Beyond the smart phone

Here comes the even SMARTER phone.

This week, a couple of really big tech companies – Intel and Samsung – announced they were putting money into a small company (with all of eight people on its staff) called Expect Labs.

The reason is that CEO Tim Tuttle and his programmers have come up with something that goes beyond the smart phone:

“We call it our anticipatory computing engine,” said Tuttle.

Which means that unlike an ordinary smart phone which requires you to touch and icon or speak a command, these smarter phones ANTICIPATE what you want:

“What this platform is designed to do is analyze the last 10 minutes of your conversation so it can predict what you need in the next 10 seconds. Then we proactively find information and display it for you in some cases before you need to ask for it,” said Tuttle.

So let’s say you’re on your smarter phone arranging a meeting, and your friend mentions a restaurant called the Blue Bottle – the moment those words leave his mouth, the phone displays the web pages of every nearby Blue Bottle with the nearest one pinpointed, so that you are utterly on top of the conversation.

You will never sound stupid or unprepared again – as long as your phone doesn’t crash. And the more you use the software, the more it learns about you.

Until I expect that eventually, you will dial a number, and the two phones will just arrange to meet each other for lunch.