I was with a CEO last week in downtown Oklahoma City; we were talking about the perceived technology vacuum here in the middle of the country, and about how wrong that perception is.  In fact, there is a vibrant and bustling community of developers, designers, and analysts here.  Did you know that the TwitPic team is based in Tulsa?  Cool huh?

In fact, remember that CEO I mentioned a bit ago? His company is high technology as well, and it happens to be sitting in downtown OKC.  DocSoft is a search company that specializes in indexing streams of audio or video and offering closed captioning in real-time.

You take that to its next logical step and suddenly you have an agent that could be dropped into a widget on any web site. Give that agent access to your web cam and microphone and you could have your conversations indexed as you speak.  The agent hears that you are talking about a movie you saw in 1997, but you forget the name, so the agent opens a conversation with IMDB and sends that site bits of information from your conversation:

1997, actor name, storyline

Then IMDB replies with a list that meets the criteria your agent has sent, and the widget displays that list for you in a bubble on your screen.

That seems far-fetched doesn’t it?  It isn’t.  Ray Kurzweil is already demonstrating real-time translation between languages.  You can watch a video of this by following the link at the end of this article.  If we are there, then offering for an agent to run known programs, or simple scripts, is not that far behind.

Ubiquity Ray KurzweilTake Ubiquity for example. (Ubiquity is related to Enso, which I wrote about back in January, in that they are written by the same team, just at different companies.)  Ubiquity is not an application that you install on your computer, but rather an addon that you install into your web browser.  Ubiquity offers you an unending array of useful helpers that can make your Internet experience make more sense in many ways.  You find a term you wonder about… Simple… just highlight it and let Ubiquity define it or offer search results for it. But honestly, that isn’t why Ubiquity makes me happy.  What really makes me happy about Ubiquity is that someone could take it and write a real agent on it.

For instance, if I wanted Ubiquity to check my emails for me and then send a text to my phone when someone special emails me, it could do that.  If I wanted Ubiquity to monitor blogs I select for keywords, and then build a page to display those on a chronological basis, it could do that.  (I think.)

Anyway, all of this is to say that technology is rapidly approaching something we can’t even imagine.  I cannot wait.

Interesting Links:

Matt Williamson
twitter: twitter.com/mattwilliamson
email: matt@technologystory.com