TechWare: Mobile Media Search Resources [Best of the Web]

In this issue, "Best of the Web" focuses on mobile media search, which has enjoyed rapid growth in consumer demand and hence receives a lot of attention from content providers and device manufacturers. The combination of a large increase in computational power and an always-on broadband connection available every where at all times makes for an ideal device for all our social, business, and entertainment needs. In addition, such devices provide a wide array of multimedia sensors such as a high-quality cam era, a touch screen, audio-capturing abilities, and a global positioning system (GPS). This makes the devices not only suited for multimedia consumption but also a powerful platform for multimedia content generation. The relatively small form factor of the mobile devices in com parison to desktop machines also brings challenges as it is much more difficult to provide textual input to the device. On the other hand, the wide availability of the multimedia sensors makes additional input modalities more natural and many applications make good use of the added opportunities this provides. As a result, the importance of multimedia search has risen considerably given the explosion of devices attempting to locate content and the explosion of content generation itself. In addition, the spectrum of the problem of multimedia search has widened given the additional input modalities now commonly available through the sensor rich clients.