Towards a Platform for User-Generated Mobile Services

In the near future, the trend of user-generated content and services currently observable in the Internet domain will also affect the mobile environment: mobile users will become able to easily create content and small services while on the move and offer them to social communities. Mobile users will no longer be pure consumers, they will also become producers and providers of mobile content and services. However, to let this vision come true, a new mobile service platform has to be built and established. In this article we are surveying relevant aspects, like service technologies, semantic search and recommendation mechanisms, revenue sharing, and security technologies. Based on that survey, requirements and challenges are identified. By means of an application scenario from the health and fitness domain, we present a first concept for a platform that allows for building virtual communities with easy and inherent support for real physical meetings.