Social Networking Extends Mobile Battery Life !!

A new approach to social networking for mobile devices, such as tablet PCs and smart phones could improve the user experience and boost battery life by up to 70% by exploiting shared data between users in the same location. Details are reported this month in the International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems.

Social networking sites, like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter can now all be accessed via mobile devices and offer location-based services, these are explicit networks. But there is a second kind of network that can be created by virtue of the users' context (e.g. location) and preferences (e.g. favourite multimedia content), an implicit network that could hook together users who are physically close to each other and share similar interests.

Now, Vedran Podobnik and colleagues at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, have developed the software, or middleware, that could sit between telecommunications provider and users and allow a richer and faster experience for users as well as reducing the bandwidth burden on providers and even save mobile battery life substantially. The system works through serendipitous cooperation, via more energy-efficient Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, between users close to each other in an urban environment. The team suggests, based on simulation of such peer-shared activity, that users could boost battery life by almost three quarters.

"Our MAgNet middleware enables creation by the telecommunications company of an overlay network (i.e. social network) on top of the network of users physically situated in a mobile network environment and using mobile devices," explains Podobnik. "The system identifies mobile users near each other who are interested in the same multimedia content," he adds. "Each mobile user would download only a part of the requested content from the mobile network and then share it with other users in their locale via an ad hoc Bluetooth or Wi-Fi network." It is peer-to-peer downloading but on a local scale for the mutual benefit of users and providers.

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Need for Transparency on the Web !!

The need for more transparency in Web-based information systems has been highlighted by an academic at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science.

In a paper entitled "The Foundations for Provenance on the Web", published in the journal Foundations and Trends in Web Science, Professor Luc Moreau points out that due to the complex flows of information on the Web, it is not always clear where information originates from.

"This is a challenge since we want to be able to establish the exact source of information, we want to decide whether information has been altered, and by whom, we want to corroborate and possibly reproduce such information, and ultimately we want to decide whether the information comes from a trustworthy source," said Professor Moreau.

According to Professor Moreau, the solution lies in 'provenance', a term used in diverse areas such as art, archaeology and palaeontology, which describes the history of an object since its creation. Its main focus is to establish that the object has not been forged or altered, and the same can be done with computer-generated data.

"Understanding where data comes from will enable users to decide if it's trustworthy. This will also lead to a new generation of services over the Web, capable of producing trusted information," Professor Moreau added.

In his paper, Professor Moreau reviews several approaches that adopt provenance, allowing their actions and information flows to be audited, and their compliance or violation to rules and policies to be determined. These strong capabilities -- information transparency, auditing capabilities and compliance detection -- provide users with the means to decide whether they can trust systems and information.

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