Hello, this is Benedict Evans and welcome to the 816Z podcast. I'm here this afternoon with

Steve Cheney from Estimate and we're going to talk about location and maps and knowing

why you are and where your phone is and what your phone can do with that and all these kind of

interesting things. We were just chatting about this earlier. I thought one of the interesting common strands across Google I.O.

and Apple's WWDC was kind of the death of the Tenbley links.

And Google doing a bunch of stuff to try and get ahead of you having to type a query into a

search box and press go with now on tap and all sorts of other stuff

going on inside the OSS and inside their services. And Apple doing this proactive thing, again,

where the computer is trying to get ahead of you and work out what you might need.

It kind of reminds me of this old computer science saying that a computer should never ask a question

it should be able to work out the answer to. And we've got these pocket supercomputers with two

dozen sensors that we're carrying around with this everywhere. And Apple and Google, amongst

other people are trying to work out, well, what could you do when you've got that? And what would

that mean? Yeah, no, it's fascinating. I think to some extent, if you think about the phone, the watch and these devices, right, it's not an extension of us as a human being. So to some extent, we think about this as like it could become the first brain. It could be something that it decides what's going on before you sort of tell it to. And I think the predictive nature, you know, it, you know, I think we heard on stage at I.O.

That the phone could potentially tell you when you're hungry and, you know, when you're on your treadmill and which music you want to listen to.

And that's, you know, fairly provocative.

And of course, the, you know, the search intent and like killing the links is one thing.

But how does the phone understand what you're going to do?

How does it understand what you're going to do when you're indoors?

Is it really know you're in your kitchen?

Is it because your toaster told it, you know, hey, you're in your kitchen?

And there's a bunch of different ways that Google and Apple are approaching this fundamental problem.

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