Phones are typically used for communication, even those fancy new "Smartphones."

But perhaps there's a better way for phones to work. Maybe a personal data mining program that makes intelligent suggestions. It can let you know about things in your area, based on a combination of GPS, past behaviors, even on text messages.

It's a whole new level of data mining that seems like a cool evolution to the "smart typing" that my Windows Mobile Dash uses. It has learned words I've typed and remembers them, so that I can easily enter the same words again in a new email.

I'm not sure I want any mining applications going through my messages for clues about me, especially if the phone companies can access the data. And with the constant holes we see in software, how long before some hacker comes up with a way to get your personal preferences and habits through the bluetooth link your phone has? That would be a stalkers dream.

And many a woman's nightmare.

I like the idea of an intelligent assistant that can help me, but it really needs to be tightly bound as to what it can access, or what information it might inadvertently gather. And it needs to be very, very tightly secured.

Something like this is best left as an option that we can turn on, something like an "Advanced search" that allows us to input some terms, locations, etc. and have it try to guess what we might like. Or give us very helpful solutions.

Regardless of the possible privacy and security implications, I bet this is a great project to work on. Meet a lot of people, try to refine algorithms, make them learn, and come up with creative and well-received solutions. The addition of possibly "mashing-up" other people's recommendations, past ratings, and more, could create some kind of Uber-Recommendation that puts Amazon to shame.

As long as mine runs on SQL Server Compact Edition so I can get to the data (and remove it or back it up), I might be persuaded to give this a try.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

The podcast feeds are now available at sqlservercentral.podshow.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.

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