Archive for the ‘Coming Soon’ Category

“Mommy, Why Won’t the TV Answer Me?”

by Bruce Kasanoff

early November in 2015

Julia stood in front of the television set, wailing. Her Mom rushed down the basement stairs to see what was troubling the little girl.

“What’s wrong, Julia?”

Her daughter gave her a look of confusion and hurt. “She won’t answer me, Mommy. Why won’t she answer me?”

Katie smiled. Julia was standing in front of their old TV, which Bill last night decided to pull out of the garage and set up in front of the treadmill.

“She won’t play Sesame Street! She won’t turn up the music!”

Katie crouched and put her arms around the little girl. “This TV is old, Julia. It doesn’t talk. It doesn’t listen.”

Julia rubbed her eyes. “Everything talks, Mommy. Toaster talks. Frig talks. Garage talks. Why won’t TV talk?”

“No, honey, just a few years ago nothing but people talked. None of the things around our house used to talk. So anything that’s older than you probably can’t talk.”

Julia tilted her head. “But that’s stupid, Mommy. How do things know what you want if they can’t talk and they can’t hear?”

Katie smiled. “We used to have to push buttons, twist knobs and type on keyboards. Everything had controls you touched with your hands.”

“Yuch,” said Julia with a grimace. “Dirty.”

“Maybe a little bit, yes.” It certainly was easier to keep appliances and electronics clean, now that you barely touched them.

Julia looked back at the TV. “Old TV is stupid. Old toasters are stupid, too. Everything old is stupid.”

Katie looked her daughter in the eye. “I’m sort of old. Am I stupid?”

Julia shook her head aggressively. “No, Mommy. You can talk. You listen to me. You’re not stupid. Only things that don’t listen are stupid.”

Wow, thought Katie, Julia’s generation will only know intelligent devices. Her daughter still had trouble holding a crayon properly, but she was creating stories just by talking to the bulletin board next to her bed. At night, Julia would chat happily with “Sarah,” and Sarah would record every word the little girl said – unless Julia told her to “forget that last part.”

Katie had to admit it was an unsettling change when the first few companies made the transition from horrific voicemail systems to Talking Company. Now you could just call Best Buy and a gentle female voice knew every detail about every product; she even remembered your previous call.

Katie nearly hung up the phone in panic the second time she called Best Buy’s Talking Company and the voice said pleasantly, “Hi, Katie. It’s good to talk with you again.”

“Mommy,” said Julia, trying to get her Mom to focus on what is really important. “Please make the stupid TV play Sesame Street.”

Written by Bruce Kasanoff of Now Possible, where science fiction meets business.

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Siri Meets Soulmate

by Bruce Kasanoff

Imagine if Apple’s Siri was combined with a location-based dating service, just a bit more powerful than the ones Jenna Wortham profiled yesterday in the New York Times.

One day, a voice in my ear said, “Alex, this is Soulmate. Please stop. I’d like you to meet someone special.”

Rushing through the brick plaza outside Boston’s Faneuil Hall, late on a gorgeous summer afternoon, the words almost didn’t register. I was tired from a tough day at work, and wanted to catch the T early enough so I could run along the river before the sun went down.

I kept moving for a few hundred feet before it dawned on me that this was the first time that Soulmate, my new social GPS unit, had ever come to life. Given to me as a gift by my concerned parents, who were almost as tired as me of a succession of flawed girlfriends, it had spent three months sitting silently on my phone, never making a peep.

Think of Soulmate as a dating service with ESP. It broadcasts all of your interests, dislikes, bad habits, unique qualities, personal characteristics and dreams in a quarter-mile-wide circle that follows you everywhere you go.

The data is encrypted, thank God, so your office mates won’t be able to discover that you really like cuddling by the fire and giggling at bad jokes, to use a purely hypothetical example. Only other Soulmate software units can “read” the data.

Although the technology is complex, the idea is pretty simple. If you ever cross paths with a potential soul mate, Soulmate stops you both in your tracks and introduces you.

At last, I stopped.

For a moment, I actually froze. Did she stop, too? Was she staring at me now? Do I look stressed out?

I tried to look casual. It didn’t work.

Then I remembered the instructions. “Match us up,” I said to my phone.

“Excellent,” replied Soulmate. “Julia is 240 feet to the northeast of you.”

I have a bad sense of direction. “Which way is northeast?”

“Turn around and she will be ahead and slightly to your right.”

Summoning my courage, I turned around. As I did, Soulmate prompted me, “Please take out your phone.”

Soulmate introductions often take place on crowded city streets or at parties or public events, so the service created a simple step to help people find each other. You are supposed to actually take out and hold your phone – something no one ever does since the advent of wireless earpieces and voice activated dialing – so the other person can spot you.

I took out my phone, holding it somewhat awkwardly in front of me, and started walking forward. It was dinnertime, and the restaurants and bars were filling up quickly. People were hustling across the plaza, many in groups but plenty on their own. I could see dozens of women in front of me.

Then I saw her. Julia has red hair that falls onto her shoulders, and her hair stood out against the ivory color of her blouse. She, too, had her phone out, but had an expression and pose that suggested she was debating whether to bolt before I showed up. Then she saw me, and I actually managed a welcoming smile.

“She’s 92 feet in front of you,” Soulmate said.

“Shut up,” I said, turning off my phone.

Julia was stuck now. She returned my smile and walked towards me. As I was calculating how to greet a perfect stranger my phone identified as my soul mate, Julia broke the ice. She gave me a big hug.

“Hey, Alex. I’m Julia.”

You can learn a lot from a hug. Julia was a warm and outgoing person, in great shape. She was both soft and hard, if that makes sense. Soft in the right places, but in wonderful shape. A runner, I guessed, like me.

She pulled away and looked me right in the eyes, for a long time. Her eyes and her lips sparkled.

“Why don’t we sit on the bench?” I suggested. One was right next to us.

She looked at me for another few seconds, then smiled and said, “That would be nice, Alex.”

Julia was a researcher from Yale, in town for a week to attend a neuroscience conference at MIT. Being a public television producer who generally made programs about gardens, dogs and old houses, it was pretty unlikely I would have ever crossed paths with her.

Sorry, if I don’t speed things up this story will take five years, eight months, two weeks, four days and – let’s see – 27 minutes, which is how long it’s been since Julia and I met. We have only been apart for seven nights since.

Thanks, Soulmate. Both of you.

Written by Bruce Kasanoff of Now Possible, where science fiction meets business.

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ALS Entrepreneur

by Bruce Kasanoff

“I will never leave a fallen comrade.”

They tell me that’s the most important line in the soldier’s creed. I live by it.

I am one of the lucky ones. I have ALS, and have been “locked-in” for three years. For nine months, I had no way to communicate with the world. Couldn’t talk. Or write.

My mind is sharp as ever. Spirit strong. I had fallen. My wife left; it was hell.

My brother, Jim, stuck by my side. He got me a BCI, or brain-computer interface. I type by looking at a screen. Letters flash in a repeating pattern. When I see the right one, my brain goes “aha!” and the letter gets added to whatever I’m writing.

One year in, I was emailing, slowly. Each paragraph took about 15 minutes. It was a miracle.

Emailed my accountant and some friends. Tested my ideas, and checked my bank balance; I’ve been lucky, it was better than expected. Hired an assistant, then a programmer, Ted. Decided to start a firm. Guess what we make?

BCIs.

First task was to give me more lifelines. Ted built a navigation interface for me, so I could open files and surf the web using the same sort of “aha!” brain signal. It also lets me play songs, control the lights, call my assistant…

Ted even built me an avatar. Using hot buttons, I can make it smile, cheer, grimace, clap, jump or 97 other actions. It makes in-person interactions a lot more natural. (When someone’s in the room with me, I keep the avatar on one screen and my flashing letters on the other. With people I know well, I can react almost in real time (or, when I get excited, ahead of real time!)

OK. I was back in business. Wrote a mission statement: free everyone else like me.

Gave it to a grant writer, Lisa, and hired a biz dev guy, Mark. Lisa brought in $457,000 the first 12 months. Mark reached out to leading BCI labs around the world, found the smartest technology firms in this area, and – our big break – discovered a billionaire-who-wishes-to-be-anonymous whose sister is locked in.

Mr. B. put $5 million into my firm. That let us take Ted’s programs and make them ready for prime time (add help screens, get rid of the bugs, design pretty interfaces…)

The grants let us start training BCI assistants. Remember, our clients can’t do anything for themselves, at least until we get involved. The money also helped us start finding the people we are trying to free. One of the problems serving our client base is that they don’t (can’t) call their friends and recommend our services. Even when we restore their ability to communicate, their locked-in friends don’t have a means to receive such messages.

So we started building a database of ALS patients worldwide. It seems to be the first. I realized the more names we found, the better we could validate the market size and demonstrate our growth potential. So now five interns work on the project, with one FT manager.

Applied for more grants. Learned how to help get funds for our clients to pay for our services. I will never abandon someone with ALS. Somehow, we find a way to pay the expenses.

(BTW, sorry if my sentences are too clipped; it saves me time.)

Two years in, we had 15 employees. One, a talented kid named Clara, was joking with me, “When do I get to use some of these toys?”

Eureka.

The bigger the market, the more investors pay attention, and the greater the economies of scale. Stuff gets cheaper. Thanks to Clara, I realized we should be selling BCIs to healthy people. After all, the vast majority of people don’t have ALS; they aren’t locked in. If I could convince healthy people to use BCIs, I could drive the cost of our headsets down from thousands of dollars to less than a hundred.

But why would a healthy person use a BCI? They are slow beyond belief. Much faster to type than to watch flashing letters one at a time, etc.

Gathered the team, and we brainstormed.

There are numerous situations in which your brain generates a recognizable change in activity. To name a few, when you:

- realize you have made a mistake
- recognize a face or object
- are fascinated
- grow weary
- become bored

For example, when you realize you just hit the wrong letter on a keyboard, your brain sort of goes “oops.” Your brain waves change. If your typing program knows exactly when you thought “oops,” it can highlight the letter you typed just before your brain went “oops.” Then, it can show you some likely replacements. When you see the right letter, your brain sort of goes “aha!” The program could automatically fix your error.

Congratulations. You just corrected a typo with your thoughts.

A BCI could help you teach Microsoft Word new words. Imagine you type an acronym the program has never seen before. The program highlights the “error,” but then does not detect any indication that you made a mistake. In other words, it “senses” that you are confident this word is correct. So the program eliminates the error message, saving you the time of manually adding the word to your dictionary.

A BCI is the only device we can think of that offers complete and total privacy to its user.

You could sit across from a person at a table, give instructions to your BCI, and the other person would have no idea. You could remain motionless and silent, but your instructions could put actions in motion far outside the room in which you are sitting.

Since BCIs are so crude today – they cannot read your thoughts, not by a long shot – this idea requires a very, VERY, simple interface. Think: two or three signals, tops. Such as “yes” or “no.” Fortunately, yes and no can take you a long way.

We came up with the idea of combining a BCI with a wireless phone. The phone has no controls whatsoever; is looks like a Bluetooth earpiece and is only designed for incoming calls. It is designed for executives to use with their assistants. We call it: EitherOr. Basically, someone calling you on this device can give you the choice of either one option or another, and your brain will think “aha!” when you hear the right choice. The BCI recognizes this response.

On a regular basis, your assistant checks in with you by calling your earpiece. You hear her, but what she hears in return is an automated voice that says either “yes” or “no,” or “the first choice” or “the second,” based on which response your brain triggers. On each call, she follows a similar pattern, asking:

“Do you need my help?” (If “no,” she hangs up.)
“Would you like me to pull you out of the meeting?” (If “yes,” she comes and gets you.)
“Do you need access to important facts, or would you like a colleague to join you? (You answer “first.”)
“Do you need budget estimates or opinions from outside experts?” (You answer “first.”)
“Do you want sales for this quarter or next quarter?” (You answer “first.”)

“Sales for this quarter are projected to be $3.4 million, breaking down as follows. The Northeast will generate $750,000, which is a rise of 7%…”

Someone sitting across the table from you will have no idea what is happening. You are perfectly silent, and moving normally. EitherOr is a secret weapon, or a discrete tool, depending on whether you like wartime analogies or not. I do, given my obsession with never leaving a fallen comrade behind.

Over the past four months, we sold 250,000 units. This Christmas, we are coming out with a toy version that kids can use, and preorders just topped 3.7 million units. We make $20 each, which totals to $74 million in sales.

Tomorrow, my dream will start coming true. We are going to announce that our BCI systems for ALS individuals will now be free. Yes, free. Sales to business executives and kids will completely cover the cost of these higher end units. There’s still much work to do finding locked-in individuals and training the assistants each one needs, but that’s all doable.

The tough part was figuring out what a healthy person could do with a BCI. Doing so set all my comrades free.

Written by Bruce Kasanoff of Now Possible, where science fiction meets business.

(Note: Brendan Allison helped inspired and inform this story, but bears no responsibility for its flaws.)

Amazing sneak preview of your future

by Bruce Kasanoff

Microsoft created this stunning look at what your future may hold.

Will magic, I mean technology, save us?

by Bruce Kasanoff

If you listen to the media, humanity is doomed. If you visit an Apple Store, life is wonderful. Which is it?

People, including me, are entranced with what technology can do. Explain all you like, but it’s magic, pure and simple. I can’t wait for the next spell.

But why aren’t we actually getting smarter? During the Republican Presidential Debate last night, the candidates were still bickering like kids over whether one did/said/supported something 2/4/10 years ago. Why couldn’t Anderson Cooper pull up the facts and end the bickering?

Tech is great at making us want more tech, but not so good at solving the big problems. No one agrees on how the economy works, or how to fix it. No one can (yet) create millions of new jobs. We can’t agree on whether global warming will drown us or disappear without a wimper.

Companies have spent over a decade installing expensive IT systems, but companies often still act like dolts. Why is it that my iPhone talks to me more than my wife does, but my bank’s ATMs still don’t know what language I speak?

Having been raised under the umbrella of The American Dream, it’s tempting to think that tech will solve our biggest problems just in time. But I’ve now spent a half-century waiting fruitlessly for a tech alternative to carbon fuels.

And even Apple’s batteries run dry quickly when you utilize the coolest apps.

It also worries me that the people who come up with all this magic aren’t necessarily, well, ideal role models. In the Race to Introduce Cool, few stop and think whether New Cool will make our world a better place in which to live.

I love getting a text from my daughter in Sweden that lets me know she’s safe in bed for the night, but don’t love sitting at a family dinner with everyone texting.

Then there’s the troubling issue of the Dark Side of Technology. That gleaming new iPhone or Android may one day rat out your location to your spouse or employer. It may reveal you work 6.2 hours a day versus the 9.7 average of your co-workers.

Yes, technology is like magic. I’m just not yet sure how much we can trust it to solve all our problems.

PreMergency (a “Coming Soon” story)

by Bruce Kasanoff 8 Comments

(Here’s another fictionalized story I wrote partly for fun, and partly to illustrate the ways I hope my 1toEverything chart gets your imagination going. By the way, the lodge and the dogs really exist.)

Two miles into her hike, Sara could finally see the ridgeline up ahead. From there, she would have an amazing view of Echo Valley.

Following instructions from Nan, owner of the guest ranch, she began her hike by calling out, “Who wants to go for a walk?” to the nine Australian Shepherds who lived on the ranch. Four joined her. The dogs would give plenty of notice to the bears and other wildlife that lived in the woods of British Columbia, preventing any nerve-wracking meetings.

Sara hiked past the pasture that was home to about 40 horses, and followed the twisting path through the woods. It was a gorgeous early morning, and the cool temperatures kept her comfortable and energized.

Up ahead, Sara heard the dogs barking. A few strides later, she had her first glimpse of the clearing at the top of the ridge, and was surprised to see the dogs surrounding a man who was sitting cross-legged on a big boulder. Their tails were wagging enthusiastically, so she decided to trust their instincts.

“Hey,” the man said with a big grin, “You found my secret hiding place.”

“I didn’t mean to bother you,” Sara responded.

“No worries. Besides, you brought some of my friends with you.” He held out his hand. “I’m Jake, staying at Echo Valley just like you.”

“Sara,” she said, shaking his hand.

“A pleasure. Did you come in last night? I don’t remember you from dinner.”

“Yep. We didn’t get here until after 10. I didn’t realize it would take six hours to get here from Vancouver.”

“It does, unless you have Norm fly you in.” Norm was the other owner, a passionate pilot who built his own airstrip on the ranch’s property and gladly flew in any guest who didn’t want to endure the lengthy drive over not very good roads. “I’ve been here four days, and every morning I come out here to meditate. This spot is one of the main reasons I’ve been coming to the ranch for four years.”

Sara sat down on a rock opposite Jake. She looked out over the vista, which stretched for dozens of miles. Nothing but wilderness and blue skies. Heaven.

“It’s great that you meditate. I’ve tried it off and on.”

“It’s part of my job, literally. We’re required to meditate and exercise consistently.”

Sara looked back at Jake. He was about 30, lean and strong, with close-cropped hair. She couldn’t figure out what his line of work was, so she asked, “What sort of job requires meditation?”

“PreMergency crews.”

“Pre Mergency? As in before an emergency?”

Jake smiled. He liked explaining his job, especially since less than 100 people in the world had so far been trained to do it.

“I’m part of a test program in Minneapolis in which we respond to potential medical emergencies before they happen. The meditation and exercise requirement is because we’re constantly showing up on people’s doorsteps and telling them they are just minutes away from a heart attack or other life-threatening problem. We need to project calm, assertive energy, or otherwise the person might freak and die.”

Sara narrowed her eyes. She was trying to decide if he was being sincere, or putting her on. But he really did project calm and assertive energy, so she decided to believe him.

“How do you know someone is about to face an emergency?”

“Lots of ways. We have almost two dozen wireless biosensors that monitor heart rate, pulse, and other vital signs. With elderly patients, we monitor movements like stride length and cadence. We use different sensors for different patients. Over 35,000 patients are enrolled in the program, ranging from the very sick to some who are in better shape than you or me.”

“No way.”

“Yes way. All the signals go into an automated center, and when anything varies from normal, someone like me goes out to check. I’m somewhere between an emergency medic and God.”

Sara took a moment to digest this. It was a lot to absorb at 7 a.m. She imagined a middle-aged man sitting in a big easy chair, rubbing his chest to wish away indigestion, when the doorbell rings. Jake is at the door and says something like: you’re not going to rub away that pain; let’s get you to the hospital and stop that heart attack before it happens.

“Why do you say God?” she asked.

“In the past three months, I’ve saved twelve people who most likely would have died if I hadn’t rang their bell. One was a mother who gave birth three weeks later; she was going to name her child after me, but it turned out to be a girl. In most of the cases, the person didn’t even know anything was wrong. It sure feels like divine intervention.”

A dog came over and pushed Jake’s leg with his snout. “Sorry, Wally, are we ignoring you?”

Jake put his hand up, and the dog went up on his hind legs and hit Jake’s hand with a paw. “He likes to slap five,” said Jake, with pleasure.

Sara had a thought. “You’re sort of like Wally and his friends. You sniff out trouble before it happens, and you keep the bears and humans separate. Only instead of bears, you chase away all sorts of grizzly medical problems.”

“Ouch,” replied Jake, grimacing in good nature at the weak pun even as he warmed up to Sara.

“Playing dog, or playing God. Might be the same thing, except for the order of the letters. Either way, I love my job.”