Apple and Google are the current darlings of Silicon Valley. Anything they do is golden and for the longest time they formed a tag team with Apple building great consumer electronics and Google leading in search and other search related applications like Maps and GMail. Google Search, Google Maps, and GMail power the iPhone and helped it be such the huge success it was. The sweet relationship between the two tech giants was only growing.

Now it is war.

First Google made Android. That pissed off Apple somewhat, even causing the Google CEO to quit Apple’s board. Google use to get the location data from each search on the iPhone and Apple started to withhold it last year. Apple feared that Google would use this valuable data to do market research and to build behavior metrics into the Android. If Google knew every search performed on an iPhone and the location where the user was standing when making that search, that is very valuable market research information if you are thinking of entering the mobile market.

Then last summer Google Voice was rejected by the Apple App Store. As I wrote on this blog several times about Google Voice, it is disruptive technology that AT&T is threatened by, so Apple rejected it, showing us once again that Steve Jobs controls the iPhone very tightly. While this spat was ugly, it was just a lovers quarrel. The FCC got involved and some high profile tech luminaries ditched their iPhones over this, but it was a not a declaration of war.

Then came the Nexus One. Pearl Harbor. Now Google is right on Apple’s turf. Apple decided to buy a mobile advertising company to retaliate. The war is on.

Even the iPad is a front in this war. ChromeOS started to ruffle Apple’s feathers. While ChromeOS is a threat to Microsoft in the NetBook space (but Windows 7 for Netbooks is something like $7), ChromeOS is on a collision course with the iPad. In the battle for lower end light weight web device laptop/netbook/slate market, it will be ChromeOS vs the iPad.

Steve Jobs decided to get into the rally the troops mode now that war is on. As reported by Wired, Jobs went ballistic at an Apple company town hall meeting when the topic of Google was brought up.  He claimed that Google wants to kill the iPhone, but “we won’t let them!” He said that Google’s mantra of “don’t be evil” is “bullshit.”

Wow, this venom is usually reserved for Microsoft. Speaking of which, Apple is rumored to replace Google as the default search application on the iPhone with Microsoft's Bing. Warfare makes strange allies.

Dag Kittlaus is the Co-Founder and CEO of Siri. He is a serial innovator and consumer wireless Internet veteran of 10 years in both Scandinavia and the US. Siri is Dag’s third consecutive mobile product.

In the near future, anyone who lives a connected lifestyle will be able to delegate their everyday tasks to intelligent virtual assistants that will coordinate, execute and simplify users’ lives.

We will look back on these days and ask ourselves how we ever got by without our trusted assistants, the same way my kids ask in amazement about how we ever got things done before laptops and the Internet.

What Constitutes a Virtual Assistant?

For a long time, Hollywood has been portraying machines that humans can converse with, delegate tasks to, and command. Remember the HAL 9000, KITT the car, COMPUTER from Star Trek, or even the brilliantly conceived and visualized Apple “Knowledge Navigator” from over 20 years ago?

They have symbolized our desire for trusted machine assistants that can help make our lives easier. They have persisted in the creative works of science fiction writers for decades. But have you ever asked yourself why that is? Looking beyond the theatrical and dramatic value of these ideas, the reality is simple — we have always desired more help, less hassle, and higher productivity in our lives.

What about search engines? Aren’t they the modern day version of this? No, at least not the search engines of today.

Search is a fantastic tool to help you find information on the Internet, but try to ask a search engine to actually do something for you. Try typing “get me a seat on the next flight from Chicago to Seattle” and see what happens. Or ask your favorite search engine to book you a table for three at Gibson’s steakhouse in Chicago for the day after tomorrow. Today’s paradigm of 10 blue links doesn’t cut it, and we need a new tool to help.

We need software that is specifically designed to help you get things done — a “Do Engine” rather than a search engine: A virtual assistant.

Intelligent Cohesion of the Tools We Already Use

Here is the good news: The elements, technology and ecosystem needed to build machines and software that can automate many of the mundane tasks of our lives are here already.

We just need to add a little intelligence. It will take some time, maybe 3-5 years, for the concept to mature. But when it does, it will emerge as the most frequently used and trusted online tool. It will make the most common actions on the web as simple as having a conversation. It will integrate into your life, get to know you, and be proactive.

In some sense your smartphone is starting to work like this already. There are already tens of thousands of services, apps, and sites that help you find and do things on the web and in the world. The problem is that they are all islands unto themselves, typically focused on a limited domain, and don’t often work together. They rarely share data or context with each other, have different user interfaces, and require users to spend a good amount of time to discover them, sign up, and get started. In terms of unified personal services, it’s not ideal.

Virtual assistants will help unify these and get them work together at your command. It would be nice to simply pull out your phone one day and tell it to move your 3 p.m. meeting to 5 p.m. and alert everyone invited of the change. That day is coming sooner than you think.

A New Chapter for the Web

There is a direct relationship between simplicity and user engagement on the web. Less clicks means more users — period. When combined with tools like smartphones, virtual assistants will migrate user interactions towards a far more frictionless e-commerce, consumption and collaboration model.

You will soon pick up your phone and start asking your assistant things like “take me to live CNN news,” “send my dad the latest John Grisham book,” or “tell Adam I am running 20 minutes late,” and you will then watch it all happen. This evolution towards simplicity of interaction will reduce the barrier to almost everything you use your mobile device to do.

Furthermore, the device is always with you. The combination of simplicity, impulse opportunity, context, and preference will create the most explosive market opportunity in ages.

This will be a market in which every player along the line wins. Users will be able to click less, enjoy simpler interactions and receive much-needed help getting things done and managing their day. Participating service providers get simpler discovery, more transactions, and higher consumption rates. This then drives more data dollars to networks, fueling infrastructure expansion.

As proof, witness what a cool device called the iPhone has managed to accomplish through a snappy and simple interface with shiny buttons and creative apps. That one device and the competitive response we are now seeing has created a complete transformation in computing.

The Anatomy of the Virtual Assistant

The OS of virtual assistants will be the Internet itself, as Kevin Kelly postulated years ago. The brains will be AIs that are developed by software companies for both general purpose and targeted domains. The arms and legs will be web APIs (many of your favorite brands and services), and the connective tissue will be authentication protocols like OAuth and Open Social, and trust circles like those of Facebook.

The rapid maturation of technologies that enable free-form interaction such as natural language processing and speech recognition have vastly improved, to the point of gaining real adoption in many applications today (e.g. Google Speech, Nuance Dragon Dictation, Ford Sync for cars). Virtual assistants will leverage these inputs and begin to integrate them with conversations for a simpler, more natural way to get things done. This concept was best described by the late pioneer from MIT, Michael Dertouzos, who called it “human-centric computing.”

Over the long term, this paradigm will expand to many (or most) of the online services and tools we use to manage our lives like booking, buying, reserving, reminding, and scheduling. As we build trust in our digital “partner” we will put more and more onto its to-do list.

Trust is Key

The vague promises of contextual awareness, personalization, and other generalizations have rarely materialized in real products on the web. We are wary of what personal information we share online, in search engines, and the the never-ending fear of credit card fraud still looms. But this game is changing with the open web.

Mark Zuckerberg is indeed correct that privacy is dead on the Internet among the digital generation. Hundreds of millions of people spend a great deal of time telling the world all about their personal interests and information that forms their “digital face” on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others. This will only expand as the demonstrable benefits of this effort become more apparent.

The paradigm shift we will see with virtual assistants is that providing them with access to your preferences, tastes, accounts and more will be the cornerstone of the simplicity they will enable (within a very secure environment, of course). In other words, where we once feared how long search engines kept our personal information, we will now go out of our way to expend time and effort to specifically provide our trusted assistant detailed information about ourselves.

This will be done both manually and via syncing with existing sources of our personal data such as Facebook profiles, iTunes music lists, and contacts. The point is that you will make your virtual assistant definitively yours.

2010 and Beyond

The experience will be like hiring a new assistant that doesn’t yet know you, but eventually becomes so familiar that you can’t live without him or her. Keep your eyes on this space, try out these products as they emerge, and prepare to make your life a bit simpler over the next few years.

As John Battelle has said: “The future of search is a conversation with someone you trust.” 2010 will be the year in which we start to see real progress towards this vision, on many fronts.

More social media resources from Mashable:

- 5 Tips for Building Lasting Online Friendships
- Top 5 Must-Read Social Media Books
- Social Media Can Change The World Through Common Ground
- 5 Ways Social Media Is Changing Our Daily Lives
- How Social Media is Taking the News Local
- The Tao of Tweeting
- Sports and Social Media: Where Opportunity and Fear Collide

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, julos, jodiecoston, clu, Valeriya,

Tags: artificial intelligence, business, facebook, Google, innovation, productivity, Search, tech, virtual assistant, Web 2.0

I had a very interesting meeting yesterday with an MIT Professor who I’ve known for a long time.  He is anti-software patent, as am I.  However, he suggested something I hadn’t really spent much time thinking about, namely that patents slow down innovation.  Some very credible folks have been talking about this for a little while, including James Bessen and Michael Meurer in their excellent book Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk. 

In my conversation Friday, I heard a very interesting example.  Regularly, patent advocates tell me how important patents are for the biotech and life science industries.  However, there apparently is academic research in the works that shows that patents actually slow down innovation in biotech.  The specific example we discussed was that there is increasing evidence that when a professor or company gets a patent in the field of genetics research, other researchers simply stop doing work in that specific area.  As a result, the number of researchers on a particular topic decreases, especially if the patent is broad.  It’s not hard to theorize that this results in less innovation around this area over time.

I’m just starting to read some papers about this stuff, including those by MIT Professor Fiona Murray.  If you are interested, Stuart Macdonald’s paper When means become ends: considering the impact of patent strategy on innovation frames the discussion nicely.  And Stephan Kinsella’s excellent essay Reducing the Cost of IP Law absolutely nails this.

I’m still obsessed with my mission to “abolish software patents” especially after receiving yet another email from a new startup that claims to be a “Patent Insurance Company.”  A number of these have popped up recently in the past few years, including several that are funded by VCs.  Their pitch is that you pay them an annual fee, license any patents you have to them, and they will “protect you” against any patent litigation.  Whenever I hear this pitch, all I can think about is Al Capone walking the streets of Chicago going door to door offering “protection” to all of the local businessmen if they will pay his vig every week.

Just A Few Ways To Use The iPad For Real Estate

Michael Price had a great post the other day providing an overview on the new Apple iPad. Seeing as this blog has the word geek in the title, and seeing as I’m a geek myself, I thought I’d build off that post with a few ideas for potential real estate uses. Besides, I really want one and have to build the mental case for it first.

Open Houses:

• Build a fun, interactive signup sheet for visitors. You could let them choose to subscribe to various value add lists right there, and depending on what you use it could put their info right in your list/ database, no tedious transcribing later.
• Set it on a table and play your virtual tour and slideshow w/ music.
• Let visitors dig deeper with links to your website/ blog posts about the area.
• Show them all the awesome neighborhood places on Yelp (if it’s in your area of course)
• If the listing isn’t for them, search other open houses in the area and email it to them (I smell contact info…)

Listing Presentations:

• Michael touched on this in his post, and I agree there’s a huge opportunity to make stunning presentations.
• Integrate a video resume into your keynote (the mac’s powerpoint) presentation, make the entire presentation paperless, and email it to prospects right after you’re done.

Buyer Tours/ Showings:

• Plug one of the last remaining holes in the paperless transaction: just save a pdf of all the listing sheet’s you’d normally print.
• If your MLS works on Safari, then you can easily search listings on the fly in places too fluid for a laptop (walking down the street, crowded cafes, in listings, etc). This gives you something better to do than stand there like an idiot while your client searches listings on their Redfin iPhone app
• Take notes directly into your online CRM/ organization software, with no risk of losing them and no tedious transcribing later.
• Potentially in the near future, record your client’s feedback and have it automatically transcribed for you, just like Google Voice does now with messages (this isn’t here yet but it’s just a matter of time).
• Have all your client’s info (kid’s names, etc) always at your fingertips for those with less than stellar memories.

Again, these are just a few ideas, and just as we saw thousands of new apps appear for the iPhone, I believe we’ll see thousands of even more innovative apps take advantage of all that new screen real estate. The only question remaining for me is one that haunts many geeks… do we jump into the inevitably buggy first edition or be patient and wait for the second one?

Web developers can rule the iPad

A lot of tech commentators seem disappointed that the iPad feels more like an evolutionary step than a revolutionary step. For one group of technologists, though, the iPad is an opportunity for revolution, to take center stage in creating experiences users will want, and even want to buy.

The iPad is all about consuming content, but most of the conversation about that content has seen it in traditional silos:

• Audio, through iTunes
• Video, also through iTunes
• iPhone apps (and now iPad apps), through the App Store
• Books, through iBooks
• The Web, the most open of these options.

The last of those options, however, can incorporate all of the rest - even the iPhone applications. Given the space on the iPad screen and the reported speed of its A4 processor, web design is actually the easiest way to create applications for the iPad.

Web design? On the iPad? Wasn't that the bad idea Apple originally had for the iPhone, before they were overwhelmed with requests for a real SDK?

Well, yes. The early iPhone development environments felt maybe too sandboxed. A lot of features now available in Mobile Safari were only starting to develop, and key tools for connecting to features of the iPhone not typically found then in web browsers (vibration, accelerometer, geolocation) didn't exist. Learning Objective C made sense at the time.

Today, things have changed. With support from tools like jQTouch, it's shockingly easy to create apps that feel like they belong on the iPhone using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With PhoneGap, you can reach out to features like vibration, accelerometer, geolocation. What's more, PhoneGap lets you target your application to multiple platforms, including Android and Blackberry, so you're not even locked into Apple's tightly-controlled universe.

For a quick tour of how this works, see Bill Peña's tutorial. For a lot more detail, though still 160 pages, see our recently released Building iPhone Applications with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Despite massive rust on my web skills and no experience with iPhone development, I was able to create a functioning, if basic, iPhone application in three hours, and have it running on the iPhone Simulator in twenty more minutes.

Moving to the iPad shouldn't be difficult. As the PhoneGap folks tweeted:

for those unsure, iPad is @phonegap compatible out of the box.

There are, of course, ways Apple could make this difficult. They could have locked web-based apps into the iPhone size, but fortunately that doesn't seem to be a problem. They could also block PhoneGap based applications from the App Store, as they once did, though they seem to have gotten over that a few months ago. Even if they were to cause trouble, however, it would just block one possible revenue stream - the web browser itself would still be open for business. I don't think even Apple can close that down.

Apart from the joy of being able to say "I don't have to learn Objective C", the web approach has tremendous advantages for probably 80% of the applications people the iPad seems built for. The layered approach of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript makes it easy to pour content into templates, decide how those templates will look, and what interactivity they will have. Done right, it's a much more maintainable approach as well, making it easy to change the look or add interactivity without having to break into the underlying content again. Adding content or reaching out to content elsewhere on the web is easy. Toolkits already make the shift from traditional web browsers to device development easy. We've come a long long way since the first glimmerings of a slow and creaky Dynamic HTML appeared on the landscape.

I expect music and to some extent video to stay in iTunes or similar venues. Terrified book publishers who want their DRM will likely stay in the iBooks zone, though hopefully Apple will let braver publishers in there without DRM. Customers will expect to find "books" there. It's also clear that there will always be applications, notably games, which demand native code - Objective C on the iPad - to achieve the fastest possible response time, draw intricate graphics, or bind tightly to iPad features. There's a future for all of those things, in their particular venues.

But for "content", especially content that combines text with audio, video, pictures, and interactivity, web-style development has a tremendous advantage.

Arise, web developers! Our time has come to dominate!

Which Fonts Should You Use for Saving Ink

Though we are headed towards an era of paperless offices where all the information would be in strict digital format, the pace is quite slow. That ink-sucking printer is still an indispensable part of your home office because you are frequently required to print invoices, emails, web pages and other documents on paper.

Since ink is still the most expensive component in the print workflow, you can reduce printing costs of documents if you can figure out ways that will decrease the consumption of ink while printing. For instance, when printing a document in Microsoft Word, you can switch to “Draft output” and the toner will last much longer.

Use a Font with Holes

An interesting option to help you save ink is Ecofont. Ecofont is like the popular Arial font but it has these little holes punched in the letters. These holes aren’t really visible in the printed document (that uses standard font sizes like 11px) but will save money as no ink is required when printing these dots.

Ecofont is available for download on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. It may not be a good idea to use Ecofont in client communication but you can definitely consider using this font for personal or internal use.

Printing Web Pages with Custom Fonts

If you are printing web pages, I highly recommend Readability – this is a bookmarklet that will not only remove images, ads and other clutter from web pages but will also replace the font that was originally used in the formatting of that page.

Readability can sometimes remove sections from web pages that you would like to see in the print version. If that’s also a problem for you, check out PrintWhatYouLike.com – this is also a printing bookmarklet but it gives you complete control over the page layout including the font family that is used for rendering that page (see video demo).

Both the above bookmarklets require a live internet connection to work. If you are looking for an alternative that will work offline, check out Green Print – they have a free version for Windows though the Mac edition costs a few bucks. Another good option is Smart Web Print from HP but that’s only available on Windows.

Which is the Best Font for Printing Documents

Now consider the third scenario. You have a document – say some training material or presentation handouts – that you want to print without sacrificing readability.

Fonts like Arial, Times News Roman, Courier, Helvetica, etc. are generally available on every machine but which one among them is the most economic typeface when it comes to printing?

Matt Robinson recently conducted a fairly unique study to determine the ink usage of these different typefaces. They used ballpoint pens to hand draw the same text at the same size but using different fonts and here’s the result.

Garamond* followed by Courier turned out to be the most economic fonts of them all while Impact and Comic Sans consumed the maximum ink. This is definitely not a “scientific study” but you still get the idea.

[*] Most Harry Potter books are set in 12pt Adobe Garamond.

Which Fonts Should You Use for Saving Ink

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

   http://labnol.org/?p=12603%20-%20via%20@labnol">   

Tonight when I picked up my son in Petaluma we started talking about the Apple iPad and he told me he thought it was a “fail.” This reaction was interesting coming from Patrick (he was first in line in Palo Alto for the iPhone and has been an Apple fan for as long as I remember.)

Anyway, I asked him if I could record our conversation, he said yes, and this is the result. It’s in two parts, because when we uploaded the first part we got a lot of reaction on Twitter so followed it up with a second part. Here’s the two audio recordings, sorry for the poor quality, we recorded that while driving.

Part I.
Part II.

His major points are:

1. That it isn’t compelling enough for a high school student who already has a Macintosh notebook and an iPhone.
2. That it is missing features that a high school student would like, like handwriting recognition to take notes, a camera to take pictures of the board in class (and girls), and the ability to print out documents for class.
3. That he hasn’t seen his textbooks on it yet, so the usecase of replacing heavy textbooks hasn’t shown up yet.
4. The gaming features, he says, aren’t compelling enough for him to give up either the Xbox or the iPhone. The iPhone wins, he says, because it fits in his pocket. The Xbox wins because of Xbox live so he can play against his friends (not to mention engaging HD quality and wide variety of titles).
5. He doesn’t like the file limitations. His friends send him videos that he can’t play in iTunes and the iPad doesn’t support Flash.
6. It isn’t game changing like the iPhone was.

Anyway, revealing conversation with a teenager who got extremely excited about the iPhone (and saved up to buy his own) the day he saw that.

What do you think?