In 2005 Google filed a patent for mobile phone service that can predict phone calls and actions based upon time of day and your location; the patent may be a part of the upcoming Google Phone project.
This patent is truly groundbreaking in what the application could do. Imagine that you are planning a night out in London. At 6pm Google could predict you are looking for a restaurant and, given your history of looking for directions to Chinese restaurants every week, would select an array of suitable places for you to eat.
At 9pm you would turn your phone on again and Google would know you wanted bars near the restaurant. At 11pm Google again predicts you need a list of local taxi firms.
The patent makes a lot of sense because we’re all creatures of habit - if there’s enough data and enough horsepower to organize the data - Google probably could predict 75% of the searches we make, especially those on a mobile device (your location helps to provide context for predictive searches).
Links: Search Engine Journal
Comments
@ 12:19
The crucial aspect of both the Google Phone and the iPhone, is that they’re data-centric consumer handsets, which treat the mobile network operators as nothing more than “dumb pipes”. There’s an intriguing article on this topic at: http://www.robinontech.com/2007/03/10/mobile-operators-as-dumb-pipes/
@ 16:00
We may be creatures of habit, but is it good to develop a service that encourages and banks on that level of monotanous predictability? Who would really want a phone that daily revealed to him/her that his/her life is in a rut?