Authoring tools for mobile multimedia content

The latest generation of mobile phones comes with a rich set of capabilities for presenting multimedia information and it is expected that the mobile phone will soon be one of the most widespread devices for consuming multimedia content. In this paper, we present an overview of the key opportunities and challenges in developing tools for authoring multimedia content for the mobile environment. First, we discuss on a general level the different needs of professionals, hobbyists, and ordinary phone users for mobile multimedia authoring tools. We then focus on easy-to-use mobile phone based authoring tools aimed for ordinary phone users. We present some of the most important applications of user-created mobile multimedia content. We conclude by looking at the typical characteristics of the current and near future mobile phones from the perspective of multimedia content authoring and discussing two common authoring approaches used.