Features

Momento is a platform mainly focused on messages exchange; messages may contain text, pictures, multimedia contents as well as data forms. The interactivity that turns Momento into a complete platform able to offer applications to mobile devices is reached with the aid of data forms.

Channel bidirectionality

With respect to the traditional web navigation, Momento offers a a fully bidirectional channel including the push of information from the server to the clients. The use of the XMPP protocol as a base for the exchange of messages allows to overcome the typical limits of the traditional web navigation based on page and HTTP; this approach provides the server with the chance to push text, multimedia and data forms messages to grant full interactivity to the product.

User identification and Presence awareness

Within Momento the users are never anonymous; each user is associated a unique identifier; this leads to offer services and customized contents to each user.
Moreover the system offers the chance to gather information about the user "presence", i.e., to know exactly when the user is effectively on line. This way the messages delivery takes place only when the user can receive them.

Real time message delivery

The platform delivers the messages to the recipients in real time, i.e., without latency nor delay between the expedition and the reception of messages. This operation is associated with the online presence of the user; when the user is offline or unreachable, the platform keeps track of the sent messages and delivers them the next time the recipient is online again.
The platform offers the opportunity to exploit politics of non retention of messages for particular configurations.

Mobile device oriented interactivity

The integration with the platform takes place on the client with the aid of an ad-hoc software. This software does not exploit the paradigm of the navigation within a web page. This kind of interaction, in fact, did not make a success, on mobile devices due to the intrinsic limits of clients: screen dimensions and the keyboard limitations. The web page was designed to be represented within a browser on a computer desktop, provided with a sufficiently wide and clear video together with a keyboard and a mouse usable with the two hands; mobile devices like phones are usually too small to be kept easily in the pockets and then used with only one hand and, hence, have a smaller video and a limited keyboard.
Momento client is used as a simple address book; the messages are visualized within an interface resembling the one used for SMS, resulting in a more "natural" and handy use.

Interactivity through data-forms

Besides the messaging system, Moments is intended to provide interaction with "dynamic" components through delivery and reception of data forms, Data forms are particular messages that are represented by the client in a fancy and simple way for the mobile device; hence the user may insert and send his data to the service that is going to make the proper use of it in order to provide the user with customized contents or act depending on what the form was containing.
Examples of information that may be transported within forms are:
  • news signup
  • news about vehicle transport request
  • activity completion notifications
  • bank account information request
  • payment operation
  • ...

Ease of services creation

Momento furnish services providers with an easy to use platform needing a little development time and the deploy of services is reduce with respect to the actual WAP or web browser based platforms; in fact it is not necessary to take into account the differences of the many clients because the interface adaptation phase is performed by the clients.

Plug and play service addition

Momento architecture is such that the deployment of new services is realized only by adding components on the server; the clients automatically obtain new services without upgrading anything on the client.