Ever got into a position where a person walks up to you and acts very friendly while you are scratching your head, trying to figure out who the heck it is? The connected world equivalent of that is getting a call from an unknown number of email from someone who you haven’t been in touch for a while.
In the real world, one would slyly slip away to find someone who can tell you who that friendly person. In the connected world, you’d go to a search engine or a social network and look for that person. Or, you’d ask around if anyone knew the number flashing on the phone.
Thats the old school way of doing things. With a few nifty tools, you can have sixth sense right in your Inbox, on the mobile phone or even Google Glass when its launched. Try these:
1. Rapportive: This plugin shows you all the details of your contacts inside your inbox. Say someone sends you an email, you’d have all his/ her details including Google+ profile, recent mails, Linkedin and Facebook data on the right hand side of your inbox.
2. Truecaller: This is a collaborative phone directory built using user data. It like a Caller ID built on crowd sourced data shared by each individual user. Pro Tip: Careful with this one. This app uploads your phonebook to its database to make it part of the directory.
3. WhoSent.It: The app is like Rapportive. But is still in closed beta for individual and business users. You can sign up for the beta invite here. A developer version is available here.
Thats about people. How about some sixth sense about your surroundings?
If you’ve been a smartphone user, you’ve probably heard of Shazam already. It can identify the music playing in the surrounding and give you a match from its database. Thats handy when you have that nagging feeling that you’ve heard the track before but can’t place it where.
Then there is this really cool app from Google called Goggles. You take a picture and it tells you what it is. For instance, say you are stuck in a country where you don’t understand the language and all the labels looks like gobbledygook to you. Take a picture using the app and let Google do the rest for. It works well with popular monuments, places, personalities, books and brands but be warned, it doesn’t always work and doesn’t do face recognition.
Now, imagine all these on your wearable gadget, like Google Glass!
