Virtual sticky notes: Making cell phones more useful (and annoying?) than ever

By Alpha Doggs on Fri, 06/20/08 - 2:30pm.

Engineers at Duke University have come up with a system for one day exploiting cell phones worldwide so that mobile users can easily learn from each other about everything from art exhibits to traffic jams.

"Every mobile phone can act as a telescope lens providing real-time information about its environment to any of the 3 billion mobile phones worldwide," said Romit Roy Choudhury, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, in a statement.

The engineers have created an application that they call micro-blogging that enables cell phone users to enter site-specific information ("virtual sticky notes"), such as comments or photos or videos to a central server that other cell phone users can tap. Time and location can be logged as well, and attached to the other information. So say one user could create information about an art exhibit that could then be viewed by later visitors to that exhibit as they stand in front of a certain painting (hmmm, maybe not such a great example after all, especially at venues that request cell phones be put away...).

The technology, which has been successfully protoyped using the Nokia N95 mobile phone, takes advantage of GPS data and works like a sort of mobile social network. It is outlined in a paper called "Micro-Blog: sharing and querying content through mobile phones and social participation," which was presented this week at the MobiSYS 2008 6th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services in Breckinridge, Colo.

Roy Choudhury said the application will eventually work with any kind of programmable mobile phone.

Issues yet to be worked out: the battle between GPS usage and battery drainage, how to encourage users to submit info of use to strangers, and how to maintain privacy.