Design and implementation of mobile electronic memos: a tool to capture and share information in mobile environments

The first part of this paper introduces “MEMs” (Mobile Electronic Memos). MEMs are electronic notes consisting of a data structure associated with a specific class of information (e.g. information describing a location, a person, a service, or a Web site), and meta-information, used for management. Users can automatically capture MEMs from the environment or from other services, store them for future use, share them with other users and send them as input to other services and applications. With MEMs, users can drastically reduce the amount of information they have to input manually. MEMs should be seen as an extension of the traditional clipboard, a uniform mechanism allowing users to store output from one service and provide it to other services. We suggest that this possibility could play an important role in encouraging the take-up of mobile services by private and business users. The second part of the paper describes the implementation of the MEM concept in the framework of a EU-funded project, named Simple Mobile Services. The implementation includes as main elements: i) an open source client for mobile devices (called MOVE), which simplifies access to mobile services and allows easy management of MEMs; ii) server-side components; iii) a middleware platform; iv) Smart Card Web Server (SCWS) technology to access the security features offered by the (U)-SIM, contained in the mobile devices. The whole solution has been implemented on real-life SIMs by a major operator, and is currently tested in real life environments on the University of Roma “Tor Vergata” campus and at Athens International Airport. Finally, we point out that the aim of this paper is a high-level description of our work. More technical details can be found in project deliverables and documents