100 Mobile Product Ideas...#14......Never forget a thing you said...

The idea of recording phone calls is not new. Wax cylinder recorders were possible in the early days of telephony. What is new, in the age of cheap and dense memory, is the potential to record everything we ever say. Perhaps we can start with our phone calls.

Recording on the device is one option, as demonstrated by Natural Widgets' Natural Recorder. It works on Nokia Series 60 devices and simply records all calls. The files get stored in a circular buffer, so there's no need to worry about file management per se.

Now, the point that I argue in my latest book piece "Mobile in the 3G Era", is that memory is sufficiently cheap that we shouldn't have to worry about file management. Let's face it, who's going to sift through all those files and decide which ones to keep and which ones to trash? It's just like all that stuff that we store up in our garages because we'd rather not decide what to throw.

Everything should be recorded and we simply trash what we don't want after we haven't gone back to if for 1 year, or however long we feel comfortable with, keeping some key files.

I'd much rather see this feature implemented on the network and have all the files spooled to a store on the Internet where I can do what I like with them. I'd probably want to see the files accessible via my mobile personal portal (see idea # 10).

What's essential is an index that means that I stand a chance of finding the file I was looking for. Location and date stamping would be essential and easily done of course. Offline transcribing and novel non-linear search techniques will facilitate searching back through any conversation.

In my book piece I suggest that ALL content produced on the mobile should be perpetually stored. Think of the power of searching this merged content memory. All that data fused with copious meta-data and the power of Web Semantics gives rise to powerful possibilites. "Where was I when I said X to Y?" Who was I with when I said X to Y?" And so on.

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