How many INQ hacks can you fit in a phone box?

COLLY MYERS, best known for being the founding CEO of Symbian, now spends his time cultivating AQA, a premium text question-answering service.

The company currently answers about 15,000 questions a day at £1 each, anything from "What should I have for lunch?" or "What am I wearing?" to "How many Cornish pasties would fit in Buckingham Palace?" (They calculate 49 million.) To answer questions, AQA relies on hundreds of human researchers who consult the Net, their libraries, and their brains to come up with accurate five-minute answers. They are assisted by a database of every question AQA has ever answered, which pops up the ten most likely answers.

Myers came to Britain from his native Zimbabwe (via South Africa) to write a 32-bit operating system for Psion, where he ran the software division before becoming founding CEO of Symbian. In 2001, as a new challenge, Myers, together with fellow Symbian alumni Bill Batchelor and Paul Cockerton decided to reinterpret Internet search for mobile phones.

Putting the service together was not easy technically. For Myers, it was a complete reeducation as he'd always written client software. "I had to work out what to do for running a service on a server," he says. The real problem, he says, "was, how do we scale it in a way suitable for the volume of researchers working online?" The second problem was, "To pick the top ten most likely answers and present them to researchers so they could pick it - that's an artificial intelligence problem. We split the question down automatically and do a particular kind of search based on algorithms we developed in several stages. It was quite a hard problem - there are lots of natural search algorithms, but they had to be fine-tuned for our system and database."

On to the frustrations. For one thing, Myers would really like to run AQA as a Java applet on the phone; doing so would save the company from having to market the number (63336) and, he says, would help it add features.

"These phones are all meant to have Java. But in practice it's impossible, and it's really frustrating." The big stumbling block: the network operators.

"First of all, theyh're trying to be too protective of their customers by not allowing you to run software at all. The only thing you can do is write a game." But since so many other much larger devices can run games, Myers doesn't see the point: the key benefit of running something on a phone, surely, is to be able to use its communications abilities.

"That's what you can't do." Any time a user fires up a Java program, the phone pops up an alert to ask whether to authorise it, like an untrained copy of Zone Alarm. "It should just ask the user once," he says, "but no, it asks every time. It makes any program unusable."

A second problem under the current arrangement is that AQA has no way of finding out the number of the phone that's calling. "We need that to run our service. The first thing we have to ask is, 'What's your phone number?' so we just look like idiots."

Finally, there is no single common platform.

"The network operators are preventing development," he says. "We need an agreed platform and an agreed price. You could get viral selling." Nothing has changed since 2002, and he now thinks any improvements are at least three to five years away - "Sadly."

He believes his old company, Symbian, is ideally placed to make a stab at fixing the problem, since a lot of the handset manufacturers are customers.

What's needed, he thinks, is industry cooperation. "Once you do that, it will allow people like us to deliver services on the phone. If we can experiment, one of us out of thousands of people will come up with a service that moves the market and others will follow." µ