Standing in Line, Woz Discusses How the iPhone 4S will Change His Life

  • Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak likes the excitement of a new product release and tries to be first in line, despite the fact that Apple will ship him products.
  • He was #1 on line at the Apple store in Los Gatos, California and stayed up all night tweeting about it.
  • TechCrunch interviewed “Woz” (on iPhone video) as he discussed his enthusiasm for Siri: “This is the way I want all mobile devices to be in the future.”
  • “I’m so tired of pushing buttons, tapping things to get the right things done on a phone,” he added. “I just want to talk my thoughts to it.”
  • He also notes that he no longer wants to be sent somewhere that might have answers: “Google is known for search engines. I say search engines should be replaced by answer engines.”

Siri: Imagining the Untapped Potential of Artificial Intelligence

  • Geek.com writer Will Shanklin believes Siri’s capabilities would be enormously expanded with access to third party apps. Currently, “Yelp and Wolfram Alpha appear to be the only ones in that elite group.”
  • Third party apps could enable users to play music among different streaming services, quickly use music ID, combine data from multiple services (“How about a combination of Netflix and IMDb data?”), get real-time navigation and a range of other convenient possibilities.
  • Siri access to Facebook could expedite posts, messages and notifications and quickly get information from friends’ profiles.
  • “As much as you might be blown away by Siri’s capabilities now, we will likely look back at this as ‘Siri 1.0’ five years from now,” writes Shanklin. “In much the same way that the first iPhone’s single-paged homescreen – with no third-party apps – looks primitive now, this introductory version of Siri will pale in comparison to where ‘she’ will be then.”

Virtual Advertising Finds its Way into TV Syndication

  • Virtual advertising is making its way into re-runs.
  • An episode of “How I Met Your Mother” (that originally ran on CBS in March 2007) recently aired in syndication featuring a magazine cover that mentions a new movie, “Zookeeper.”
  • The Kevin James comedy that appears in the four-year-old episode premieres today.
  • The digital ad is an example of “virtual advertising” that inserts messages into video that wasn’t originally there — not a new technology, but perhaps an interesting approach for repurposed content.
  • The article includes links to images before and after the digital insertion.