Virtual Assistant, for Free
Would you like a (virtual) personal assistant? Not as a status symbol (obviously not, it’s virtual, who would see it?), but as someone that reminds you of that next item on your to-do list or how bad traffic is on the route you will be taking. Sure, you could search for all that info online, but what if the phone just “knows” what is relevant to you and shows it before you even ask? For free? Mathew Ingram talked about such a service, Google Now, in his article titled “The Google Now dilemma: Yes, it’s kind of creepy — but it’s also incredibly useful” . So how does Google Now work? “…it just collects a broad range of information about you and your activity from your search history, your calendar, your email, web services you are signed into, and so on, and then uses that to show you information that is relevant to what you are doing or where you happen to be.” It does all this only if you give permission for the feature to activate: and unlike Facebook, the default setting...