Mike Butcher

The Tom Cruise character lives in a world 52 years hence where we have given up many of our innate human rights in return for security and public humiliation in every shopping mall.

The real issue here is one of data and of cost. Today we have most of the ‘Minority Report’ technologies, they’re just too expensive to implement. Only the security services have enough cash and political will to turn the reams of personal data capable of being collected into usable services. But services for them, alas, not us.

There have been a few gallant attempts to personalise advertising and content, although it usually appears as ‘Click here to set your home city weather’.

There is, of course, the ever-present cookie file, which will make sure you don’t see more than three of those banner ads you’ve ignored anyway. There are personal home pages where sites such as Yahoo! and MSN try (sometimes in vain) to deliver an ad relevant to the country you’re actually in, let alone relevant to who you are and when you’re looking at it.

My favourite is the MacUser site from Dennis Publishing, which in roughly six years of logging me in as www.macuser.co.uk/mikebutcher/home.html has never once produced an ad which said ‘Hi Mike. We notice you’ve been looking at a lot of articles about Z’, since it must have recorded every one of my interactions in that directory. The closest it got was when Dennis wrote a little script to get every banner to say ‘Welcome Mike’. I assume this must have scared the willies out of most users because I never saw it again.

Latterly, there have been two more-interesting-than-the-average UK firms addressing personalisation. The first was Fingertips.com. Unlike the risible WinWin.com, which had no content, this was a content site which built fiendishly clever software to allow people to make my weekend based on its multiple entertainment feeds. It had everything – sliding preferences, group calendaring, collaborative filtering – you name it. Gradually Fingertips would learn all about you and start to suggest things. Unfortunately the main backer, Channel 4, pulled out before the formal launch and we never got to see what it was capable of.

The second is Media One Europe, a start-up which is the only one I’ve seen so far that plans to address the mountains of data which sites collect but never actually use, to deliver better and more targeted services.

Today personalisation is moving towards the TV screen, with the likes of TiVo and ReplyTV. But still those tonnes of unused data files lie untouched inside many a Web server, unloved either by the economies of scale involved in extracting the gold or the dull wit of the site owners. Unless you’re MI5. But that’s a different story.

First published: http://www.nma.co.uk/nmz/story.asp?id=235835

Charmed.com was not your typical Silicon Valley start-up by any means. For a start its CEO was the 27-year-old Katrina Barillova, an ex-Czechoslovakian spy who’s cover had been to work as a fashion model. When Eastern Europe turned capitalist she left to become a bodyguard and security advisor to billionaires in the Middle East.

After leaving for the US, she teamed up with an ex-MIT graduate to form InfoCharms, a spin-off from the MIT Media Lab, to develop small Internet-connected devices masquerading as – wait for it – earrings and bracelets. At least that’s what it said in the press release. Looking at some of the products, one was often hard-pressed to tell the difference between Charmed’s vision for the future of sunglasses and something you might see on a Borg character in Star Trek.

Their idea was to market items like sunglasses with tiny monitors, and earrings that alerted the fashionable lady about town to incoming email (remember, SMS messaging remains a minority activity in the US). Charmed planned to be selling millions of devices by the end of 2000. Few people could work out whether any of its stuff would work or was even saleable, but no matter, mostly they just went to the fashion shows.

Fast forward two years and the latest wheeze to roll off the ‘future of technology’ conveyor belt is a mobile phone inside a plastic tooth. Like the baubles once paraded by a hopeful dotcom start-up in Los Angeles, this is a concept phone, designed by graduates for the Royal College of Art’s annual summer exhibition. The ‘tooth phone’ contains a radio wave receiver and a tiny vibrator, which would resonate your skull in order to produce sound. It really would mean voices inside your head.

Today we interact with our mobile phones and our computers through more conventional means. The difference between Charmed’s Californian accoutrements and the tooth phone is that the former was conceived in a time when the ‘personal area networking’ as afforded by the likes of Bluetooth wireless was still unrealised. It also proves that Bluetooth must, as The Economist put it recently, get ‘boring’ before it gets ’sexy’, by simply replacing the trail of cables we carry around with us.

Charmed still exists, but it too has had to get boring to stay in business. It now markets small, wearable computers for industrial and commercial applications.

These days fashion is left to the likes of Nokia and Ericsson as mobiles have become fashion accessories in their own right and don’t need to be disguised as earrings.

First published: http://www.nma.co.uk/nmz/story.asp?id=235469