Interesting Interview on Predictive Analytics - CUE

Last year I was using Friday quite a bit. Friday basically logged your day from the use of your mobile phone.  The idea is that if you know how you spend your time you can optimize what you do in a better way.   It is billed as a personal assistant sometimes but the power is in the analytics it performs.  It did give me some insights that were interesting but I'm not sure I got the full potential out of the idea.

I recently bought a Nexus 7 with Jelly Bean installed.  It has a great new feature called Google Now which I really like.  It basically provides you "cards" that anticipate what you want to know.  It is invasive and requires you to give it access to your other Google services e.g. Calendar and Chrome searches, but it works pretty well.  I'll blog about that more later.

I came across another similar tech called Cue.  It is only available for the iPhone.  Here is an interesting YouTube interview from Scoble that is worth watching.  There are some interesting discussions on the topic of predictive analytics to help you with your day.

Taking Friday for a Spin

I recently received a private Alpha invite to try out Friday, an Android application made by Dexetra, http://goo.gl/42auo .  Dexetra is a private company located in Cochin, India and primarily focus on smartphone platforms such as Andriod, iPhone, Symbian and Blackberry. 

Friday http://goo.gl/2r0RR is a logger for your activity with your phone.  It basically logs places your go, the calls you make, the chats / SMS messages you make, pictures and locations you take, etc.  Overtime it becomes a journal of your activities and allows you to recall events such as what did I do in Denver.  To do this you have to give Friday access to everything on your phone which is a bit scary but required to provide you detailed analytics of your daily patterns.

Two things I find that are fairly interesting to me, although not very useful are:

• Hourly Profiles
• Daily Trivia facts

The hourly Profiles basically shows how many calls, sms, mails messages, places, and lists over a 24 hour period.  You can see when you get the highest call volume or receive the most emails daily.  It is interesting to see over a daily period when you have spikes in activities.  The question is how can I sue this information to have a  more balance profile.  

The daily trivia facts is just kind of fun.  Facts like that I have the highest emails on Monday and the lowest on Tuesday or that the majority of calls from X are never answered.  BTW I know I never answer those calls.  It’s just fun facts about your daily habits.

Since I just started with Friday my plan is to have it monitor my work life over the next month and then see if I find utility in using it.  So more to come.