From DSC:
Recently, my neighbor graciously gave us his old Honda snowblower, as he was getting a new one. He wondered if we had a use for it.  As I’m definitely not getting any younger and I’m not Howard Hughes, I said, “Sure thing! That would be great — it would save my back big time!  Thank you!” (Though the image below is not mine, it might as well be…as both are quite old now.)

 

 

Anyway…when I recently ran out of gas, I would have loved to be able to take out my iPhone, hold it up to this particular Honda snowblower and ask an app to tell me if this particular Honda snowblower takes a mixture of gas and oil, or does it have a separate container for the oil? (It wasn’t immediately clear where to put the oil in, so I’m figuring it’s a mix.)

But what I would have liked to have happen was:

  1. I launched an app on my iPhone that featured machine learning-based capabilities
  2. The app would have scanned the snowblower and identified which make/model it was and proceeded to tell me whether it needed a gas/oil mix (or not)
  3. If there was a separate place to pour in the oil, the app would have asked me if I wanted to learn how to put oil in the snowblower. Upon me saying yes, it would then have proceeded to display an augmented reality-based training video — showing me where the oil was to be put in and what type of oil to use (links to local providers would also come in handy…offering nice revenue streams for advertisers and suppliers alike).

So several technologies would have to be involved here…but those techs are already here. We just need to pull them together in order to provide this type of useful functionality!