Cliff Reeves at Microsoft writes about the beneficial consequences of "liberating" business data from proprietary formats. He believes the main beneficiary will be "situational applications".

While not directly situational software, here's an interesting project at MIT. Article from TheFeature.com.

Last week, we had the fortune to meet Harry Blount, SVP and analyst at Lehman Brothers who covers a broad range of IT companies. We met at Nokia headquarters in Helsinki where our investor Nokia Innovent had its annual portfolio day with lots of Nokia execs in attendance.

Harry has this concept of "liquid data" data, which he defines as follows:

What is Liquid Data?

The ability of data to instantaneously and securely flow from where it is stored to where it is used regardless of the underlying hardware, network, or software.

CURRENT SITUATION:

• Islands of data in both enterprise and home
• Data viscosity due to:
  • Lack of connectivity/accessibility
  • I/O compatibility
  • Data format agreement
  • Security and access

It's a great analogy. It conveys quite well what the problem is. We probably would have called it Liquid Information rather than Liquid Data, but the end result is about the same. One of the overarching, "mega-trend" challenges we face in the IT industry is to make information more liquid, and thus more used and more useful.

Of course, NetMesh InfoGrid is a great technology that helps us move in that direction. In fact, one could argue that making legacy data more liquid is its essential function: making it integrated, real-time, uniform, event-integrated and usable from many different devices and user interface paradigms.

Situational advertising via Bluetooth via Mobile Weblog.

The MyCampus project describes itself as follows:

myCampus is a Semantic Web environment for context-aware mobile services aimed at enhancing everyday campus life at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). The environment revolves around a growing collection of task-specific agents capable of automatically accessing a variety of contextual information about their users (e.g. context-aware restaurant concierge, context-aware message filtering agent, etc.). A central element of the myCampus architecture is its use of Semantic eWallets that support the automated discovery and access of contextual resources (e.g. personal resources, organizational resources or public web services) subject to privacy (or confidentiality) constraints specified by their users.

Via Mark Frauenfelder's article "A Mobile Web That Knows All About You on TheFeature.com.