GigaOM » Tim Tuttle

MindMeld maker Expect Labs teams up with voice expert, Nuance

Om Malik — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 14:38:55 +0000

Expect Labs, the anticipatory computing platform maker behind MindMeld, a video and voice calling app, has teamed up with voice-technology company, Nuance Communications and is incorporating its voice recognition engine in its platform. Expect, was co-founded by Tim Tuttle and Moninder Jheeta two years ago and is backed by the Google Ventures and Greylock Partners.

The company believes that with Nuance technology its platform can do more than just answer questions or perform simple voice search — a not-so-subtle dig at Apple’s Siri and Google’s voice command based search. Expect is one of the companies I am most excited about as it represents big progress in how we consume information and interact with devices.

In case, you were wondering what is this anticipatory computing, here is how I described it in my initial piece about MindMeld.

Tuttle started the company two years ago to develop a platform that would “continuously pay attention to what happens in your life and pick up ambient information and then start to surface relevant information.” Why? Because be believed that our computing habits were going from being desktop bound to completely mobile, and that would essentially mean a different usage behavior.

With more devices and more sensors coming into our lives, the amount of data being generated will reach a point where the machines need to start anticipating our needs. Search as a way to access information doesn’t and won’t work — mostly because search can only respond to questions we ask. Also, if most of our computing is shifting to devices that are always with us, the idea of how to compute also has to change.

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MindMeld app maker Expect Labs gets $2.4M from Google, others

Om Malik — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 14:00:50 +0000

Expect Labs, the San Francisco-based company behind the MindMeld iPad app, plans to announce Thursday that it has received $2.4 million in new funds from investors that include Google Ventures, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners in addition to many angel investors. Expect Labs was co-founded by Tim Tuttle and Moninder Jheeta two years ago.

Tuttle was the founder of video search company Truveo and Jheeta built the infrastructure for Truveo, which is now part of AOL. Vince Vannelli, managing partner of KPG Ventures, is joining Tuttle and Jheeta on the company’s board of directors. Alex Rosen, managing director of IDG Ventures, has joined as a board observer.

Expect launched their app last month and Tuttle outlined his vision of anticipatory computing in a recent conversation. MindMeld app’s demo impressed me a lot and I believe that Tuttle & co are on to something big. Here is what I wrote about the company last month:

Tuttle started the company two years ago to develop a platform that would “continuously pay attention to what happens in your life and pick up ambient information and then start to surface relevant information.” Why? Because be believed that our computing habits were going from being desktop bound to completely mobile, and that would essentially mean a different usage behavior.

With more devices and more sensors coming into our lives, the amount of data being generated will reach a point where the machines need to start anticipating our needs. Search as a way to access information doesn’t and won’t work — mostly because search can only respond to questions we ask. Also, if most of our computing is shifting to devices that are always with us, the idea of how to compute also has to change.

Of course, in order for them to realize their long-term vision of offering its core Anticipatory Computing Engine as a developer platform, the company is going to need a lot more than $2.4 million. The company is expected to launch its MindMeld app sometime this fall.

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New app MindMeld heralds the era of anticipatory computing

Om Malik — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 23:47:30 +0000

Tim Tuttle, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded web acceleration technology company Bang Networks and video search engine Truveo (acquired by AOL), has returned with his third startup, Expect Labs, which he co-founded with Moninder Jheeta (who built infrastructure for Truveo.) The company today announced its first product, an iPad app for simplified group conferencing called MindMeld that is built upon Expect’s core technology concept — anticipatory computing. Even as a demo, it is an impressive piece of technology that shows where the future of computing is headed.

Group conferencing like none other

MindMeld is an iPad app (for now) that uses Facebook’s open graph and identity to help create quick audio or video conferences. Add a few people and start talking. But here is where things get interesting: As you speak (or other participants speak), the app listens and starts surfacing information pertaining to what you are talking about.

For instance, if you are talking about an upcoming meeting with, say, someone like me, then in near realtime, it would show you my Wikipedia page, surface my recent blog posts, show GigaOM location on a map, and other such information. And as fast as the topic shifts, the system brings up relevant information for that new topic. Sometime in the future, the company will be able to access data from your Dropbox or Google Docs account and when it does, Cisco’s WebEx division should reach for a proverbial bottle of migraine medicine.

I got the demo of the application at a fairly noisy restaurant in my neighborhood, and even then, it kept offering suggestions and information pretty quickly. If there was a lag, it was due to AT&T’s LTE network, which isn’t as robust as advertised, especially in San Francisco. Put this app on a WiFi – which we did – and everything from picture quality to voice latency and information being pushed to the screen was pretty flawless. Sure, it was a demo on a system used by no more than a dozen people, including all eight of the company’s employees, but I have seem many demos in my time. Someday, Siri will work as flawlessly as this app and will get an A-plus from me.

Rise of anticipatory computing

The MindMeld app has me convinced about the capabilities of Tuttle and his crew. Yes, if you looked at the company just from the perspective of this app, its ambition might seem limited. Tuttle says what matters to him is that their platform (which he expects to unveil next year) is used by other apps that can integrate it using their API. But in order to showcase his company’s grand ambition, he needed an app and hence MindMeld.

Tuttle pointed out that unlike other semantic efforts that analyze usage history, their approach is to look at the past 10 minutes and then anticipate what users might need in the next 10 seconds. “We have a predictive model that changes second to second and surfaces relevant information without searching,” says Tuttle. He calls it “anticipatory” computing, and as far as I am concerned, “predictive” is the future direction of computing.

Tuttle started the company two years ago to develop a platform that would “continuously pay attention to what happens in your life and pick up ambient information and then start to surface relevant information.” Why? Because be believed that our computing habits were going from being desktop bound to completely mobile, and that would essentially mean a different usage behavior.

Sensors, data and mobile = complexity

With more devices and more sensors coming into our lives, the amount of data being generated will reach a point where the machines need to start anticipating our needs. Search as a way to access information doesn’t and won’t work — mostly because search can only respond to questions we ask. Also, if most of our computing is shifting to devices that are always with us, the idea of how to compute also has to change.

Tuttle, who did his Ph.D studies at the AI Labs (Artificial Intelligence Labs) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says the idea for the company came when he was fine-tuning his last company, Truveo. That company, which used speech-to-text technology and helped search video streams, has become one of top video search engines. Fast forward to today, the emergence of faster networks, cheaper (and reliable) cloud compute platforms and newer technologies has made it possible for Tuttle and his co-founder Jheeta to develop Expect’s platform.

They don’t go into great detail about their infrastructure, but say that at any given time during a call on MindMeld, there are multiple processing threads going, and they are pushing and pulling data over the network at a pretty rapid clip. They currently have based their system on Amazon’s EC2 and have built both voice and data communication layers in addition to using speech-to-text technology from a partner. Translation: they are using Nuance’s technology. For data (information) they tap sources such as YouTube, Yelp and Google.

Tuttle isn’t the only one thinking about anticipatory computing. Google recently launched Google Now, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see something similar to Expect’s approach show up when Google Glasses become mainstream. And other startups are working on making anticipatory computing a reality and coming up with new techniques that would simplify everyday computing tasks.

PS: Here are two links to videos that introduce you to the company and the app.

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