There are four distinct mobile bots now available as a bundled download here from Nokia Labs, the community site featuring beta, non-commercialized programs for Nokia handsets.

Currently, the collection includes the following:

• Profile Bot: This bot automates switching between mobile profiles - like switching to "silent" mode when you're in a meeting and switching back to normal mode when the meeting is over. The bot can be configured to suggest profile changes that can be activated with a single click or it can be set to full automation.
• Alarm Bot: The alarm bot learns when you go to bed and when you wake up. At night, the bot suggests alarms and profile changes via your homescreen. With a single click, you can set the phone to silent mode and create a new alarm to wake you in the morning. 
• Shortcut Bot: The shortcut bot learns what mobile applications you use the most and updates your homescreen accordingly. The bot reconfigures your phone's homescreen to feature shortcuts to your most frequently used applications. As your habits change, the bot updates these links.
• Battery Bot: This bot keeps an eye on your battery's status. If your battery needs a recharge before bedtime, you're reminded to plug it in.

In combination, what these bots deliver is a more adaptive UI and mobile phone experience. As your behaviors change, the bots learn and their suggestions change. More importantly, you don't have to configure these bots - they figure everything out on their own.

Currently, the bots work on Nokia N97 and Nokia N97 Mini handsets only.

Smarter Smartphones: The Future of Mobile?

Although these bots are still in beta, they represent the course mobile smartphones should be taking - and not just Nokia smartphones, either. With over 160,000 iPhone applications now available, 20,000 some Android apps and thousands more in the app stores for Palm, Windows and Blackberry, we're getting overwhelmed by our mobile options. How brilliant an idea is it that your phone should learn your behaviors then organize your apps for you? That would be a major improvement over, say, the iPhone's DIY app organization tools.

And while Android's AudioManager widget is a handy way to get one-touch access to your phone's volume settings, how much better would it be if your phone automatically knew when to go silent?

That being said, we have seen some interesting patents receive approval for iPhone - like its location-aware homescreen or location-based social networking for example. However, we actually haven't seen any improvements to the OS that would result in an adaptive phone that learns from our behaviors. (Of course, who knows what Apple has in store for the future?)

Smartphone makers should take a cue from Nokia's innovation and expand the meaning of the word "smartphone." It's time for manufactures to build devices that don't just run apps but that run apps that make the phone itself smarter. Why not take advantage of geo-location's power, learn from user behaviors and enable one-click features that take the place of manual configurations? That's what a true "smartphone" would do. And maybe one day, all will. Until then, Nokia users, prepare to be envied - get your new bots here.

Don't miss the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7th in Mountain View, California! We're at a key point in the history of mobile computing right now - we hope you'll join us, and a group of the most innovative leaders in the mobile industry, to discuss it.

The objective of the VideoTagGame is to collect time-based annotations of the video which could then enable the retrieval of relevant parts in a video when a search is performed, rather than returning the entire video itself. These annotations are collected in the context of a multi-player game.

How To Play

To play the VideoTagGame, participants must sign in with their Yahoo! ID and join a new game. There will always be at least three players in each game. After a 3-second countdown, the video will begin to play. As it plays, participants enter tags that correspond to the various parts of the video. When two players agree on a tag (that is, they enter the same tag), they each get points. The closer together the tags were entered, the more points are rewarded. After the video ends, participants can then watch as it plays again, this time with the tags overlaid on top of the video.

The game, like Google Image Labeler, can be both fun and challenging for those involved. Think it sounds easy? Don't be fooled - the other participants are often fast typers capable of of entering nearly a hundred tags during a couple minutes of footage.

The VideoTagGame is a fun time-waster for those who like to play online games. It's similar to the games at the site Gwap ("games with a purpose"), launched by Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, as it uses "the human processor," too. Like the GWAP games, the end result of the VideoTagGame is the possibility of enabling new technology for searching within videos...or your name at the top of the scoreboard...whichever one sounds more exciting to you.

I regularly check the MyBlogLog widget on a new blog I discover to see if I recognize the faces of other recent readers, as a way to get a feel for the site's community. BlogJuice takes that practice and amplifies its usefulness by orders of magnitude.

I'm sure this is only the beginning of what can be done with MyBlogLog and I'm very excited to see what comes next. As I said when the MyBlogLog API launched, for all the good discussion around Data Portability, MyBlogLog is making things happen quickly. It's being done through proprietary technology, under the umbrella of one particular vendor, but damn is it hot.

It's not often that a tool comes along that I can imagine myself using every day. If BlogJuice holds up over time and traffic, this handy little service will join that list for me.