Agents in TechnoUtopia

Today, I had a huge craving for nachos, thanks to my friends at Jet Set Zero.  I had read a blog post they had on their summer food highlights and the image of that glorious mountain of nachos had been haunting me since, today more than ever. So I did a search on Mexican food singapore and the name Harry’s Mexican Restaurant came on the top of the search results. So I looked up the address on gothere.sg as well as how to get there by bus and went on my way. The genius in me took note of which bus stop to get off at but forgot to take note of how exactly to walk there. So when I got off the bus, I was basically walking around in circles before I actually got to the place. It didn’t help that although I frequented Orchard Road, I cannot, for the life of me, remember all the names of the buildings down there. Long story short, after almost an hour of walking, I eventually got to Orchard Parade Hotel where the restaurant was supposed to be at, stomach demanding to gobble up what was hopefully the most authentic as nachos could get in this country. #01-13 was the unit number. #01-04, #01-05, walking, walking and more walking. #01-09, #01-10, more walking. #01-12, a dark grey curtain along the wall… #01-14. CRAP.

Super exhausted, I walked to the nearest cafe that looked like they would serve nachos, though I had high doubts that they would be any good (a validated fact a few minutes later). I ordered a Margherita pizza to console myself from the inevitable fact.

The whole afternoon, while reading Falling Man my mind was in TechnoUtopia, my fictitious world where technology has made life better for human kind.

In TechnoUtopia, there was a concept of Store Presence. All the establishments had a web presence that was easily accessible through everyone’s IM client.

It’s easy to see whether your favorite store or restaurant is Open (Online), Closed (Offline), Busy (self-explanatory) or Idle (also self explanatory). And because IM use is already also very popular on the mobile device, people have the same presence information available even when they’re on the move

Of course, this presence is not the only information you can get out of their system.

Live Agents have become a hit in TechoUtopia. Ever since they announced the release of the Windows Live Agents SDK, developers have come up with the all sorts of intelligent solutions that deliver a whole new level of user experience to consumers across the different industries. In this particular solution, they’ve allowed the integration of a POS, Inventory and CRM systems and the Live Agents to give consumers a more convenient way to find information about their favorite restaurants and shops.

It was at this point that I woke up from my daydream. *sigh* All the technology to make this possible is already here! I’m sure someone will build something like this (or something even better) very soon. I can imagine a system like this would be pretty easy to build. Come on Devs, get your groove on. Check out the Live Agents SDK at http://agents.live.com

//I don’t mind if anyone takes this idea and runs with it. I would, however, really want to know when it goes live so I can make use of it!