Some work my group did on making it easier to re-find information on mobile devices. The core idea is to have a web proxy connected to your desktop web browser, which would look for mobile data types (things that might be useful while on the go, such as street addresses, times, maps, etc). These mobile data types are then copied over to your mobile device, making it easier to re-find the information when on the go. Networked devices like desktop computers and mobile phones make it possible for people to access any of the billions of web pages available on the Internet. However, mobile devices are fundamentally different from desktop PCs in terms of input speeds, screen size, and network speeds, making it harder in practice to find information when on the go. In this paper, we introduce GurunGo, a system that monitors a person’s activities on their PC for mobile data types—kinds of data likely to be useful to a person when mobile—and then proactively copies these snippets of data onto his mobile device, thus making it easier to find that information when mobile. Our initial prototype finds and extracts mobile data types from web pages that are browsed on a desktop computer, annotates it with additional relevant information, and copies it to a mobile device in the background. We discuss the design and implementation of GurunGo, as well as some of the tradeoffs and design rationale. Authors are Ivan González and Jason Hong

1. Gurungo: Coupling Personal Computers and
Mobile Devices Through Mobile Data Types
Ivan Gonzalez
Microsoft
Jason Hong
Carnegie Mellon University

2. 1 – Theoretically, Incredible Access

3. 1 – In Practice, Harder to Get Info
• Smaller screens
• Slower text input
• Slower network speeds

4. 2 – Why Do We Print Maps?

5. 2 – Why So Difficult to Get to Mobile?
• Synchronization tools useful for email, calendar,
but still lots of useful information just thru browsing

6. 3 – Re-finding Information is Common
• Tauscher and Greenberg 1997 found 58%
of web activity was re-visiting old web pages
• Cockburn and McKenzie 2001 found that 81%
of web pages were previously seen
• Obendorf et al 2007 found:
– 72% of revisits happen within an hour
– 12% of revisits happen within a day

7. 4 – Not All Information is Equal
• Sohn et al’s CHI 2008 diary study on
Mobile Information Needs
• Lots of kinds of information useful when mobile
– Trivia
– Directions
– Points of Interest
– Movie times
– Phone numbers
– Flight info
• In many cases, these kinds of mobile data types
can be automatically detected

8. Gurungo
• Make it easy to acquire and share data you
already interact with on PC with mobile device
• Automatic Sharing
– Implicitly monitor stream of web pages on PC
– Detect mobile data types
– Annotate the data (e.g. synthesized voice directions)
– Copy data to mobile device
• Manual Sharing
– Copy and paste metaphor

9. Related Work
• Komninos and Dunlop 2007, pre-cache content
based on calendar entries
– Ex. name of atypical place in calendar, get maps
• Harding et al 2009, plan ahead and show manually
entered information based on contextual triggers
– Ex. Show travel info based on time
• With Gurungo, cache data that people directly
interact with on PC, based on mobile data types
– Variant of old idea of locality

10. Gurungo Overview
• Automatic
– Implicitly monitor the stream of web pages
– Detect mobile data types
– Annotate the data (e.g. synthesized voice directions)
– Copy data to mobile device
• Manual
– Copy and paste metaphor
• Two data types implemented
– Driving directions
– Product details for price comparisons

11. Detecting Mobile Data Types
• Use a FireFox addon to monitor web pages
– Goes thru the HTML DOM
– For predefined web pages, use XPath to get data
– For unknown web pages, use regular expressions
and keywords
• We used a hybrid approach
– XPath good for hard to specify data (maps, movie times)
– Regex and keywords good for broad coverage

12. Annotate Data
• Use web services or local programs to improve
usability and/or utility of the data
• Driving Directions
– Generate synthesized speech
• Product details
– Get product reviews
– Get prices on web sites

13. Copy Data from PC to Mobile
• Proactively copy the data over to the mobile device
– Currently, just keeps all info, no garbage collection

14. Manual Copy and Paste

15. Mobile User Interface – Directions

16. Mobile User Interface – Products

17. Discussion
• Static versus dynamic mobile data types
– Driving directions and product details good for months
– Flight information good for … minutes?
– Traffic reports, social events, movie times, store locations
• User interface
– Needs to be able to scale up more
– Possible to use location and recency to filter
• Garbage collection
– Some data has natural expiration (social events)
– Other data does not, may opt to collect oldest and unused
• Lots of assumptions, need to verify with user studies
– Re-finding info on mobile, recency of info

18. Summary
• Gurungo, a system for coupling PCs and mobiles
based on data that people see and use on desktops
– Not all data equally useful when mobile, bias UI
– Detects mobile data types based on what people already do
– Annotates data for usability/utility
– Make it easily available on mobile

19. Gurungo: Coupling Personal
Computers and Mobile Devices
Through Mobile Data Types
Ivan Gonzalez
Microsoft
Jason Hong
Carnegie Mellon University