reQall

» see reqall.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

reqall came out of a phd project about how human memory works, and out of a research park on nasa land in california. that is the kind of origin i read about with interest and never actually touch. i was an engineering student in turkey when it launched, keeping my todo list the way i always did, in a text file.

the public version showed up at the demo conference on january 30, 2007, and won the show's demogod award. the idea was easy to say and hard to build. you speak a note, into the app or over the phone, and reqall transcribes it and files it as a reminder. by 2008 it had grown from a phone-in service into iphone and blackberry apps with a website behind them. sunil vemuri, who built the early research at the mit media lab, was the name attached to it.

the more interesting piece was the one it called memory jogger, which tried to surface the right reminder at the right time using your calendar and your location. that was years before an ordinary phone did the same thing on its own. which is also what killed it. once the operating systems shipped their own reminders and their own assistants, a separate service for the same job had nowhere to stand. the brand was taken over in september 2015, the app stopped working, and the notes people had spoken into it did not come back.

~ the record ~

~ what it saw early ~

reqall guessed correctly that the phone would become the place you dumped a thought before you lost it, and that voice would be how you did it. it just built that as a product you had to find and pay for, at a moment when the phone itself could not yet do it. a few years later the phone could, for free, and the guess stopped being worth money.

~ the distance ~

none of this reached me directly. a voice-productivity service pitched at american knowledge-workers, phoned into a us number, was not in my orbit in ankara. i met the idea later, as a feature baked into the phone in my pocket, with no memory that a small company had shipped it first and gone under doing it.

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