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Now, virtual sticky notes

New York: Software that enables mobile phone users to obtain location-specific, real-time information, either actively or passively, from other users across the world has been developed by a team led by an Indian-American Professor at Duke University.

The rapid convergence of social networks, mobile phones and global positioning technology has given Duke University engineers the ability to create “virtual sticky notes” — site-specific messages that people can leave for others to pick up on their mobile phones.

Romit Roy Choudhury, Assistant Professor at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, said: “Every mobile phone can act as a telescope lens providing real-time information about its environment to any of the three billion mobile phones worldwide.” It will be as if every participating mobile phone works together allowing each individual access to information throughout the virtual network.

Interested in trying that new Indian restaurant? Tap into the virtual sticky notes floating in the ether within the restaurant and find what other network users thought of it. Heading to the airport and need to know where the traffic jams are? Sensors in the phones detect movement and can relay back to the network where traffic is the heaviest.

The potential of this application, dubbed the micro-blog, is limitless. “We can now think of mobile phones as a ‘virtual lens’ capable of focussing on the context surrounding it. By combining lenses from all the active phones in the world today, it may be feasible to build an Internet-based ‘virtual information telescope’ that enables a high-resolution view of the world in real time,” Mr. Roy Choudhury said.

The application combines the capabilities of distributed networks (such as Wikipedia), social networks (such as Facebook), mobile phones, computer networks and geographic positioning capabilities, such as GPS or WiFi.

“Micro-blogs will provide unprecedented levels and amounts of information literally at your fingertips no matter where you are, through your mobile phone,” Mr. Roy Choudhury said.

“We have already deployed a prototype, and while some challenges remain to be addressed, the feedback we’ve received so far indicates that micro-blog represents a promising new model for mobile social communication.”

In simple terms, people who use the micro-blog application will enter information — photos, comments, videos — into their mobile phone, where it will be “tagged” by the user’s location.

Passive information, such as location or speed, can be recorded. Information is sent to a central server, where it is available to all.

The issue of location privacy needs to be addressed. Since mobile phones transmit data, including location, back to a central server, users must trust the administrator to keep the information private. Mr. Roy Choudhury believes these issues could be addressed by assigning different modes — private, social or public — as social networks do. — PTI

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