Alerts appear under a Today tab in the Notifications Center, which you can turn on in the Settings app. The data, according to some info that MacRumors found, comes from different sources within iOS. Traffic information about frequently visited locations is gathered if the user turns on the Frequent Locations feature under Location Services.

Today, at least in its current beta incarnation and as currently understood, is much less robust than Google Now, which does much more than provide traffic, weather and scheduling. Google Now will not only check traffic related to events on a user’s Google Calendar, it can alert them to everything from flight delays to sports scores, local sightseeing recommendations and package delivery notifications. All of that information is gleaned from users’ activities within other Google services. Google Now has been available on the iOS platform as part of the Google Search app since April.

But even if Today isn’t as full-featured, the ambition seems similar: to anticipate information for iOS users before they need it. Anticipatory computing is still in its infancy. But with Google and Apple, with one of the most ubiquitous mobile operating systems and one of the most ubiquitous mobile computing devices in the world, are the best candidates of moving anticipatory tech into the mainstream.

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At its Google I/O conference Wednesday, company execs introduced “conversational search” capabilities. As Google implements its “hotwords,” users will no longer need to click the microphone in the search bar to start using voice recognition. All users have to do is say, “OK, Google,” and then speak commands. Google relies on natural language processing to figure out what users want to do and then serves up results.

Combine that with Google search’s ability to go beyond serving up graphs and other data in response to user questions and actually weave in additional information Google thinks users are looking for. For example, if you search for China, Google will not only show changes in population over the decades, but it will also graph the countries  China’s population is often compared to — India and the United States.

This is possible as Google keeps expanding knowledge graph, which now has more than 570 million entities, such as people, places and things, said Amit Singhal, a senior vice president and Google Fellow.

Coming soon: More knowledgeable searches

The knowledge graph operates with searches in English and eight other languages. Starting today, Singhal said, it will be  available in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Polish and Turkish.

Google is also integrating personal data into searches in Chrome on desktops and laptops, which makes loads of sense. Flight reservations, restaurant reservations, package deliveries, and other user-generated information can be rapidly pulled up in the familiar interface of Google search results. That could put an end to going through emails of paper for this sort of information, saving users time.

Johanna Wright, vice president of search and assist for mobile at Google. Source: Janko Roettgers

Google has provoked lots of buzz and some concerns with its Google Now feature on mobile devices. The application will soon allow users to set reminders — to call someone, buy something — and expect them to occur only at the right time.

Parlaying personal and general data

Johanna Wright, vice president of search and assist for mobile at Google, took some of these new and upcoming features for a spin. As an example, she said she wanted to plan a day trip to Santa Cruz, Calif. So she said “OK, Google” — bringing Google to attention — “show me pictures of the Santa Cruz boardwalk.” Up came multiple pictures in a horizontal bar at the top of search results. She wanted to know the length of the trip and said, “OK, Google, how far is it from here?” Google figured out that “here” was her current location, in San Francisco, and “there” was Santa Cruz and displayed a map and spoke back that the drive would take an hour and 21 minutes.

She then asked seafood restaurants and got a list. Then she asked Google a tough question: “How tall do you have to be to ride the Giant Dipper?” Google came back with, “You must be at least 4 feet 3 inches tall to ride the Giant Dipper. “Nice,” she said. “Looks like my son can go on.”

On a mobile device, Wright also directed Google Now to send a quick email based on her voice commands, which happened right away, and set a reminder for her to call a friend when she arrives in New York on a business trip. FInally, she was able to tell Google to show the pictures she made during a previous trip. And about 16 pictures came right up.

The combination of personal data with more traditional search data is a logical next step for Google, which has no shortage of either. While Google Now has critics, it could become more popular with these new features. And how could people — investors included — question Google’s innovations in search, its core product. The voice recognition capabilities make searching still more intuitive and set the bar still higher for everyone else.

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While there is something undeniably creepy about the Google Now service, I have to admit that it is also very useful — so much so that I couldn’t imagine going on a trip without it. I’m already imagining how it and other kinds of “anticipatory data” services (including Google News updates) might work through Google Glass.

Useful information when you need it

It’s not that Google Now is really all that revolutionary, in the sense of being surprising or magical or having whiz-bang special effects: it just collects a broad range of information about you and your activity from your search history, your calendar, your email, web services you are signed into, and so on, and then uses that to show you information that is relevant to what you are doing or where you happen to be (Google recently introduced it for iOS as well as Android).

In a way, that could be part of the reason Google Now is so appealing — it doesn’t try to impress you, it just works silently in the background, in more or less the way you would expect it to. That in itself is something to be grateful for.

The first time I noticed myself depending on it (or at least noticing how useful it was), came when I was getting ready for my flight to Italy: sliding upwards from the home button on the Nexus 4 showed a series of Google Now “cards,” and the first one said that my flight had been delayed by an hour. Since I was panicking at that point about how much I still had to do before leaving for the airport, that information was incredibly helpful. I could take a bit more time and relax.

Meanwhile, the second Google Now card showed the traffic on the highway and told me that I should probably give myself more time than usual to get to the airport — and when I got closer to the time of my departure, a third card showed my boarding pass information, including boarding time and the gate number (Google Now got that info from my calendar, but it also supports scannable boarding passes for a limited number of airlines).

Not revolutionary, but evolutionary

Again, none of this information was specific to Google Now, or derived magically by Google search trickery: I could have easily found out about my flight being delayed by using a service like FlightStats, or by checking the website for the airline or the airport itself — and I could have checked the traffic on any number of sites. But the point is that doing these things would take time, and I was already pressed for time. Seeing it all displayed in front of me in a simple way, without me having to do anything, was exactly the kind of thing a virtual assistant is good for.

Google Now continued to perform this kind of function while I was travelling (once I got a local SIM card, of course, so that I wouldn’t get robbed by my carrier for roaming charges). It told me that my connecting flight in Munich was on time, which allowed me to prepare for possibly not making my connection — and once I arrived in Italy, it informed me of the weather, the traffic from the airport in Rome, and also showed me photos of nearby sights that I might want to visit.

These latter aspects were also very useful for someone visiting a foreign country: I didn’t have much use for them while I was at home, but they instantly became much more important when I was travelling. Like the flight information or traffic, I could have found that content myself by doing a web search — but it was much handier to have it displayed for me automatically. And I started to imagine what it might be like to simply look at something like the Colosseum with Google Glass and have information about it appear in front of my eyes. Geeky? Yes. But also hugely useful.

The privacy tradeoff is worth it

The part that clearly disturbs some people about Google Now is the data collection that is involved in making it work: the tracking of your web searches, your calendar appointments, your location via GPS, the photos you have posted, the flights you are preparing to take, and so on. There’s no question that this is invasive — and some users will undoubtedly decide that it’s not worth the tradeoff, and choose to keep the information to themselves. I think the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

Are there ways Google could use this information that I might not like? Of course there are. But I trust that Google is aware enough of the dangers — both legal and commercial — of engaging in that kind of behavior that they will avoid it. While some may choose to see Google’s ambitions in this area as evil, I think the company’s goal remains the same: to provide services that encourage users to spend more time on the internet and produce more data that improves Google’s search and/or advertising algorithms. And I am okay with that.

In return for providing some anonymized data and behavior patterns, I get access to a personalized assistant that is not only more unobtrusive than any human version would be, but is also faster and completely free. That’s a pretty good bargain.

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That is what Kansas City, Mo.-based startup Leap2 hopes its new search site that combines the web, location and social in a way that delivers detailed results while allowing for serendipitous discovery, will be: Disruptive in a way that draws search market share from Google. The startup launches its site Tuesday on mobiles and also said today it had raised $1.6 million in first round funding. The round was led by Dundee Venture Capital, with support from OpenAir Equity, Linseed Capital and the Wichita Technology Corporation.

Mike Farmer, the CEO of Leap2, is no stranger to search, having tried seven years ago with a web site called Kozoru. But this time he thinks that focusing on mobile, as well as bringing in social elements to a search gives end users better results as well as a few nice surprises.

The Leap2 web plus social results page.

For example, when the app opens, you see a home screen that offers the day’s news as a slate of pictures. Some are self-evident and others are perhaps a mystery. Clicking on a picture offers you one of the day’s top news stories. Once you enter a search term, the screens splits in half with the top half showing Twitter results related to the search and the bottom half showing images of the web sites that match your search.

Here’s where it gets dicey. Searches for “the best brunch in Austin” or “tacos and tequila Austin” (it’s a restaurant) worked well. I saw relevant websites, pictures of places, and even tweets from people who were there and a tweet promising me a discount next weekend at a brunch locale. But when I searched for my name and other people’s names, I started running into what is the bane of the mobile web — requests to download apps.

My people searches drew up magazine and LinkedIn results that I couldn’t see without clicking through to the “no thanks” button on the screen that pops up asking me to download a mobile app. I, like the rest of the population, hate those screens. Farmer is hoping that the mobile web becomes less about apps and more about the web soon, but I’m not holding my breath.

Location results page.

Things like the discovery of discounts or even insights from Twitter, (Farmer wants to integrate FourSquare, Yelp and Facebook eventually for the social aspects) plus the integrated location and directions, help make this a contender against Google Now, which I adore for its ability to read my calendar and tell me when to leave the house to make a meeting. Leap2 can’t offer that, and it’s going to face the same challenge that all search engines face, which is enticing users to click on it as opposed to going with the already-integrated search functions.

As for monetization, Farmer said that some time in the future Leap2 will integrate sponsored search results, initially among the social cards on the top half of the screen. The goal will be to play relevant results based on the location, the search or other information gleaned. Farmer gave the example of real-time deals. He plans to have the same image-filled-card-like interface that spans the app now, be the same interface for showing sponsored search ads as well.

The mobile app for iOS and Android launches Tuesday, with the website launching on Wednesday. Give it a try. I thought it was worth using, especially when I’m on the go, as it gives a much richer picture on the small screen than I might otherwise get.

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Google Now has been an integrated feature of Android 4.1 since June 2012, but starting Monday, it will, for the first time, be available on the iOS platform. (And no, Google did not have any problem getting the app approved, company representatives said.) The service, which draws on a wealth of user information in Google’s mobile apps and desktop services, aims to give users relevant answers to questions before they’ve even asked them. That information pops up on a “card” on the screen.

For example: if you’ve entered your work address, every morning when you get up Google Now will check the traffic; if it’s going to be a slow commute, the card will pop up in the Google Search app alerting the user to leave earlier than usual for work.

Users can choose what kinds of cards they want to receive. If you want to receive notifications about package deliveries, flight delays, football scores or sightseeing suggestions, that can be set in preferences. Google Now will know when you get, for example, a FedEx delivery notification in your Gmail, and it can alert you to that. Or, it can know when you have an upcoming flight, also based on airline confirmation emails as well.

Using Google Now is equivalent to the “signed-in” experience of using Google services in the browser: it can share information across other Google services to help you and give you information it thinks you want. If that creeps you out — if you don’t want Google knowing where you work or where you’re going on your next trip — you can turn any of those services off. Google Now will still work, it just won’t be as “rich” of an experience, Tamar Yehoshua, director of product management at Google, told me.

There are lots of small differences — and one big, major difference — between Google Search with Google Now on iOS and Siri. Both are described by their creators as the mobile, digital equivalents of “personal assistants,” but Siri is the kind that you have to keep asking to complete tasks. Google Now is the assistant that, when given access to a lot of your crucial personal information, can preemptively do things for you before you ask.

Google said a version of Google Now for iOS is one of its most requested features. And based on the praise the Android version has received over the last few months, it’s very likely to be a big hit for Google.

For Apple, this brings the benefit of offering a useful and popular service through its App Store. But, looked at another way, this is yet another way that its main rival in the mobile world is able to deepen its relationship with its own customers on Apple’s platform. And that’s got to be more than a little bit concerning to the folks in Cupertino as the two companies do battle for the future of mobile technology.

Still, Siri does maintain a nice home-field advantage: it’s actually built into the iPhone’s operating system and can be accessed with a quick long press of the home button. Google Now, for all of its features, still has to be searched for or accessed through push notifications just like any other app.

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The Wikidata project was kicked off around a year ago by the German chapter of Wikimedia, which is still steering its gradual development. For Wikipedia, the advantage is simple and powerful — if there’s a central, machine-readable source for facts, such as the population of a city, then any update to that data can be instantly reflected across all the articles in which the facts are included.

To posit a morbid example: a singer may have dozens or even hundreds of language versions of her Wikipedia entry and, if she were to die, the addition of a date of death to the Wikidata database would immediately propagate across all those versions, with no need to manually update each one (yes, I can also see how this might go horribly wrong).

Indeed, Wikidata is now being used as a common data source for all 286 Wikipedia language versions. Here’s the under-development “item” page for Russia, if you want to see what Wikidata looks like in practise.

But the really interesting thing with Wikidata is that it’s not just for Wikipedia – although it’s worth remembering that its API is still under development, the database can be used by anyone as it is published under a Creative Commons 0 public domain dedication. Here’s how Wikidata project director Denny Vrandečić put it in a statement:

“It is the goal of Wikidata to collect the world’s complex knowledge in a structured manner so that anybody can benefit from it, whether that’s readers of Wikipedia who are able to be up to date about certain facts or engineers who can use this data to create new products that improve the way we access knowledge.”

There are already some pretty cool (if bare-bones) examples of what people can do with Wikidata. One is GeniaWiki, which is trying to map the family relationships between famous people (the first and so far only example is that of the Bach family), while a Tree of Life project is trying to put together a viable, Wikidata-based “taxonomy of all life”.

It’s worth noting that the initial funding for Wikidata’s development has come from Google, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Ultimately, Wikidata is precisely the sort of venture that is needed to feed the nascent semantic web and AI movement.

It’s far from the only venture in this space – I’d also recommend keeping a close eye on Google’s Knowledge Graph, which powers Google Now, and Wolfram|Alpha, which partly powers Siri – but all these (often intertwined) projects are essentially trying to do the same thing: to turn facts into something that machines can understand.

And that, in conjunction with advances in natural language processing and machine learning, will ultimately help us converse with machines. These are the building blocks of artificial intelligence and the future of search, and Wikidata’s very permissive license should act as an open invitation to anyone dabbling in this space.

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Although I’ve seen short demonstrations of Glass prior, this one is the most detailed and encompassing I’ve found yet. Jordan’s Glass is connected to a projector in this case, so the audience can see what he sees.

I knew that Google Now had a heavy influence on the Project Glass experience, and it’s easy to see why in this demo: Google Now provides the type of information that’s sized properly for the small screen while providing huge, immediate benefits.

The demo also illustrates how to interact with Glass using the side panel and head gestures. Tapping brings up the Home screen while sliding down on the small touchpad is similar to the Back button in Android. Voice activation is of course heavily used as are sound responses from Glass itself. But there’s no speaker in your ear to block out ambient sound; most impressive. That’s useful for the New York Times app, which can read news aloud, for example.

Jordan spends quite a bit of time discussing the Timeline cards that are supported in Glass; these are the screens of data users can see and interact with. While I’m not a developer, I found the presentation fascinating from a UI perspective, mainly because the Glass screen is limited in size and user interaction on wearable gadgets are so challenging.

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At the Google Big Tent Summit, he was asked by the event’s moderator when Google Now would come to iOS. His response? Well, he played coy, as Mahendra Palsule noted on Twitter:

Alan: "When can I get Google Now on my iPhone?" Schmidt: "You'll have to ask Apple" #BigTentIndia—
Mahendra Palsule (@ScepticGeek) March 21, 2013

Schmidt went on to say, somewhat cryptically, “Apple has a policy of approving or disapproving apps that are submitted into its store, and some of them they approve and some of them they don’t.” That could be read as a hint that Google is simply waiting for Apple to approve the app.

The reason the question is on many people’s minds is because last week a video surfaced online that was purportedly a promotional video for Google Now coming to the iOS platform. The video seemed to have the same narrator as an earlier video promoting Google Now for Android, but the iOS video was promptly pulled from YouTube after discovery; usually that’s a tell-tale sign the promotion is legitimate.

Google Now was very well received when it was launched as part of the Android Jelly Bean operating system in mid-2012. By knowing the user’s location, the time of day, and search habits, it can offer properly contextualized search results.

It seems a lock that Google would want it to be on iOS. Google Now is a solid competitor to Apple’s own Siri. And Google has made it its goal to make better iOS apps than Apple, recent releases and revamps of Google apps for iOS include Capture, YouTube for iPhone and iPad, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Voice Search and Chrome for iOS.

Update: Well, Apple has shot down one possibility: the company told some news outlets that Google has not submitted a Google Now app for review.

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The new app is from a startup called Grokr, which was founded by former McAfee CEO and founder Srivats Sampath. The app, which officially launches in beta Wednesday morning, aims to predict the information that users want and give that to them without them asking for it. And when they do ask a specific question, Grokr takes them directly to an answer or a source, rather than to a bunch of links.

Grokr tries to personalize its answer to a user based on a whole load of data it can gather through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more than 50 other sources. After a few weeks in use, Grokr can tell where you live, where you work, what kind of music you like and what teams you follow. It can even figure out a user’s ethnicity and demographic data though it keeps all of this anonymized.

Then it pairs what it knows about a user with a knowledge base built on top of Freebase, which is also used in Google’s own Knowledge Graph. Grokr has built out its knowledge base with another 50 sources including Bing, Factual, Yelp, Songkick and others. Grokr has more than 700 million facts in its database, covering 25 million entities, which represent the meaning behind all kinds of words it comes across.

When it all comes together, Grokr can tell you if there’s traffic on your route to work or feed you pre-game info on your favorite team. It can remind you of upcoming concert tickets for your favorite artist, show you trending topics tailored to your interests and even bring you personalized data reminders that cater to your demographic. Grokr does this through a handful of tiles that cover local information, breaking news. sports, trending topics and recommendations.

This may sound like Google Now, but Sampath said it’s potentially more powerful because it’s not relying on Google products and services. By engaging with an array of data sources, Sampath believes Grokr can be even more prescient and helpful for users because it knows more about a user and can steer them to more data.

“The differentiation is just purely the number of signals we have about you. We have a lot more than Google Now,” Sampath said.

Sampath believes that Grokr has an advantage over Siri as well, which is still built around pulling data via voice. He said Siri doesn’t work in many environments and it’s not built for the future of mobile search, which is all about pushing data to a user.

This does sound intriguing because it’s another sign of how our devices and apps can become even more personal in the way they cater to our needs based on data it can absorb.  And I like that it acknowledges that search on mobile needs to be different, more immediate and intelligent using as much context as possible.

But it can also be a little creepy. Sampath showed me how Grokr figured out he’s South Asian based on his name and then gave him a headline about the need for South Asians to get tested for diabetes, which Sampath actually has.

I’m not sure how people will feel when an app starts to really understand someone. There will be moments of delight when you get a spot-on recommendation but you can also be taken aback when you realize the picture that forms when all of your data is put together in one place. Sampath, however, said that Grokr doesn’t identify a particular user, just looks at the collection of words and topics they represent. And he said Grokr will never sell or rent user data.

If Grokr can gain a following, there’s some real money to be made. Google is the leader in local search advertising, which means a lot of search advertising revenue. Sampath believes that Grokr can build a similar monetization strategy presumably around search ads. Right now, it’s leaning on Bing to complete index-based search results. Grokr previously raised $4.2 million from NEA, U.S. Venture Partners, Triple Point Ventures and Lerer Ventures.

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But increasingly, mobile users have fewer excuses for showing up late. More mobile apps are applying situational awareness and intelligence to help prod and prompt people to be punctual. Apps like Google Now, Twist and Bounce are leveraging what it can learn from a user’s calendar and analyzing it against current traffic conditions and a user’s present location. Then it can figure out the optimal moment to leave to ensure they show up on time.

Apps like this display a simple form of situational intelligence, in which software takes data from disparate systems and presents it in an intuitive way. It shows you what a smartphone can do as it gets access to more information from a user. Here’s how these three applications work:

• Google Now, which is available of Android 4.1 devices, scans your Google Calendar and then lets you know when to leave based on your location and how how bad traffic is. It can navigate you to your appointment, and it can also show you traffic info and the total expected travel time when it senses that you’re headed to a regular destination like work.
• Twist is an iPhone app that lets you share your estimated time of arrival with users. Users can enter in their destination or Twist can pull in calendar appointments. After you set a Twist, the app will tell you when to leave based on current conditions and then it will start broadcasting your ETA to recipients.
• Bounce, which started on Android and is now moving to the iPhone, works like the other apps, combining calendar and traffic data to tell you when to leave. But it allows users to set their own buffer, so they can set aside extra time.

The apps, however, also reveal some shared limitations. For instance, the apps require users to keep an accurate calendar. And if their appointment location information is not filled out or is hard to determine, the apps can’t figure where you’re headed, so they don’t know when to prompt you to leave. The apps do try to understand where you’re going even when you don’t put in an address but it doesn’t always work perfectly. I’d also like to see the app work in more weather and events data, which can also affect when I need to leave.

Ultimately, getting somewhere on time is our own responsibility, and I wouldn’t completely rely on an app to ensure I get there on time. But it’s nice to see more useful tools that blend a lot of data and real-time context to help users be more efficient or smart.

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