Workshop

Track: Workshops

Paper Title:
MobEA VI: Personal Rich Social Media

Authors:

• Rittwik Jana (AT&T Labs Research)
• Daniel Appelquist(Vodafone Group R&D)
• Galit Zadok(MilkMore Ltd)
• Bin Wei(AT&T Labs Research)

Abstract:
2008 will be the "Mobile Eureka! Moment". With the Olympics just round the corner and the mobile market experiencing a phenomenal growth, we believe that WWW 2008 will truly be the climax and focal point in the midst of this mobile revolution. Mobile Web Initiative spearheaded by W3C is making a strong stand on how to realize the vision of pervasive mobile computing. Three screen services (TV, PC, Phone) are demanding new architectures to be developed. Furthermore, the need to go beyond technology, demands an embrace of the human-centric aspects of mobile computing. The objective of this workshop is to provide a single forum for researchers, sociologists, and technologists to discuss the state-of-the-art, present their contributions, and set future directions in personalized applications for mobile users with a focus in rich social media. The transition from the wired Internet to the mobile web has generated a wide array of novel services bringing in billions of dollars in revenue in the recent years. So there are a few natural questions that one may ask. "What is "the" next big thing in the mobile web as far as applications and services are concerned?", "How will operators provide these services efficiently with this next wave of applications?" and "What are the emerging business models that drive the next generation of services?". In a nutshell, to answer some of the questions above, we believe that in general there is a convergence in the fixed and mobile worlds by means of standards like IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) [1]. This convergence allows enterprise and consumer applications to be blended via a unified infrastructure. This unification results in a number of advantages like a) application availability from any access methods, b) enhanced user experience for combined/blended services (presence, messaging, address book etc.), c) centralized user profiles shared between applications and common provisioning, d) flexible charging and billing of multimedia services in particular, e) scalable deployments with guaranteed Quality of Services and last but not least f) secure solutions through built in identity management, authentication and authorization procedures. There are a variety of novel applications that are starting to emerge. A general shift from static content to a more dynamic nature has been observed in recent years. In particular, multimedia and social networking are the foundations of emerging applications. One such example is the delivery of IPTV to the third screen (mobile, PDA). Social networking/messaging (applications like Twitter) and peer-to-peer applications are also on the verge of breakthroughs in the mobile landscape. Interestingly, a lot of the momentum has been reinvigorated with the introduction of smart phones like Apple's iPhone [2]. Devices are becoming more powerful and standards are being written to take advantage of these smart features. Finally, we believe that the mobile web is at the forefront of technology and this workshop will discuss many of these technical and business challenges that are on the wish list of everyday practitioners.

PDF version

Inquiries can be sent to: