Record Everything
from the life-imitates-Snow-Crash dept
Some folks at Accenture's R&D labs in Palo Alto (a place that a couple Techdirt contributors used to work at) are apparently working on a Personal Awareness Assistant which will make the PDA all but obsolete in just a few years (they claim). The basic idea is to take the concept of the wearable computer to the next level, adding in cameras, a microphone, an earpeace, GPS, voice recognition, and other whizbangery to "help you gather and process information". Yes, it's time for the electronic brain as an addition to that old gray clunker you've got stored in your head. They give examples of where a sales person could be stumped by a customer's question, only to be rescued by someone more knowledgeable who is listening in to the conversation and can "whisper" the answer in their ear. Another example is if you forget the name of the person you just ran into, the system can take an image, match it to a database of people you've met using face recognition and tell you that it's Bob, who you met last month in San Diego. Does this creep anyone else out yet? While I could see some areas where it would be useful, I imagine that there are plenty of non-business applications it can be used for as well. Just think of how the modern Cyrano could make use of such a system. Better yet, think how much stronger services like Coincidence Design could be if they used such a system in conjunction with their current service. Okay, now we're back to creepy.
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Human Memory Prosthesis
Xerox in the UK developed a system that did many of these things based on active badge technology years ago. It mailed you a summary of your day in diary forma and video form and it could even recognise which documents you were working on on your desk from the layout (as all the documents had come off the printer originally)
Typical of Accenture to go around reinventing wheels.
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Re: Human Memory Prosthesis
Of course, I could say in response, "typical Xerox to not commercialize a useful product... "
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No Subject Given
Sounds like a lot of noise on the hard disk. I have a hard enough time organizing VCR tapes. How are people supposed to organize petabytes of digital video? When would they watch it?
As far as being creeped out. AIM already creeps me out. Just having the knowledge that my co-workers are online and I know when they come on/go off disturbs me.
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Congressional testimony anyone?
Apparently these guys have forgotten what the word "evidence" means. Get real people. Nobody's going to want to use something that watches them all the time. None of this technology ever seems like it's used for something worthwhile. It all ends up being a tool for management to fire your ass.
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