Mobile, Mobile, and More Mobile: New Services, Tools, and Stuff
When mobile search and access to information becomes a regular part of our daily lives, no one will be able to say that ResourceShelf wasn't on the scene early.
Smart Money alerts us to a new mobile search service that lets you do comparison shopping via your mobile device and UPC symbols. It's called Frucall.
Here's how it works. Call 1-888-DO-FRUCALL (1-888-36-378-2255), and type in the barcode number of the item you're shopping for. The service uses Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Street Prices and Shopping.com to get results. Within seconds, an automated voice will tell you price ranges for a new item, noting in a separate range the prices for used items, if available. Shipping estimates are included.
Neat idea, the federated search is new but the concept is not. Services like Smarter.com have offered SMS-based shopping for years. Smarter.com even offers a section where they do a head-to-head comparison of their service vs. Google.
In fact, in Japan you've been able to use your cameraphone to search and compare product prices for three years. We made note of this in this post about a related area, cameraphone searching. This post has an overview.
Our second story, this time from News.com, "Lost? Try asking your cell phone," discusses technology from GeoVector that is currently not available in the U.S., but we're sure it's only a matter of time. Like comparison shopping before it, it's available in Japan.
The software is fairly self-explanatory. Point the phone at a building, and the phone will troll the Internet and bring back information on what you're looking at. Punch in "Chinese restaurant," and it will list the nearby ones and give you walking directions.
Related Services:
+ Semacode and Semapedia (the Wikipedia + Cameraphone search). Don't also forget Mobot.
+ Loki (not for mobile devices, yet, but very cool and in most cases (we've used it a lot) works well). Uses wi-fi signals to pinpoint your location and then return local info from movie houses to local train stations to the closest Dunkin Donuts or Kinkos. Super cool. More here.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
