I’m on the road a lot these days. I just got back from Seattle, where I had lunch with Eric Horvitz. Eric has been doing work in intelligent user interfaces for decades and I am always impressed with what he’s been up to. He has this app that he’s deployed at Microsoft that uses predictive algorithms to infer a future traffic map based on things like the weather, the DOT reports, and events like football games. It actually has a notion of “surprises” so that when something irregular happens you can know right away. This was really interesting to me, because if Watson could know when there was something really important that you just couldn’t miss, then we could take special action.
Anyway, I thought his system sounded cool during our meeting, and really interesting from a research perspective. But there’s a big gulf between research and use, and I hear about lots of things all the time that sound cool in principle (augmented reality, ambient displays, visualization, etc.) but don’t seem to have any impact. So I was skeptical. Later that day when we were leaving to go back into the city for dinner, someone pulled out their smartphone to use Eric’s system, and it prevented us from taking the 520, which had a wreck, and would have added an extra 30 minutes to our drive. If only Eric’s system worked for other areas of the country, maybe I could justify a new smartphone!
There’s nothing better for a software maker than to have your software used. Every time someone writes in with a story about how they’re using Watson is a great day for me. When they say, hey I found this auction on eBay and Watson saved me money. Or, it found me a blog about my product and that resulted in a new feature. Or, even when people say, I tried it and hated it, but would love it if you could make Watson search for people on MySpace, understand PDFs, etc. Chances are if you say something like that, and we’re able, we’ll find a way to put it in.
Next week I’m of to Danny Sullivan’s latest Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, and then to this IBDNetwork Under the Radar event in the Bay Area. It’s a bicoastal week. I’m really looking forward to seeing all the new Web 2.0 stuff at the IBDNetwork event. If you’re going to be at either event, drop me a line and we’ll meet up.
-j
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