Senior Project - 5o9

One Platform. One Interface. Multiple Data Sets. Currently, web applications have no built-in way to learn about their users. The workarounds are expensive and slow. However, without any information about the user, their location, or their device, these applications have no way of personalizing the user experience. 5o9 provides this user metadata within HTTP requests, avoiding the costly workarounds.

The goal of this project was to show how business and consumer web applications may be optimized for each mobile user (who), each mobile device's capabilities (what) and the user's real-time location (where). The project involved building an extensible database and multiple web services that highlight the power and flexibility of having access to "who, what and where" metadata generated by mobile devices via 5o9 Inc.'s client-side 5o9Me application.

This metadata is retrieved from CGI environment variables provided by 5o9 Inc.'s server-side EZMobile application (to receive the metadata) and Mod_Mobile filter (to decrypt the metadata) and used to generate a personalized response. Initial functionality includes echoing the metadata as plain text on an HTML file, and leveraging the Google Maps API to render a map centered on the location specified by the metadata. A second application used location metadata to enhance a local search application. Finally, a third (and primary) application is a mobile online store. The 5o9 Storefront application showcases how metadata can be used to create a customized user experience for each individual user.

Video:      Personalizing, Localizing and Mobilizing the Web