Origin of "Smarter Stuff"

Since my friend and occasional Web design helper Willa Cline has blogged me, I feel obligated to explain the slightly cryptic title of this blog to whoever wanders by.

(note - one of the disappointments of Typepad is the relative paucity of statistics about traffic, even here in the Plus version.)

When I left Mindscape in 1997 (my last real job), I was toying with the idea that computers were going to disappear into the fabric of things. I had an idea for a smart appliance (smart in the sense that interacting with it would be more natural than some things we've become used to doing in order to accomplish some tasks with computers), and the larger idea behind it was that computing cycles were sufficiently cheap that you could spend more and more of them on making devices more natural to use (and I don't mean 3-D zooming windows a la Microsoft).

The tag line was this:

People don't want computers; they want Smarter Stuff^™

Anyway, I realized that speech recognition technology, no matter how accurate, doesn't deal with the issue of semantics (although I had a nice little workaround for that, which I call "The Family Feud Effect").

Products in this general space, like Wildfire, seem to have evaporated. Reading Russell Beattie's blog about mobile technology, though, makes me entertain thoughts of reviving this idea.

I still own the domain: www.smarter-stuff.com

Comments

[Dave Goodman]

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