There is a lot of buzz about the future of mobile applications in 2011. 2010 was the year we saw the emergence of location based services, such as Yelp and Foursquare. In addition to location-based services, we’ve seen developers continue to explore personalization of web content. Web Ad placement is smarter and more targeted than it was before, especially with Facebook‘s ability to mine personal data. It’s hard not to browse the internet without coming across something that is keen to one’s interests. There was a simpler time when users could ignore spam ads and emails, but today, those ads are much flashier and enticing.
Machine Learning
To go a bit further, Google unleashed their own personalized shopping assistant, Google Boutiques, in hopes that it will be a new area of growth. Not only does it help you shop, but it recommends based on what it learns from your sense of style. Siri (acquired by Apple), a personalized mobile assistant, adapts to your day to day tasks, helping you organize things, such as appointments tasks. The utilization of machine learning and artificial intelligence creeps closer and closer to what we’ve seen in science fiction thriller films, such as Minority Report.
A new upcoming player to the game is Clever Sense. Clever Sense a three-year old start-up based in Mountain View, CA that’s focused on developing artificial intelligence based engine for things, such as mobile applications. The engine will create a personalized experience through mining data on location, time, and social graph.
“Clever Sense is an artificial intelligence-based, context-aware platform for location-based services. It’s the culmination of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data learning,” explains Pahlavan.
Meet SEYMORE
An example of Clever Sense’s technology in action is a new mobile application, Seymore. Seymore provides recommendations based on who you’re with, the time, where you are, what you want to do, and your mood. It saves these preferences as “taste cards,” and cross references with online review to generate personal recommendations.
Seymore is designed to process natural language, instead of search query. This means you can search for things in the same way you may converse in person. “Where can I find X?” “What’s the best place for X”. Users can further personalize their tastes by giving recommendations “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” which Seymore will learn. It will also eventually learn your tastes and behavior from “check ins” through Yelp and Foursquare.
A beta version of Seymore is now available for Windows Phone 7.
What Clever Sense is working on with the Serendipty Engine will create endless opportunities for dozens of creative developers. We look forward to seeing what the future holds for Clever Sense technology.
