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Magitti: The Intelligent Mobile Platform

Maneesh Prasad
maneesh.prasad@GISdevelopment.net

PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, Inc), was founded in 1970, and is well known for inventions like laser printing, Ethernet, object-oriented programming, ubiquitous computing etc. Last September, PARC announced the creation of mobile application platform, Magitti. The software codename Magitti, comes from two early design concepts: 'Magic Scope' and 'Graffiti System'.


Magitti System Overview
Magitti, the leisure city guide system will be sold by Dai Nippon Printing (DNP), Japan.

DNP has working closely with PARC since 2005 on this project. Using contextual information such as time of the day or positional information obtained via a GPS in the mobile phone, this system would use the Artificial Intelligence (AI) based algorithm to forecast or recommend options to the users laid out across to him as text options or overlayed on map of the locality.

Magitti is designed to assist in getting "location based information". It will also suggest activities based upon the local area data, like shopping, dining, banking etc matching the consumer's location, his behaviour pattern and time of day. What differentiates this with other GPS enabled mobile applications, is the Artificial Intelligence.


Magitti User Interface
The application software will mature with the use or in other words, as one uses this tool, the data base of preferences and habit based upon the time and location would start getting populated. Hence over a period of time, it would be able to predict the user behaviour. It will not only use the location based services for this, but the text in the SMS and text from the voice communication too would be used to analyse an individuals taste. It will be sitting little close to the fence dividing the personal privacy and exciting utility. But considering that most of the data would be analysed in the handset, it may give little comfort to the privacy freaks. According to those from the media present during the demonstration last September at PARC, the interface is similar to the iPhone but the overall user interface (UI) is not as cool. On the positive side you can operate this device using one hand only. But one will have to wait and see how the device interprets the language. For a word can have different meaning in different context. Also in personal communication one tends to have a relaxed approach in terms of abbreviations, three letter codes (TLCs) etc.

The trials are expected to take place early this year and commercial sales would start in 2009 in Japan, thereafter followed by US.

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