myLifeBits

Last night Sean and I went to the monthly BayCHI meeting at Xerox PARC for a talk by Gordeon Bell of Microsoft Research on his MyLifeBits project. This project explores how we would use terabyte computers when they become ubiquitous and can record everything we access digitally: email, web pages, tv/video, music, phone calls and other voice recordings, pictures we take, etc. We were both disappointed in the talk. The guy isn't an interesting speaker (sean kept falling asleep) and the project itself seemed not very inspired.

In fact the most worked up I got was when he casually mentioned that one of his colleagues has patented the idea of tagging a digital photo with coordinate, elevation, time, and angle information not because he has worked out something interesting about it, but just to lay patent-traps for innovators who work in the area later so he can sue them. Evil! Evil! I'm not sure if that was a Microsoft colleague or one of his VC firm colleagues. No shortage of evil in either of those camps though.

Comments

[Bjorn]

The patent issue is interesting. Sounds a rather trivial thing to patent, much like the famous Amazon one-click-technology. I know someone here in the UK is using images + map information to reconstruct scenes like cities, this is what it could be useful for.