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Google Now and further

Google Now is a great initiative, that helps brings search relevance closer to the user's life and makes it more centric to users' experiences..

I have used google now for the past 3 months and i find it really intelligent in picking content from email calendars and past search done; and make it relevant to the life of the user based on their local / contextual  information being captured within their smart-phones. Privacy advocates and activists would not like some of the work that google is doing with an individuals data, but the way i see this as a commoner, is that,  search from google actually becomes useful for the user by understanding and optimizing for the  context rather than just have the user go chasing about content that could have been delivered to them in the first place. this is a great example of machine to machine internet, where the context from the mobile device of the user, along with transaction and conversational information from user centric sources get seamlessly curated for the user reference..

in this initiative, today google has supposedly launched 29 cards and i am sure they must be working on many more.. the following is the set of ideas to increase the number of cards that could enhance  the google now experience

Idea #1 > combine catalog and search and deliver relevant content to the user..

today most people are exposed intimately and commercially to dozens of services and products that they use daily, thereby creating a growing need further information on these services. For e.g.  as a user, I have a few digital devices {smartphones tablets} , a car,  a couple of banking services, that  i interact, consume and struggle with on a daily basis, how would it be if google could catalog these devices somewhere and then provide relevant push updates on these services regularly? 

elaborating further,

i have a HTC One V that i bought for my wife and now i use it as my personal phone.. HTC one V being a decent mid tier smart android phone comes with its own set of issues and problems and i am sure that there could be a mods tips and tricks that can be very useful for me to  know rather than going after manual search, in this case a structured search card of the phone that includes top issues, resolutions, key mods tips and tricks nearby services, community of users,  could be a great help feature from google..

especially for a connected device like HTC oneV there can be the additional possibility of android issue logs being trawled to identify problems and added to the card as problems.. these could be problems that users face but are not aware of it or are not aware of the problem itself. 

if we extend this to the top 10 product services then it becomes a very powerful handy assistant

think about the scenario where a Galaxy s3 user as he walk by near a accessory store is offered some tip, discount on an accessory or a service because google now, now know of it!

Idea#2 - identify service providers 

Google could look at providing information about service providers based on notes, email.. if they especially integrate with todo and task managers, where there is a trove of information about users intent to get work done.

As a specific timeline approaches or otherwise, google now can alert through a card on service options .. for e.g. i have the chores to get some apartment / home improvement done that is detailed in keep, along with the intent to buy stuff like a digital microscope et al.. 

google could go further and track prices for these devices, especially if a specific model is *-ed in the card to find optimum purchasing points. 

there could also be a Groupon like feature to group buy some of these service to aggregate demand to service provides 

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the above two ideas are  quick ones that come to mind, but i am sure that google now is just the  starting step in the right direction < privacy advocates would argue against though> in bringing a lot of intelligence and search relevant to our life contexts.. 

would like to see a day when these ideas are available. 



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