The example of a metaphorical search in last month’s Newsletter (linking of a Formula 1 pit crew and an operating room team) has a real world parallel. Lindsay Chappell writes in Automotive News that the McLaren Racing pit crew’s techniques are “trending to become the hot new thing in global business management.” He explains, “McLaren has gone manic in analyzing real-time issues during its Formula 1 events. The team wires its participants to the gills, pipes data from all corners of the racetrack in a place like Abu Dhabi back to England, where a command center crunches it with the speed of a McLaren MP4-29, factors in all variables and shoots back decisions about what action to take and when.” It has proved so useful that global financial consulting firm KMPG has struck a deal with McLaren to make the technique available in widely varied applications from inventory control, advertising buys, investments, to tooling and more.
The Coroco Scanner, a device that can detect when people are lying has been introduced in Japan Joe Mandese reports in Media Daily News. “When worn on the head, the device senses stress levels indicating the donner’s mood expressed as blinking red, yellow and green lights that can indicate whether they are telling the truth.” He adds, “The product is more than just a modern day mood ring. It’s one of the first
mass consumer marketed products to utilize advances in biometric technologies that can determine people’s emotional signals, including their unconscious feelings.”
Amazon’s Echo is a device that will do away with keyword search according to Aaron Goldman in Search Marketing Daily. He says Echo has far-field voice recognition that hears from across the room and takes action instead of serving up links or answers. For example, a conversation with your personal Echo, “Alexa” might go according to Goldman:
“Alexa, add batteries to the shopping list.”
“Do you need AA, AAA, C, or D?”
“AA.”
“You can get 15% off Energizer, should I buy those for you now?”
In Googling The Future Of Search an earlier article for the same publication, Goldman wrote of the growing “Internet of Things” and listed a number of such “things” Google already has invested in: glasses, watches, TVs, cars, cameras, thermostats, virtual reality headsets and even robots. He used an example from a 2001 Scientific American article by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Internet of Web pages (sorry Al Gore). “In this scenario: a phone sends a message to the entertainment system to lower the volume so its owner can take a call from his sister about their mom’s medical condition, prompting a web agent to book a doctor’s appointment after cross-referencing everyone’s schedules.” Berners-Lee is quoted as seeing these connected devices as a good thing: “The real power of the Semantic Web will be realized when people create many programs that collect Web content from diverse sources, process the information and exchange the results with other programs.” On the other hand, in our Quotes To Note, physicist Stephen Hawking is not so positive, about this new world where devices will talk to one another, learn from one another and make decisions for us before we humans even know they need to be made.
