Rationale

Multimobile services are services you can use on your mobile phone.  You can use these services in multiple ways – by interacting with a speech server, sending and receiving text messages, sending and receiving instant messages, etc. – hence “multimobile.”

The conditions that must be met in order for the use of multimobile services to be effective, I believe, are the following:

  1. Most obviously, you need an infrastructure that supports the use of multimobile services. In The Revolution No One Noticed , I called this infrastructure a multimobile application server.
  2. There must be a relatively large number of services available.  The value of individual services will usually be limited, but the collective value of a large number of services may be significant.
  3. There must be interactive as well as notification services.  The distinction is explained on the Whimsy Services page.
  4. A sizable number of faculty, staff, and students must be involved in creating and managing the services.  The collective creativity of the institution must be tapped.  A corollary of this condition is that easy-to-use tools for creating and managing the services must be available.
  5. The services must be aggregated.  There must be a catalog where all of the services, are listed, together with information on how to use them.  The catalog must be dynamic; as services are created and/or retired, the catalog must reflect the changes.  The catalog may be online - on a web site - but should also be available to users on their phones, as the response to a "catalog" or "help" command.
  6. The aggregate/collection of services should, I think, be given a name.  In the tutorials, the collection of services is called WSU Mobile.
  7. There needs to be a way for new users to learn how to use the services.
  8. There needs to be a way for users to subscribe to notification services, and to cancel subscriptions they no longer find useful.
  9. There needs to be a way for users to say how they wish to receive notifications - as text messages, voice messages, email, etc.
  10.  To enable conditions 8 and 9 to be met, and to enable personalization and services that require security, there needs to be a way for new users to register, and a way for registered users to log in to manage their preferences, profiles, and subscriptions.
  11. It needs to be possible for producers to send, and users to receive, long messages, attachments, and messages that require security.
  12. There needs to be a way for users to get help when they need it.
The purpose of the Whimsy Project is to enable these conditions to be met.  Whimsy is the infrastructure that makes it possible for multimobile services to be used.  Reverie and Chimera are the easy-to-use tools that make it possible for faculty, staff, and students, non-technical as well as programmers, to be involved in the creation and management of multimobile services.  Caprice is a prefabricated, customizable web site that enables most of the other conditions to be met.

This statement of purpose puts the tutorials into perspective.  The tutorials are meant to demonstrate how these conditions may be addressed, and to provide a simulated experience of using multimobile services in a situation where most of the conditions have been met.


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Weber State University

Ogden, Utah 84408