City Guide To Search SMS, E-Mail For Recommendations

By James Quintana Pearce - Fri 28 Sep 2007 07:26 AM PST

CNet has a review of a service developed by PARC which provides information about a local region: “things like shops, restaurants and event listings based on your location (via the GPS device in the phone), the time of day, your preferences and your past behavior”. Individual parts of it are available but from the sound of it the service does bring them together in a very good way—but it will be launched in Japan in 2009, and it doesn’t sound impressive enough to justify such a long development/marketing time. However, there are a few interesting aspects: “It predicts the likely activity,” said Bo Begole, a co-leader on the project. For example, coffee shops might be displayed in the morning hours, stores throughout the day, and restaurants, bars and movies at night.” It also keeps track of your preferences and adjusts its suggestions to reflect that, and uses collaborative filtering to recommend things other with similar tastes like. More controversially, it can also “detect clues to your activities in e-mails and text messages"… The analysis is done on the handset and Japan has some pretty strong consumer privacy regulations, but it’s still going to freak some people out until they get used to it. Gmail went through something similar, and it doesn’t seem to have hurt it.

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