Yup - I was there. We had a couple of killer apps... "The Personal Travel Assistant" - it booked trips, it managed delays, cancellations, it texted your wife

Yup - I was there. We had a couple of killer apps... "The Personal Travel Assistant" - it booked trips, it managed delays, cancellations, it texted your wife to let her know you would be late.... "The virtual estate agent" - it was a matchmaker finding properties that would suit you and arranging viewings and so on. "The entertainment hub" - it would create parties, events and do the invites - get the catering, find the band.... Our problem was the interface - 2g phones were useless.. a desktop pc was needed for everything... how to use?! Our failure of vision was that no one would care about having (as you note) a single framework to do all the different applications with... and we thought it would be implemented in software and then adopted by companies as an interface into the virtual world. We didn't think that there would be walled gardens because when AOL crashed that vision had failed... right? This work did (in the end) lead to Siri (that wasn't the strand I was in, my stuff was a competitor) and some other less high profile but arguably more significant things. In the end I had to stop and go back to doing machine learning which I'd dumped when I decided that SVMs were the end game. What a dummy!