Picking up his son from school

John also downloads the beginning Swedish language module for his phone. While waiting in his car to pick his son up after baseball practice, John tries the module. He uses his earpiece and holds the phone in front of him on the steering wheel. The module begins. It shows him the number one on the screen and below it the word "ett." In his ear he hears "One. 'Et.' You try it." John says "Eht." It responds, "Excellent. Let's move on to the number two. Tvoh. You try it." John is able to get to eight before his son arrives.

As his son, Mark, gets in the car, John hands him the phone. Mark knows the interface well from playing with it last week, and he turns on the Genius Loci watcher for their trip home, setting it to show everything it finds. As the car moves through the streets, the phone sends its location to the servers at Fresh. The server compares the phone's location against its database, searching for the nearest thing whose topic matches John's profile, which only contains "beginning Swedish." It sends back what it finds. John is driving, so Mark watches the screen and calls out when it changes.

"Dad, look for a church."

"Yep, I see it."

"In Swedish it's…kire-kah? Hang on, let me listen…No, sheer-keh."

John and Mark try a number of words this way.

At a stoplight, John sees a fountain. "Fountain" didn't come up on screen, so Mark uses SMS Reference to request a translation of "fountain." The service sends him the response, "fontän", and notes where the phone was at the time the question was asked. It drops the query in the database. It will show "fontän" to the next member that comes by this same spot, running Genius Loci and interested in Swedish. John and Mark have helped to build the very database they are using.

NEXT> Business trip to Sweden