Geniuses can be found on every street corner in Silicon Valley, but visionaries are much less common. Geniuses are good at completing tasks while visionaries are the first to recognize tasks that need completion. And of all the visionaries none were greater or had a longer range view than Doug Engelbart, who died last night at age 88.
To most people who recognize his name Doug Engelbart was the inventor of the computer mouse but he was much, much more than that. In addition to the mouse and the accompanying chord keyboard, Doug invented computer time sharing, network computing, graphical computing, the graphical user interface and (with apologies to Ted Nelson) hypertext links. And he invented all […]
Siri’s big brother from Google
With today’s introduction of Apple’s iPad 3 or iPad HD or whatever the hell they end up calling it, I think we’ll be entering a pretty Siri-ous phase when it comes to mobile Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. Apple has a winner in Siri, its iOS digital assistant app, and knows it, so we’ll soon be seeing all-Siri, all the time in Apple products to come this year including, no doubt, Cupertino’s own big-screen TV. But this is not to say that Google’s Android will be far behind. There are stories popping-up about Google doing its own Siri-like app. But I expect Google to go significantly beyond Siri capability and I base that belief […]
