Would you like to know more?

"Starship Troopers," Paul Verhoeven's movie take on the Robert Heinlein classic, is interesting in the casual way it shows us an advance in communications technology. Though supposedly set in the far future, the TV/Internet mixutre it shows us could be from tomorrow. People watching news shows are told to "click here" if they want to know more. And it looks like tomorrow just arrived:

A new iPad app from Yahoo can recognize any TV show by listening to the audio, and automatically serve up related Web content, such as news stories related to a news broadcast or play-by-play stats for a ballgame.

The app, called IntoNow, is a refreshed and improved version of technology that Yahoo acquired by buying a startup with the same name.

[. . .]

This technology actually understands the 'aboutness' of the show," Cahan said at a Yahoo press event. He showed the app automatically pulling up a list of Yahoo news content related to a story airing on CNN about an airplane making an emergency landing in Warsaw, Poland. The app also uses its knowledge of the show to find relevant Twitter conversations.

IntoNow identifies TV shows by comparing an audio "fingerprint" of a person's viewing with a vast library of TV audio fingerprints stored on cloud servers. The closed captions for that moment can then be retrieved and fed into Yahoo's technology to determine the meaning of what is currently on screen.

Man, this stuff is coming fast and furious now. Hope there's an Android verison of this coming. I finally broke down and ordered myself a tablet -- at $200, the Kindle Fire was just too much of a bargain to pass up. And I'm starting to be tempted by the smart TV's they're rolling out now -- TV and Internet on the same flat-panel screen.