Services and systems currently exist to synchronize certain types of personal data between a user's handheld device, such as a personal digital assistant (“PDA”) or smart phone. In the mid 1990s, PDAs such as the PalmPilot by Palm Computing emerged to provide users with the ability to store addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and personal notes in a small portable device. The PalmPilot would be coupled to a user's desktop PC via a cable in order to synchronize such information with a desktop application provided by Palm Computing to manage and modify such information more easily on the desktop. By the late 1990s, content synchronization services such as AvantGo began to appear to provide PDA owners with the capability to receive updated feeds from content providers (e.g., American Airlines, CNET, GM, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, etc.) via the Internet through a synchronization process whereby the PDA owner would connect his PDA, which had an installed PDA application to view content, to his PC, which also had an installed “conduit” application to download content from the content providers' web sites. In 1999, Research In Motion (“RIM”) introduced the Blackberry, a wireless email portable device that solved the “two mailbox” problem (having a wireless email mailbox and a corporate email mailbox). A corporation supporting the Blackberry email synchronization system would install a proprietary RIM messaging server to interact with the corporation's own email system. The proprietary RIM messaging server situated at the corporation would interact with RIM's own proprietary remote messaging center server which would then relay corporate emails to the user's wireless provider, which would in turn deliver or push the emails to a user's Blackberry device. As such, emails addressed to a user's corporate email address would transparently appear on the user's Blackberry device in real-time without the need to manually synchronize in a manner similar to the prior PDA synchronization solutions discussed.
More recently, services such as Mobical and Yahoo! Mobile have utilized the SyncML open standard protocol promulgated by the Open Mobile Alliance to enable the transfer and synchronization of data between SyncML compliant native applications on the cell phone (e.g., phonebook, address book, contacts, etc.) and a SyncML compliant server over the cellular network (e.g., GPRS, 2.5G, 3G, 3.5G, etc.). Such a SyncML compliant server may also provide an online web environment for the user to view and modify such data. Similar to the prior PDA synchronization solutions (other than the Blackberry email push methods), many SyncML services typically focus on cell phone initiated manual synchronization. The user typically registers for a service by providing the SyncML application residing on the cell phone a username, password, server address and data paths for each native application function to coordinate synchronization. When the cell phone user desires to synchronize between the server and his phone, he navigates to the SyncML application and manually instructs the cell phone to initiate synchronization with the server. The SyncML registration process and the manual synchronization process can prove to be inconvenient and difficult to set up or use given the small size of the keypad (e.g., to type in registration information) and the time needed to navigate through the cell phones various menus. Most recently, Yahoo! Go Mobile introduced the capability to synchronize a user's emails and photos as well as the user's contacts and calendar managed at the Yahoo! Web site portal with the user's cell phone native applications. A Yahoo! mobile application is installed on the user's cell phone and appears as a separate application that can be launched from the cell phone's main menu. When the user launches the Yahoo! application on the cell phone, a Yahoo! submenu is presented to the user to provide access to the user's emails, contacts, calendar and photos. Running transparently in the background, the Yahoo! application on the cell phone polls a Yahoo! server (via the wireless network) to determine whether updates should be pulled from the user's Yahoo! account in the Yahoo! server into the cell phone.
With the continued convergence of portable devices functionally designed for personal information management (“PIM”) such as PDAs with voice and other communication oriented portable devices such as the cell phone (any such wireless networked portable devices shall hereinafter be referred to herein as a “cell phone”), Mobical and the various Yahoo! services demonstrate that the industry is moving towards a single wireless networked portable device that can be transparently synchronized with a web site where a user's personal information may be more easily managed due to the availability of a larger screen and navigation tools, such as a keyboard, mouse and sophisticated graphical user interfaces (“GUI”). However, the inconvenience of cell phone initiated manual synchronization techniques currently available through Mobical and Yahoo! continue to inhibit the wider adoption of such hosted mobile management services. Furthermore, use of open standard synchronization protocols such as SyncML require application developers to have knowledge of the synchronization protocol in order to develop specific synchronizing components (or plug-ins) for synchronization protocol compliant applications. For example, SyncML requires local applications to record the changes to data made by the user so that such changes can later be transmitted to remote servers or devices for synchronization. SyncML makes use of a “change log”, a local database that stores changes made by the user within a local application (e.g., adding or removing a contact). When the application data is synchronized with a remote server or device, those changes are sent to the remote server or device and applied to a remote copy of the application data. However, there exist many mobile applications that have been built without consideration of a change log, either to simplify the development effort or because the mobile application developers did not have the intention or forethought of synchronizing data. Many of these applications could benefit from allowing the data they store locally to be synchronized so that the data (1) could be backed-up or stored on a server, and (2) could be managed on a server where the user interface is more convenient and then have those changes synchronized back to the local application.
While there currently do exist non-SyncML synchronization mobile solutions, such solutions generally either (1) offer their own proprietary user-facing application on the cell phone with a “rich” user interface, or (2) require application developers to develop mobile applications that interface with a proprietary synchronization platform (i.e., through proprietary APIs, etc.). For example, PixSense, a company that enables a user to immediately upload digital photos taken from a user's cell phone camera to the PixSense website, requires the user to download and install a proprietary PixSense user facing application onto the cell phone through which the user must interact in order to manage and send photos to the PixSense website. Sharpcast is another recent company that offers a proprietary platform that enables independent software developers to utilize proprietary Sharpcast APIs during the software application development process to provide synchronization related capabilities between mobile devices, desktop applications and web services. What is needed is a synchronization architecture that enables a user to add, remove and otherwise manage content such as multimedia data (e.g., music, photos, video, ringtones, images, etc.) from the web to the phone (as opposed to an architecture that may require manual initiation of synchronization via the cell phone). Such an architecture should not require independent cell phone application developers to understand or write to either proprietary or standard synchronization APIs such that both pre-existing applications such as the native applications on the cell phone and newly developed applications can benefit from the architecture.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds