MobEA V: Mobile Web in the developing world May 7, 2007

This will be an all-day industry workshop at the WWW2007 Conference.

Aim and Scope

We are in the midst of a mobile revolution. Mobile Web Initiative spearheaded by W3C is making a strong stand on how to realize the vision of pervasive mobile computing. Services provided have to be adapted to the users' wants and needs. To do this, we need to go beyond technology, and understand the human-centric aspects of mobile computing. The objective of this workshop is to provide a single forum for researchers and technologists to discuss the state-of-the-art, present their contributions, and set future directions in emerging innovative applications for mobile users in the developing world. W3C has started a number of initiatives along the direction of Mobile Web Best Practices, Device Description Working Group, Device Independence Working Group and others.

Topics of interest for technical papers include, but are not limited to the following:

• Real-world projects relying on Mobile Web access in Developing Countries


• Key applications to leverage the development/use of mobile web in Developing Countries


• Analysis of the potential demand for data service / mobile web access in Developing Countries


• Regional differences in Asia/Africa/Central Europe/Middle East/South America/...


• Analysis of Mobile Web usage in Developing Countries


• Usage of Mobile Web technologies in emergency responses in rural areas


• Analysis on the way the Mobile Web could improve people lives in Developing Countries (education, healthcare,...)


• Challenges to make the Mobile Web really useful (not just usable)


• Analysis of the main value added of the Mobile Web vs. a mobile phone (voice only) vs. a computer in an Internet café? :
  
  • Are cheap PC a competing platform to web-enabled phones?
  
  
  • Can a web-enabled phone play the same role in Developing Countries as the PC at home in Western Countries


• Role of voice and multimodal technologies/applications


• Technical challenges to have web-enabled phone being the alone/primary way to access the Web


• Content authoring from a mobile phone?


• Use of the mobile web as a tool of political activism

The topics of interest are particularly important for the Spring 2007 timeframe to align MWI with the users, the carriers/operators deployment strategies and of course the application/service providers.

Submissions will be solicited and all papers are subject to peer review. Each paper will be reviewed by at least two peers and their collective comments will be taken into consideration to decide paper acceptance. We will maintain a rather high level of importance on the technical feasibility of the proposed applications for a telecommunications carrier managed service or a premise-based enterprise deployment at large scale.

This workshop will provide an international forum to discuss issues on emerging mobile applications both from a technical and business standpoint. The chosen mix of papers will attract a large community of mobile application providers. The targeted audience will range from developers and technical managers to business level executives, providing a good mix of talent.

Submission

Submissions will be evaluated according to the relevance and originality of the work and to their ability to generate discussions between the participants of the workshop. The format of submitted papers must follow the same style as regular WWW2007 papers, including no page numbers. You are invited to submit a full paper describing completed work (up to 5,000 words) or a position paper describing work in progress (up to 2,000 words) not to exceed 12 double spaced, 8.5 x 11-inch pages (including figures, tables and references) in 10-12 point font. Include an abstract, five to ten keywords, and the corresponding author's e-mail address. At least one author of accepted papers must register for the WWW'07 conference before the early registration deadline. Registration information will be available at the conference web site: http://www2007.org

For more information on how to submit papers, please visit the workshop home page at http://www.research.att.com/~rjana/mobea2007.htm.

Official Website: http://www.research.att.com/~rjana/mobea2007.htm