[jll29]

We developed an SMS-based automatic question answering service deployed experimentally under the disposable brand name "myNuggets.net": https://www.prweb.com/pdfdownload/203601.pdf Venture capitalists/UK business angels did not share our vision that the Internet's future would be mobile in 2004/5 - well before the advent of the iPhone.

I had the idea for an all-automatic SMS info service when I jumped in a taxi in Edinburgh to attend a conference overseas and had left my hotel address on the kitchen table. I phoned a friend and said "Google that hotel for me, please" - and when I thanked him and hang up, I realized a human wasn't needed for many tasks like that, as they were well within the capabilities of Natural Language Processing (Information Extraction, Question Answering) even then.

We were proud that the prototype engineered had a 2 s round-trip time, including Web-meta search, answer extraction and SMS-HTTP gateway calls (very expensive back then).