Magitti: The future of location apps from PARC?
Bo Begole, principal scientist and manager of PARC‘s (formerly Xerox PARC) Ubiquitous Computing Area, showed Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb an app that brings the concept of ‘ubicomp’ to a commercial reality.
“Magitti is a next generation location-based mobile app, currently in commercial trials in Japan. It goes further than popular apps like Foursquare and Gowalla. As well as using GPS data to figure out where you are, Magitti computes a user’s preferences and context. It then makes recommendations of near-by places to go, based on that personal data. […]
[It is] a mobile recommender service that recommends outdoor leisure activities to you based on your current time and location. More than that, it accounts for the user’s “digital situation as identified by messages they’ve been exchanging or documents they’ve been looking at.”
Begole explained that the app infers the user’s likely leisure activity and then helps partition the types of information they’d be interested in.”
Further background
– Blogpost by Begole where he discusses PARC’s work on contextual intelligence
– Case study on the role of ethnography in the Magitti development
