I have not yet seen Iron Man 3, some of which was filmed here in SAS’s Executive Briefing Center, but I wish I had a direct interface from my brain into a computer. So, like Tony Stark I could defend the world against evil or at least never again suffer that moment of embarrassment when I see someone I know but whose name is temporarily hiding somewhere in my brain. But for now that’s science fiction.

What is not science fiction is sending ads to mobile devices.

Over the last decade, location-based targeted advertising has been offered up as a new revenue source for telecom operators. The problem, of course, is that you may be engaged in another activity, deep in thought, or definitely not interested in an ad for something irrelevant. My phone can provide my service provider all kinds of information about me, but unless I am using it at the moment, it has no idea what I am doing.

Now that can change too, thanks to Ruggero Scorcioni, founder of Brainyno.

Scorcioni may not look much like Iron Man, but he recently won first prize ($US 30,000) at Hackathon, hosted by AT&T and Ericsson. His winning app is a personal assistant that uses brainwave data collected by the Necomimi sensor. When your brain is deeply engaged in thought, the app can place your phone into ‘do not disturb’ mode.

Maybe this is a step along the journey to the day when we have computer interfaces directly in our brains, with a smart personal assistant that can weed out all the distractions. And that might finally free me up to have time to save the world from evil.