{"id":10711,"date":"2014-05-04T07:46:46","date_gmt":"2014-05-04T07:46:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jurnsearch.wordpress.com\/?p=10711"},"modified":"2014-05-04T07:46:46","modified_gmt":"2014-05-04T07:46:46","slug":"apple-found","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/2014\/05\/04\/apple-found\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple Augment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An ex-Intel VP named Avram Miller <a href=\"http:\/\/twothirdsdone.com\/2014\/04\/28\/how-apple-crushed-google-in-the-fall-of-2015-from-my-book-the-future-history-of-technology\/\">has spun the blogosphere an amusing tale<\/a> in which Apple launches its Found search-engine in Autumn 2015, with a&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;new search capability developed by Apple [that] would revolutionize search&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Miller is said to be at the heart of the Israeli tech scene, so I guess he might have heard something about an Apple contract or quiet company purchase.  But I&#8217;d have liked to hear just a few more ideas from him. Like maybe some speculation about an iWatch-enabled personal search that&#8217;s hands-free and search-box free. A stronger Google Now competitor is certainly something Apple needs. While Apple Siri&#8217;s voice work is impressive, it apparently taps into er&#8230; Wikipedia, Bing and a much-criticised Apple maps service.  Google Search provides <a href=\"http:\/\/appleinsider.com\/articles\/13\/12\/10\/tests-find-ios-7-update-improves-apples-siri-but-google-now-for-android-closes-the-gap\">&#8220;just 4 percent of Siri data&#8221;<\/a>.  It would be more profitable for Apple, and a bigger blow to Google, if a Siri successor hooked seamlessly into an Apple fangirl&#8217;s entire Apple-o-sphere &mdash; hardware, software and services &mdash; in order to gain a psuedo-predictive ability to bring you what you <em>probably<\/em> need to know at any given moment or point in space.  <\/p>\n<p>Google Now already does that, of course.  But only &#8216;sort of&#8217;, by drawing on your online Google activity + traffic reports, weather and event listings.  So how to kill Google Now in its cradle, rather than simply compete with it? To do that, Apple&#8217;s predictive search might run from powerful machine-learning that&#8217;s been intelligently chewing on <em>all<\/em> your data for a whole year.  <em>All<\/em> of it, from Big Data to small data: including your itemised grocery bills, your body&#8217;s geo-location and real-time biometric data, your home sensors, even a list of your boss&#8217;s personal foibles and your pet cat&#8217;s GPS-tracked movements.  Plus <em>all<\/em> your online activity.  So it really gets to know <em>you<\/em>, rather than trying to jam you into the mould of a rather dim weather-obsessed restaurant-hopping commuter.  And it knows you in <em>context<\/em>, moment to moment. Apple is perhaps the only company that many would trust with such intrusive joined-up access to their life and work, so Apple might <em>just<\/em> be able to get sufficient traction.   Admittedly Google is also in the AI race, but they certainly don&#8217;t have one just yet &mdash; despite their recent promising purchases such as the UK&#8217;s Deep Mind.  What if Apple really has discovered a breakthrough in some back-bedroom in Tel Aviv?<\/p>\n<p>Of course this is all just my before-breakfast speculation, just like Miller&#8217;s tale most probably is.  But if Apple do have such a search strategy then they could certainly also provide the full range of hardware to support it, not simply a super-Siri in a wristwatch. To make the AI&#8217;s predictive algorithms mesh and work as intended, just augment your body \/ life \/ work \/ loved-ones with Apple&#8217;s beautifully designed range of expensive hardware and software.  <em>Ker-ching<\/em>!  They don&#8217;t even need to taint the service with ads.  Apple would make money in the advertising gold-rush by &#8220;selling the spades&#8221; to advertisers &mdash; by which I mean, selling the means to comprehensively understand two very difficult markets:  rich people who have discerning taste and a good education, and their smart tween kids. They would do this just as the affluent middle classes are set to expand by a few billion people across the world.  They would do this just as the technology emerges that will almost totally wipe out ads from our experience, if we want that.  Such a search strategy would let Apple retain its uber-cool niche by having an ad-free yet highly advanced &#8216;personal search&#8217; assistant service, while freeing Apple from the daunting prospect of burning money to battle Google in the &#8216;research search&#8217; AdWords market.  The most lucrative part of the latter, product research by intending buyers, might even be predicted very early and taken care of by a Siri Purchase assistant (days before Google Now figured it out and pushed you to Google Search via some pre-formed keyword searches).<\/p>\n<p>Ah, well&#8230; who knows?  But it would be cool if a predictive search service might eventually be just a Siri-like voice quietly warbling into one <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/04\/24\/technology\/personaltech\/app-controlled-hearing-aid-improves-even-normal-hearing.html\">augmented ear<\/a>, with the AI backend constantly learning (from your natural replies and tone of voice) if the search result was useful\/timely or not.  For now, an iEar personal search assistant would at least help bypass the camera phobia that&#8217;s currently dogging Google Glass.  Although it would not solve the problem that no-one in an office or on a commute wants to overhear their neighbour constantly talking to their assistant device.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/2014\/05\/iear.jpg\" alt=\"iear\" width=\"280\" height=\"514\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10762\" \/><br \/><em>Could be worn with any glasses, giving the glasses strut a peg on which to rest and also a pass-through hole into the earpiece.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An ex-Intel VP named Avram Miller has spun the blogosphere an amusing tale in which Apple launches its Found search-engine &hellip;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/2014\/05\/04\/apple-found\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jurns-google-watch","category-my-general-observations","category-spotted-in-the-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}