Recreating Jane

So the Ender movie is coming out. That’s… well, it’s coming out.

This had me thinking about the book series and one thing from there struck me as being more science than fiction nowadays (don’t worry, no spoilers):

In the later books of the series Ender has a digital assistant called Jane. Jane takes the shape of small in-ear dongle - a “jewel”, which Ender communicates with using voice commands.

Could we create - or at least approximate - Jane using existing consumer technologies today?

Idea: Twimeshift

Having cut the cable TV cord one of the few things I kind of miss, is the real time snarkinsightful comments on Twitter during live events like the Oscars or X Factor.

Here’s an idea; You enter a Twitter hashtag (or any search, I guess), and have the resulting tweets replayed in real time as they would have appeared had you been following the hashtag when the event occurred. That way you get the full Twitter-augmented experience when watching anything after the fact.

A feature to speed up and slow down is probably a good idea as syncing is going to be a challenge, but overall it doesn’t have to be synced with millisecond precision.

It would also be interesting if you could add your own tweets to the timeshifted stream after the fact, but I am not entirely sure how that’d work. Perhaps adding a machine tag indicating a timeshift factor or timestamp could handle it. It would be pretty confusing for your followers seeing your out of context tweets appearing, though.

Idea: fontstack.com

Here’s an idea I had the other day. I am putting it out to the world because I’d love to see it realized. While I could do it myself, I already have enough on my plate – and knowing myself, I’ll never get around to it.

Update: Someone is watching – between me posting this and today (roughly 24 hours later) the domain name has been registered. Sleazy domain-shark register-bot or quick-fire entrepreneur? Your guess is as good as mine.