Patent Application
20100229243
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to management of content for mobile devices and, more specifically, to transferring content from third party web sites to mobile devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Current web services enable users to access and store their personal content on remote servers by interacting with web pages served by the web services rather than store such personal content locally on their computers. For example, users may store and manage their photos on an online photo hosting and sharing web service such as Kodak Gallery or an online social network service such as Facebook. Similarly, users may create playlists and stream music to their local computers from music-focused web services such as MySpace Music. Users may also utilize an online storage web service such as Box.net to backup their personal content and have access to their content at any location through a web browser.
However, while these web services provide web pages that are designed for convenient access to user content through a web browser, such web pages are not designed to provide the capability to transfer such stored content to a users' mobile devices. To re-design or provide web pages designed specifically to transfer content to a user's mobile devices is prohibitively expensive and time consuming.
One or more embodiments of the present invention provide methods for enabling pre-existing designed web pages to support transfer of content stored at the web service serving such web pages to a user's mobile devices. Specifically, a media management service as described herein provides a tagging structure that can be added to the web code of pre-existing web pages of web sites to identify content that can be transferred to a user's mobile device when the web pages of such web sites are rendered within another web page that is served by the media management service itself.
A method for obtaining content stored on a remote server through a web page for delivery to a wireless device, according to one embodiment of the present invention includes the steps of receiving web page code from a third party web server, wherein an HTML element in the web page code that relates to the content is wrapped in a tagging structure, displaying the web page code in a component of the web page, obtaining a source URL from the tagging structure upon a selection by a user of the HTML element relating to the content as displayed in the component of the web page, and transmitting the source URL to a media management server upon a drop action by the user into a representation of a wireless device in a second component of the web page, wherein the media management server retrieves the content by transmitting the source URL to the remote server.
So that the manner in which the above recited features of the present invention can be understood in detail, a more particular description of the invention, briefly summarized above, may be had by reference to embodiments, some of which are illustrated in the appended drawings. It is to be noted, however, that the appended drawings illustrate only typical embodiments of this invention and are therefore not to be considered limiting of its scope, for the invention may admit to other equally effective embodiments.
By obtaining an IP address from digital wireless network system 100 or through WiFi 120, mobile device 105 is able to communicate through the Internet 115 to a media management service 125. Media management service 125 also accesses an SMS gateway 135 in order to send SMS messages to mobile device 105. One example of such a media management service 125 is described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/674,081 entitled “Method and System for a Hosted Mobile Management Service Architecture,” which is hereby incorporated by reference (the “'081 Application”).
In addition to communicating with mobile device 105, media management service 125 also serves web pages to an end user using an Internet connected terminal with a web browser such as 130 (e.g., laptop, personal computer, etc.) who has logged into his personal account with media management service 125. Such an end user may also access a variety of other web services other than media management service 125. Examples shown in
As depicted by highlight 245 of
As depicted in 255 of
Table 1 displays one embodiment of a tagging structure provided by media management service 125 that other third party web service's can incorporate into the HTML code of their web pages:
In the embodiment of Table 1, the tagging structure is an HTML element named “x-transfer” that has a number of associated name-value pairs. For example, mime-type is a name-value pair used to define the media type (e.g., audio, video, photo, etc.) associated with the content to be transferred to a user's devices via user interface 200, src-url is a name value pair that contains a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) where the associated content can be fetched and is utilized by media management service 125 to retrieve such content, provider-id is a name-value pair that identifies the web service where the content is stored to media management service 125, provider-name is a name-value pair that provides the name of the web service, item-cost is a name-value pair that identifies a cost associated with the content if a purchase transaction is involved, item-name is a name-value pair with a general description of the associated content, and xfer-method is a name-value pair that identifies a user action that may be utilized to obtain such content, such as, for example, by dragging and dropping or by pressing a button. As depicted in the example in Table 1, a third party web service wraps HTML elements in its web pages that it desires to make available for transfer to a user's devices through user interface 200 with the foregoing tagging structure. It should be recognized that the foregoing name-value pairs of the tagging structure may be optional depending upon the content and information desired to be transmitted by the third party web service to media management service 125. It should be further recognized that the tagging structure of Table 1 is merely exemplary and that additional and/or alternative name-value pairs may be added to the tagging structure to provide further information for media management service 125 and that any variety of naming conventions for the tagging structure and associated name-value pairs can be used. For example, additional name-value pairs such as a transaction type value to describe the type of transaction (e.g., free transfer, purchase, etc.) or a referrer value to indicate a web service that originates a digital media purchase transaction at an ecommerce site (e.g., MySpace site triggers an Amazon MP3 digital song purchase, etc.) may be added to a tagging structure in various embodiments. Similarly, additional name-value pairs such as time and frequency of update values to describe how often associated content may be updated by a third party web service (e.g., certain podcasts of radio shows may get updated daily every morning, etc.) may also be added to a tagging structure in various embodiments
In one embodiment, the steps of 345 and 350 for requesting and receiving content from the third party web service may be implemented as a standard HTTP GET or POST request if the src-url is a HTTP URL containing the file name of the content itself (i.e., “in-the-clear”). In alternative embodiments, the src-url provided by the third party web service does not contain the file name in-the-clear but rather contains content identifying information (e.g., a content identification number or code rather than the file name of the content itself, etc.) and is translated by a request handler of the third party web service upon receiving the request from media management service 125 in step 345. In one such alternative embodiment, for example, a third party web service desiring to make its web pages available in media management service 125 registers with media management service 125 and receives a secret key associated with its provider-id. In step 340, upon receiving the name-value pairs from the tagging structure, media management server 125 then extracts the provider-id value, obtains the secret key associated with the provider-id, and submits the secret key along with the src-url in step 345 to the third party web service (for example, via HTTPS for added security). Upon receiving the secret key and src-url in step 350, the third party web service confirms that the request is from media management service 125 (by confirming the secret key), extracts the information identifying for the content from the src-url and transmits the content to media management service 125.
In one embodiment, the third party web service may permit access to content associated with the src-url in step 350 only if information relating to a user's identification is provided to the third party web service. For example, the content associated with the src-url may be personal content owned by the user (rather than publicly available content). In one such embodiment, in step 335, along with transmission of tagging information, the user's web browser additionally transmits to media management service 125 a web session cookie associated with the user's browsing session with the third party web service as conducted within display window 250. Media management service 125, in turn, transmits the web cookie to the third party web service in the request of step 345. Upon receiving the web cookie in step 350, the third party web service is able to confirm an association of the user with web management service 125 and transmits the content to web management service 125.
The various embodiments described herein may employ various computer-implemented operations involving data stored in computer systems. For example, these operations may require physical manipulation of physical quantities usually, though not necessarily, these quantities may take the form of electrical or magnetic signals where they, or representations of them, are capable of being stored, transferred, combined, compared, or otherwise manipulated. Further, such manipulations are often referred to in terms, such as producing, identifying, determining, or comparing. Any operations described herein that form part of one or more embodiments of the invention may be useful machine operations. In addition, one or more embodiments of the invention also relate to a device or an apparatus for performing these operations. The apparatus may be specially constructed for specific required purposes, or it may be a general purpose computer selectively activated or configured by a computer program stored in the computer. In particular, various general purpose machines may be used with computer programs written in accordance with the teachings herein, or it may be more convenient to construct a more specialized apparatus to perform the required operations.
The various embodiments described herein may be practiced with other computer system configurations including hand-held devices, microprocessor systems, microprocessor-based or programmable consumer electronics, minicomputers, mainframe computers, and the like.
One or more embodiments of the present invention may be implemented as one or more computer programs or as one or more computer program modules embodied in one or more computer readable media. The term computer readable medium refers to any data storage device that can store data which can thereafter be input to a computer system computer readable media may be based on any existing or subsequently developed technology for embodying computer programs in a manner that enables them to be read by a computer. Examples of a computer readable medium include a hard drive, network attached storage (NAS), read-only memory, random-access memory (e.g., a flash memory device), a CD (Compact Discs) CD-ROM, a CD-R, or a CD-RW, a DVD (Digital Versatile Disc), a magnetic tape, and other optical and non-optical data storage devices. The computer readable medium can also be distributed over a network coupled computer system so that the computer readable code is stored and executed in a distributed fashion.
Although one or more embodiments of the present invention have been described in some detail for clarity of understanding, it will be apparent that certain changes and modifications may be made within the scope of the claims. For example, while the foregoing embodiments have utilized mobile devices such as cell phones, it should be recognized that any devices with wireless networking capabilities, such as wireless picture frames, set-top boxes, stereo system and the like may be used in alternative embodiments. Similarly, it should be recognized that alternative user interface designs may be used consistent with the scope of the present invention other than as set forth in
