I love TiVo.
There is no question that I am horribly guilty of being one of those annoying TiVo-heads who goes around expounding upon how life-changing their technology is to anyone who will listen. In fact, truth be told, TiVo was the main inspiration behind my company four years ago.
The question then, and still to this day for me is: Why isn't TiVo everywhere in my life?
The obvious one that comes up all the time is radio. How many times have you been in the car listening to a great tune and wondered, "What was that lyric?", then found yourself looking for the remote to jump back 7 seconds (boop-boop!). Why this hasn't materialized isn't entirely clear to me considering all it would require is a few hundred KB of RAM in the radio to keep the rolling window. Heck, most car decks already do this when they buffer up the last 30 seconds of a CD track for when you hit that bump and the CD skips. Perhaps there are issues around copyrights that I am blissfully unaware of...
But the real question I'm wondering about is TiVo for your life. It's a fact that digital cameras have exploded in power and capability, and digitial media capacity has more than kept up. For $250 bones today you can get yourself a 7 megapixel camera with a 4 GB memory card. It will take a couple hours of good quality video, and it probably fits in your shirt pocket.
So how far away are we from a device that can record your life?
Something interesting just happen to you? Boop-boop! Let's see that again. Heck, save it for later. Forget about all this fumbling around with your camera annoying your friends. I'm talking about Justin.tv for the common man, but without the backpack, and the live-streaming video to the world, and the annoying camera on the baseball cap. ;)
This should be very possible with today's technology. A simple pair of spectacles with a decent CCD in the frame, some bluetooth technology, the PLR (Personal Life Recorder) sitting in your pocket storing the audio/video stream, and you're done. As you travel through the myriad of times and places that make up your so-called life, your experiences, your memories, and those precious moments, all there when you want them.
Rutger Hauer summed up the problem we're solving quite nicely in my favourite film of all time. At the end of it all, he laments, "...all those moments... lost in time... like tears... in rain. Time to die.".
Hang on Roy, help should be on the way shortly... Sadly, his four years were up.
