Ideas

About Ideas and Intellectual Property

We like to think of ourselves as being at the forefront of the "mobile revolution" here at the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club. One of the things we do is discuss ideas relevant to mobile applications. Unlike commercial ventures, our objective is to disseminate innovative concepts rather than trying to monetize them with intellectual property encumbrances. Sure, we discuss a lot of old ideas, and some of the ideas we discuss in person or on the mailing list are simple derivatives of existing concepts; but every now and again we come up with something truly novel. We've started this section to collate some of our community's concepts.

The concept here is that if you have an "innovative" idea that you want to share with the community, you can describe it here or on the Mailing List. It will eventually get archived by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Then in a distant future, there will be a record that the idea existed at a particular date and time. Please note that this site's contents are published using a Creative Commons license. So, if you record some ideas here, the ideas themselves will not be the intellectual property of the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club, but the precise text you use to describe the idea will be.

Also note, not all ideas discussed here are novel or innovative. Some are simply reworkings of old concepts or simple derivatives. We (the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club) aren't trying to assert ownership of the ideas here, and it's entirely possible that some of the ideas we discuss below are patented (boo.. hiss..) So don't think that because it's discussed here it's unencumbered.

Also, this should go without saying, if you're going to post copyrighted material, make sure that it falls well within the bounds of Fair Use.

Features and Experiences

What is a mobile phone? lists the things people want to do with a mobile phone.

Technical Ideas

Data over GSM Voice

The GSM spec defines a couple different call types: voice calls, data calls and fax calls. While many people's data requirements can be fulfilled with GSM data calls, GPRS, EDGE (or some other wireless data protocol), applications that require low latency are generally out of luck. Developers working on end-to-end mobile encryption discovered that VoIP applications over the GSM data channel or EDGE have poor latency characteristics. The "Data over GSM Voice" concept envisions the specification of a CODEC that encodes an arbitrary data stream into a signal that is highly resilient to GSM voice encoding.
This also allows mobile devices to send data to each other "in band." vCard bursting is an example of this related concept.

vCard burst

The vCard burst is a concept where two or more participants in a conversation want to share digital data (like a vCard or a vCal event) while "in band."

Using SIP To Signal Readiness to Sync ;