Recommendation Engines Gathering Steam
You might have used them one way or another. Amazon, Netflix, last.fm, Pandora. ReadWriteWeb outlines some of the hottest startup on recommendation engines and while you’re at it, researchers at Palo Alto Research Center want to take it further to the next level: on your mobile phone. When AI combined with your smartphone, GPS, SMS, Calendar and a technology called Magitti,
[PARC researchers are hoping] to turn your phone into a thoughtful personal assistant, one that helps people find fun things to do. The software, called Magitti, uses a combination of cues–including the time of day, a person’s location, her past behaviors, and even her text messages–to infer her interests. It then shows a helpful list of suggestions, including concerts, movies, bookstores, and restaurants.
Magitti will go through public trials with young adults in Tokyo in the spring of 2008.
While Magitti’s goal is way ahead of other semantic technologies like Web 3.0, it represents the next step in the evolution of how technologies try to extract meaning from the context of human activities and recommend accordingly.