Coincidentally, Ford officially announced its next generation of SYNC, which incorporates Tellme services. It’s the project I’ve been working on. The first version of SYNC, which allows users to control their cell phones and MP3 players, has been tremendously successful for Ford. Cars equipped with SYNC have been selling nearly twice as fast as those without. The new  features let motorists search for businesses, get turn-by-turn directions, check traffic and get other information using just their voice. The Ford press release goes into depth on the features.

Microsoft’s Robbie Bach, president of the entertainment and devices division, referenced the service as part of Steve Ballmer’s opening keynote.

Robbie Bach introduces enhancements to Ford SYNC (photo from Engadget)

Step 1: Figure out if the Borders near my house is open. I called 1-800-555-TELL using my car’s Bluetooth to get the phone number. Tellme connected me to my neighborhood Borders. “Thank you for calling Borders… for our store hours and locations press 1.” FAIL. With more people relying on cell phones and increasing legislation requiring hands-free systems while driving, Touch Tone-only systems need to go away. After 2 1/2 minutes and three full loops of the menu I was finally connected to the store.

Step 2: Arrive at the store and look for a guidebook. No one was behind the information desk. Two computer terminals allowed me to search for a book. The search results include books that are only available online, aren’t yet published and a few that are “likely available in store” in a seemingly random order. FAIL. Gee, wouldn’t you want to sort the books that I can walk out with first? Otherwise, why am I here? The screen says my book is in section “B020,” with no indication of where that it is.

Step 3: I notice on my way out of the store a book in the bargain bin on Sonoma wineries. I figure this is the perfect opportunity to try out SnapTell, an iPhone comparison shopping application. Take a picture of a book, CD or DVD and SnapTell shows you how much that item sells for online. (It’s like Shazam for shopping.)

My first picture wasn’t good enough; I got an error message. Second time was a charm, despite taking a picture of a book that was too wide to fit in the frame. I could scroll through a list of prices from online merchants.

While I was impressed with the image recognition, the data quality needs work. The results included older editions of the book; the 1 cent price shown on the summary screen was for an older edition. Even when the current edition was shown pricing didn’t correlate to the merchant. Clicking on the $1.99 link pictured shown showed a price at the merchant of $6.99.

Data errors like this aren’t unusal in large databases, but I suspect will improve over time.

SnapTell is an interesting tool for research. And with access to location information, they could build a nice database of what people are searching for and from where.

That’s assuming that stores like Borders improve service to the point that I’ve got other reasons to come in than “I can’t wait for shipping.”

Disclosure: I work for Tellme, a company that makes speech recognition systems for many large companies. I have a bias against poorly implemented telephone systems.

Wireless carriers had long held on to core cellphone features with an iron grip. Want access to the camera, GPS, microphone or address book? Good luck. It usually involved spending a year or more negotiating with a carrier and then writing and (rewriting) your app to work on dozens of phone models. And when you were all done, you brought it to a market with little distribution support at a price few people would pay.

In the last couple of days, I’ve downloaded more apps than I had in my entire history of cell phone usage (dating back to 1996). There’s one big reason: once developers had access to features like GPS and the camera, they created compelling applications.

The most compelling apps have come from independent developers or startups. Some have used public APIs for other products; although there isn’t an official flickr app, there are several apps that interact with flickr. AOL is the lone exception among large companies, with apps for AIM and AOL Radio.

Here are some of the apps that caught my eye. With the exception of iMilk, all are free. That’s another refreshing change: Apple is making it easy for application developers who want to distribute free applications. Even paid apps can be relatively cheap, with a one time price of $3-$10 being common. (Versus the previous $3-$5 per month.)

All is not perfect in app land, of course. Much like when Facebook launched their app platform, some developers are having a hard time keeping up with the demand. I’ve also had my phone reboot at least half a dozen times when using various apps.

The functionality in some of these apps is limited compared with their other incarnations. For example, in Jott, you can’t send Jotts to others. As these apps are revved, they’ll become even more compelling.

Jott

Jott allows you to record a voice “note to self”. The note is then transcribed and put in your Jott account, which is available by phone or Web. It isn’t as robust as Jott’s

Where

A mobile social network that lets you plot friends on a map, look for restaurant reviews, find and reserve Zipcars and even look at a map of the night sky where you are with the constellations plotted. (Video of the app.)

There are a number of players looking to create mobile social networks. Whrrl, Loopt and Limbo offer somewhat similar apps. Where offers a range of features beyond social, while Limbo is the most social.

(Disclosure: I did some consulting for Where last year.)

Facebook

Facebook took an early lead with the iPhone 1.0 by having one of the best iPhone optimized sites. The lead developer released a toolkit that was used by other developers. The application version adds the ability to upload photos and IM, but lacks some of the features found in the browser version.

AirMe

Upload pictures to flickr (or an AirMe account). The pictures are automatically geotagged with your location. AirMe also tags you pictures with the current weather conditions.

NearMe

See pictures from Panoramio of places around where you are.

Twittelator

See and update Twitter. Post pictures and location updates. Twitterific has less functionality and also has ads.

Urbanspoon

Kind of like a Magic 8 ball to decide where to eat. Uses GPS to find where you are. Shake your iPhone and it will select a place for you.

iMilk  ($2.99)

“Drink” virtual milk. Uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to empty the glass. If you prefer, you can pour it into a glass before drinking.

Remote

Control your Apple TV or iTunes. Play songs, see album art and search your iTunes library. Works over Wifi, so you don’t have to be in line of sight. Much better than the flimsy remote that ships with Apple TV.

Pandora

The world’s greatest music discovery service now streams to iPhone. The app is beautifully simple. Add in an aux in jack or FM transmitter for your car and say goodbye to the $14 a month you’re paying to XM or Sirius.

Yelp

Why settle for the hand-picked (usually glowing) reviews displayed in the restaurant window? Pull out your iPhone and check Yelp. My favorite feature is a filter that limits the search to restaurants that are open now. Very helpful for those midnight cravings.

• Penny Dreadful (New Yorker) — Please, please let’s kill the penny already. It’s one of the nuisances of everyday life. Aside from Lincolnphiles and the companies that make money selling zinc to the government, who really wants these things? “Breaking stride to pick up a penny, if it takes more than 6.15 seconds, pays less than the federal minimum wage.” Anti-penny crusader Jeff Gore was on The Colbert Report last week. Obama, from the Land of Lincoln, would “seriously consider” getting rid of the penny. At least in Illinois you can use the penny in toll booths.
• GPS brings business to small town (Pekin Times) — A while back, I wrote about the potential of GPS to change the way we find businesses on road trips. This story from a small town newspaper talks about a small business that is seeing increased business from GPS users. Some of the key facts in the story are wrong, but the story is cute nonetheless. via GPS Tracklog
• Senate bill has plenty for home builders (Marketplace) – The big scandal in American politics isn’t that money can buy influence; it’s how little money it takes to buy that influence. In an unusually blunt display of force, the National Association of Home Builders announced in February that they would stop making campaign contributions, saying that Congress and the Bush administration “have not adequately addressed the underlying economic issues that would help to stabilize the housing sector and keep the economy moving forward.”
  The Senate, feeling the threat to their campaign piggy banks in a critical election year, responded with $6 billion in retroactive tax breaks for the builders. Yes, that’s $6 billion of our money going to the same people who helped exacerbate the housing bubble and subsequent pop through endless hype, captive finance arms which steered people into unsuitable loans and overbuilding. Since January 2007, the homebuilders have given $961,650 to campaigns with 46% going to Democrats and 54% going to Republicans. Let’s see, that’s a 624,000% ROI.
• Nats home opener – Jon has a great collection of pictures and a review from the opening of Nationals Park. One of my favorites is below.

But what does it mean for every day consumers? The biggest impact is likely to be in the mobile space. Microsoft’s ownership of the Windows Mobile OS and Yahoo’s large audience and mobile applications could revolutionize the industry.

As revolutionary as the iPhone is, it’s not a true network device. Apple did a terrific job integrating four devices – phone, Internet tablet, media player and camera – into one.

Even as our lives get more and more digitally connected, the cell phone remains a remote island of information. Someone needs to build a device that integrates the Internet seamlessly.

Some of the things I’d like to see:

• A network address book. You no longer have to use the 10-key keypad or a sync cable to keep your address book up-to-date. In fact, you don’t have to update it all – as your contacts move, those changes are automatically reflected. The address book would incorporate network presence so that you don’t call people when they’re in the middle of something.
• A network calendar.
• Integrated photo applications. I’ve been looking for a way to view pictures from my friends on flickr through my mobile phone or iPod Touch. The best efforts have been clunky. When I take pictures, they’re seamlessly integrated with my flickr account, without the hacks that are currently required. (Sprint has done a nice implementation of this kind of integration with Picture Mail, but their Web application is awful and little used.) The pictures could also be used for picture Caller ID.
• Richer data push to the phone. It amazes me that we’re still stuck sending 160 character text messages to each other. A network-integrated phone would allow for a better experience. Want to invite someone to dinner? Send them a message which appears complete with photo, address, review and link to driving directions.
• Web access to text messages and integration with IM. When you’re at your desk, text messages come in on your IM client. Leave and they get routed to your cell phone. All of your texts are available in your mail app. The carriers are an obstacle to making this happen (text messaging is highly lucrative), but a combined Microsoft-Yahoo might be able to pull it off.
• Network control of your phone. Phone stolen? No problem, send a bullet to erase all of the data. Forgot where you left your phone? See a map of where it is.
• Local search integration. Found a business that you like? Add it your network address book for quick and easy access. Click to rate right from your cell phone.
• Location-aware presence. The option to publish location to other networks, including IM networks. More on that later.

Some variations of a few of these features, like the network address book and calendar, exist in enterprise-focused devices. Yahoo! Go is an excellent consumer application that includes features such as a flickr viewer, but without integration into the OS isn’t as great as it should be.

Microsoft’s ownership of the phone OS, deep integration of Yahoo! Go and their combined consumer audiences could be combined to create a phone that out Apples Apple.

See also:

• iPhone as your social network
• Remote control for your cell phone

ObDisclaimer: These are my personal views and do not reflect the views of my employer.

Having gone to school in Chicago, I love deep dish pizza. Unfortunately, there’s no Carmen’s or Giordano’s in the D.C. area. The last time I had good Chicago-style pizza was when my friend Jason flew in a few Giordano’s pies for his Super Bowl party. (The Colts were are also represented with tenderloins.)

I was connecting through O’Hare today and wanted to get some deep dish at the airport. I asked Google for “deep dish pizza at o’hare”. No luck.

This is a really difficult query for search engines. It seems simple, but it has a lot of components that make it tricky. But it’s exactly the kind of query that search engines should be able to handle.

Breaking apart the components of the query, we have:

“deep dish pizza” is a distinct concept. It’s different from “New York pizza,” “Sicilian pizza,” and “Indiana pizza”. (I don’t know what that is, but my friend Wanita swears there’s such a thing.) I could restrict my query using quotation marks around the phrase “deep dish pizza” but I shouldn’t have to do that. On the other hand, “deep dish pizza” is close enough to “Chicago-style pizza” that those results should be included.

The second part of my query was “at”. Search engines typically treat words like “at” “and” “near” and “or” either as filler and ignore them, or they use them as Boolean operators. There’s a big difference between the query “deep dish pizza at o’hare” and “deep dish pizza near o’hare”. With 90 minutes between flights, “near” doesn’t work.

“O’Hare” is also tricky. It’s a known place with a physical address. But Google and other search engines know it as ORD or 10000 Bessie Coleman Dr, Chicago, IL 60666. Compare the results for “deep dish pizza o’hare” with those for “deep dish pizza ORD“. Frequent travelers might shortcut to ORD, but again, that’s not a burden users should have to bear.

The answer, in theory, lies in natural language search. I’ve written before about how search engines force people to think like computers. Natural language search tries to teach computers to think like people. The most talked about company in the space is Powerset. I saw a controlled demonstration of their technology in August, but the promised fall public beta has yet to materialize.

Keyword-based search engines fake some of this by using tricks like stemming, synonyms and anchor text. With the uptake of sites like Yahoo! Answers and the sheer volume of information on the Web, there’s a decent chance that someone has phrased the question the same way. In the search results page for my original query, one of the results was a Frommer’s Q&A.

In addition to the structural challenges of queries like this, there’s also the challenge of how data is gathered. Data providers do a terrible job of gathering information about a place that’s really a collection of places — such as malls and airports. In some cases, information is simply not collected. In others, the information that is collected isn’t sufficiently descriptive. The physical addresses of these businesses aren’t meaningful to users. “Terminal 1, Gate C3″ makes sense; 10000 Bessie Coleman Dr, Chicago, IL 60666 does not.

OK, how many geeks are pulling out their laptops and doing searches like this you ask? Not a lot. And in search from the Web, it’s relatively easy to re-do the query and keep tweaking it until you get an answer.

Getting better answers faster becomes increasingly important as search moves to mobile devices and with voice-based search from the likes of Tellme and Google’s GOOG-411. In those environments, the penalty for failure is much higher. Users can’t easily tweak queries. They can’t browse endless Web sites to try to get the answer. They need the algorithms to do the work for them.

I was finally able to find out about pizza options at O’Hare by going to the O’Hare Web site and looking at a PDF map of Terminal 1. There isn’t a deep dish pizza place in Terminal 1, though there are Pizzeria Unos in other terminals.

The pyschic search engine would know that Pizzeria Uno is not an answer that works for me.

More on: local search, search, wireless

The first time user experience isn’t exactly intuitive. When doing a search off Sprint’s portal, one of the layers that comes back is “Local” clicking again to “Go Local” then asks whether you want to enter a location or “Find Me.” Selecting “Find Me” renders a release authorizing Sprint to give your location to Microsoft. The results that come back after all this (my query term was “Target”) still show ringtones and screen savers above the local results.

Search results aren’t sorted in any discernible order. Usually in local search, results are sorted by distance from the starting point or alphabetically. These are neither.

The authorization to use “Find Me” can be stored for a session, day, 30 days or unlimited, making return visits easier.

A link labeled “Get Precise GPS Location” offers users of select phones the option to download a Java applet. Instead of typing out what you’re looking for, you can speak the name of the business or the category.

Although category names (restaurants, bars, Mexican restaurants, movie theaters) worked fine, business names did not. Of the dozen or so names I tried, only “Cheesecake Factory,” “Target” and “Dominos” returned the results I was expecting. These terms are so common that many data providers treat them as categories.

It seems that the browser-based search uses triangulation from the towers to calculate location, whereas the application uses GPS from your handset.

Despite its flaws, it’s still a significant move. This is the first time I know of that a U.S. carrier has offered location-enabled search for free.

Update: The Java application also can tap into the phone’s address book. If you find a business and want to share it, just pick a name from the phone’s address book and send.

More on: GPS, wireless data

Recommended reading:

• Sprint press release
• Sprint And Microsoft Extend Mobile Partnership, Offer New Services (Search Engine Land, includes screenshots of Java app)

You go to Google’s My Maps, plot your points and then go through a simple process to create your widget. (Behind the scenes, WHERE is using KML, which is becoming the de facto standard for identifying locations.)

I was easily able to create widgets that allow you to find the nearest Metro station in the D.C. area, the restaurants reviewed in Tom Sietsema’s 2006 Dining Guide, my own guide to my neighborhood and a list of restaurants I want to try. You can see my custom widgets in the phone at right. (The links take you to the Google My Map; if you’re a WHERE user and want a link to the widget, email me. Unfortunately, there’s not yet an easy way to publish them.)

The widgets even include photos. If you come across Clarendon Ballroom in my guide to Clarendon, you could pull up a picture of it on your phone, along with my review.

WHERE also supports a CSV import, so groups or people that have existing databases of content they want to use can just upload the data instead of first plotting it on a Google Map.

Right now the widgets aren’t live. For example, if I add or change information in my Clarendon guide, I have to recreate the widget. Even though that process is simple, it shouldn’t be necessary.

More on: maps, gps, Google

Google points to a map of Zurich to illustrate schedule information. Click on one of the tram icons. In some cases, you must then click on the “View upcoming departures” link. It’s unclear whether this is just schedule information or real-time data; it looks like it might just be schedule. This also works in Portland, Ore. (I really wish generating a URL with the “Link to this page” button would preserve the state of the info balloons.)

I still want to see Google incorporate real-time information, similar to what is available from the WMATA for the DC Metro system.

Throughout the country, Google has added the lines served to transit stations.

You can also search an area for a station. For example, here’s a search for “Metro Center station”. That alone is nice, but it gets better. I often go in to DC to have lunch with friends who work near the McPherson Square station. Here’s a map of restaurants near McPherson Square.

Of the online map providers, Google has done the best job of making maps about more than just driving. Some public transit agencies and companies like NextBus have been offering information on their Web sites, on the phone and on the platforms. But its the distribution power of Google that’s going to bring this to the masses.

Unfortunately, the transit information isn’t yet available on Google Maps Mobile. The killer app for transit information is really on mobile devices.

More on: Google, maps, transit