Ivan González and Jason Hong

Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile)

January 2010

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.