Development of a city mobile application

Abstract

Four students started during the winter '07 a company, CityMob. The business of the company will be based on a generic scalable mobile application. The goal is to distribute quality city guide information to the users of mobile phones. This thesis is based on an innovation driven process. It describes the early stages of the development of our product. We have two main areas of focus: The user and the technology/system design. The two are of course dependent on each other. Because of the initial failure of WAP, usability and acceptance measures for mobiles have become important research topics. Through the study of trends, emerging technologies and acceptance models for mobile applications we have tried to get a better understanding of our potential users and their needs. We have also directly interacted with our users through market surveys and prototype testing, making them contribute to the shaping of our product. The foundation of CityMob will lie on a scalable context aware mobile service framework. We have defined a framework that includes a server that easily integrates new city guide content providers, and a client - the mobile application - that seamlessly adapts itself to these new providers. The end-user is provided with context aware quality city information from a potentially unlimited number of cities, through a modifiable user interface.