Our Digital Prostheses' Expanding Awareness

Two recent news items:

AT&T Wireless has announced a music recognition service (DailyWireless, via Slashdot). If a song's playing on the radio and you want to know its name, you can use your mobile to dial the service number, hold the phone up to the sound for a while, and voila, it'll tell you the song name. According to the DailyWireless article, it's pretty accurate.

You're in a big city, you're lost and you want to know where you are. With the software service being developed by Cambrige researchers, you can take a photo with your mobile of where you're standing, send the photo to it, and it'll tell you where you are (and give you directions for where you want to go, and so on. NewScientist). The system has some useful capabilities, because from the picture it can tell which direction you're facing, and can incorporate this information into the directions (e.g. "Turn 90 degrees to your right, walk 100 meters...").