Computer reminders and alerts

With busy users relying increasingly on computers to provide reminders and alerts, the enabling technology is rapidly gaining importance. Surprisingly, many issues have not yet been thoroughly explored. The state of the art is characterized by after-the-fact application patches, plug-ins and custom-designed reminder methods. This hodgepodge of approaches is likely to change. Recent trends indicate that hundreds of millions of dollars of personal information management (PIM) programs have been sold, mainly because of their reminding abilities. Billions of dollars in savings per year and increased quality of work are projected as more reminder and alerting programs are deployed. Agents that perform reminding and alerting tasks represent one of the fastest growing areas of the World Wide Web and other digital repositories.