A Perspective on Location Services, Mobile Entrepreneurship & Startup Life

Nevertheless, simply because most people do not want to spend time manually logging daily experiences does not imply that the logs themselves are undesired. In 1945, Vannevar Bush laid out his vision for the memex, a device that records every detail of human memory and facilitates simple search and retrieval of experiences. While technically infeasible in his era, with the advent of wearable sensors and large amounts of disk space, many researchers today have begun pursuing their own version of the memex.

[via Using Mobile Phones to Model Complex Social Systems by Nathan Eagle]

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

[Source: Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" (1945)]

Why do I blog this? With regards to mobile and people-centric sensing the ‘memex’ is often mentioned, a crazy vision which has a lot of implications, especially privacy concerns and the question of how much transparency is good for a society…