Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [86]
The steps above will get you started with Total Recall today, but there is a lot that can be done to make it easier for people to participate in the Total Recall revolution. Total Recall holds great opportunities for entrepreneurs to serve the public—and make a lot of money.
Hardly a week goes by that I don’t hear a pitch from some start-up that wants me as an angel investor or as a board member. Very few win me over. Below is my top ten list of Total Recall ideas I’d like to hear someone pitch to me.
START- UP # 10—PICTURE-TAKINGMIRROR
Have you ever seen one of those photo exhibits in which someone has taken a picture of his kids in a set pose over a sequence of years so that you can see them change over time? One fellow, Richard Hanson, has gone even further and taken a picture of his son every single day of his life. The result is utterly compelling, even for us strangers. Imagine if it were of yourself or a loved one. I wish I had a mirror in my hall with a camera behind it that would take my picture every day. Actually, I’d like to give one to each of my grandchildren. An alternative to the mirror would be to put the camera in one of those digital picture frames—then you’d also have a potential videophone.
START- UP # 9—CONVINCINGCHAT BOT FROM MY HISTORY
I’ve already invested in MyCyberTwin.com, so you know I like this idea. The company’s chat bots are sitting in servers and providing help services to thousands of customers a day with questions about banking, tax forms, and other service requests. MyCyberTwin is great, but we are still waiting for the first company that can take a heap of someone’s correspondence (e-mail, chats, letters, et cetera) and produce a really convincing impersonation. Any team that can take my corpus and turn it into my digitally immortal chatting self will get my support. And that’s not just vanity—if you can imitate me, you can imitate help-desk personnel and make a ton of money.
START-UP #8—DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT
It sounds great to declutter your life by scanning all your documents, but full-text search on a heap of files is not always the best way to retrieve information. This service (or program that you run) will automatically group similar items. It will build a knowledge base of every kind of document it can learn about, for example from all major utility and phone companies. It will be able to pull out the date, the total, and who the bill is from. It will create descriptive file names for all your documents and also create a human-readable XML file containing all the information it was able to extract. You can send in a box of documents and get back files with descriptive names in meaningful folders. For example, a file called “AT&T Bill 2008-09-17 total 87.23” in the “AT&T” folder, which is in the “Bills” folder. An accompanying file will include things like the address the bill was sent to and the breakdown of long-distance and local charges.
START-UP #7—UNIFIED STORAGE
Microsoft took at stab at unifying all my storage with the WinFS project, but gave up. The idea is to end different data types living in different “silos,” like e-mail in my e-mail app, photos in my photo app, music in my music app, and so on. Instead, I can deal with them all at once and lump some e-mails together with some spreadsheets, or quickly jump from a photo to documents created on the same date. Also, I should be able to add comments and tags to everything, not just a few special types.
Short of a major operating system really solving this, there may be a place for some smaller start-up to hatch an idea for bringing together parts of my scattered data—say, grouping my e-mail with my files, or perhaps my Facebook entries with my chat logs. I’m not sure how such a smaller start-up can succeed in this space, but someone else might have a better imagination for it.
START-UP #6—TRAVELOGUE CAMERA
I want something like the SenseCam to take on vacation. It needs to be smaller and more attractive than the SenseCam prototypes I use now. In fact, it ought to become a