Not that far off from what FusionOne is up to. FusionOne aims to be your primary storage medium, and they’ve got the terabytes to prove it. They’re shooting for over-the-air or over-IP synchronization of all of your devices and insodoing they’re making themselves your big-ass virtual hard drive in the sky.
Right now they can propagate address book info to a few wireless devices like RIM, and some PalmOS stuff, but it’s all kiddie games compared to what the future holds.
Being a proponent of truly intimate computing, my question is: why bother with all of these intermediary steps? Why not just interface directly to my brain? 🙂
-Ian.
At 3:05 PM -0700 10/26/00, John Poyser wrote:>http://research.compaq.com/wrl/projects/Factoid/factoid.html
>
>I just stumbled across this Factoid page while looking at the latest updates
>to the Itsy project. I was excited by this concept as it mirrors what I have
>been saying for a long time.
>
>I truly believe that our current digital accessories (PDA’s, PC’s, cell
>phone address books, bookmark link files, mail log files, etc.) are all
>imperfect attempts at one thing: offline storage for our brains.
>
>We all use these items to some extent – and I have long tried to use my
>Palm, Outlook message files, IExplorer bookmarks & history file and
>search engines – as a crutch to my imperfect, human memory.
>
>I read an article written about time management and organization in an
>in-flight magazine a number of years ago and in it, they discussed the
>concept of off-loading your to-do’s and agenda items into your day-planner
>(then a Franklin or Filofax). The idea was you could free up your “mental
>stack” for more creative uses, instead of trying to remember item 33 of the
>38 things one had to do.
>
>As long as one consistently records things into a searchable database – no
>problem. But it is generally the things that you forget to record, or that
>it doesn’t occur to you to record, that can prove the most critical down the
>road. So, often I find myself recording trivia into Outlook or my PDA –
>hedging my bets that it will be useful later. Too often, I am sure that I
>recorded something, and cannot find it quickly or conveniently in my current
>collection of devices.
>
>If all of my devices were connected (via some low-powered, pan-dimensional,
>pervasive wireless medium – maybe “Bluetooth-Lite”?) then all my data would
>be indexed and quickly retrievable. Also, I feel that I am probably like a
>lot of my peers, in that my desire to have the information is greater than
>my paranoia about privacy.
>
>Factoid could be built into my watch, keychain, whatever I carry with me
>constantly. Then if I needed to access something, I would simply use a
>convenient data retrieval interface, like a PDA, PC or information
>appliance.
>
>I know there are some hurdles to jump – and this is a long way off but damn,
>I want it.
>
>jp
>
>