Amika Mobile: email for ordinary cell phones

I spent most of last week at the Canadian AI/GI/CRV/IS/SmartLinkages conference (aka the 2008 Intelligent Systems Collaborative) , which just happened to be in my hometown this year. I met dozens of researchers who presented on a huge variety of intelligent systems (such as a dynamic ambulance dispatcher), and fundamental algorithms (eg. counting people in a video frame). I'll report on several of these in the next week.

Dr. Sue Abu-Hakima, CEO of Amika Mobile, talked about the system they developed to make your ultra-thin SMS phone just a little smarter. What they've done is create a mail server that takes your plain ordinary mail (you know, that account that gets you 300 messages per day), and forwards it to your mobile phone as a text message.

Now, that would be rather awful if they sent every message, and the entire message every time. You would be receiving way too many messages. The messages would be way too long for you to grasp on the tiny 140 character screens. To solve this, Amika built some advanced filtering and compression algorithms. Their server decides which parts of the email are needed and only sends those parts. email address and subject are included. Quoted text, html formatting, and signatures are excluded. Then before sending, it abbreviates common words and expressions so it all fits.

Besides filtering message content, Amika also is selective in what messages it forwards. The server uses content analysis to decide whether the message is something you really need to see right away. If it's not urgent, you won't be bothered. You won't even see the message until you get back to the office, and log into your computer. On the other hand, if the message is urgent, you can text message back to the server, and it will convert your message to an email back to the original sender.

There are of course all kinds of services that can be provided via SMS. I suppose what makes this one interesting is the way it actively helps you see just the info you need. It takes highly sophisticated algorithms to recognize "urgent" mail, and the result is a slick service that keeps you just a little more connected.