A mobile tool for browsing recorded collaborative meeting contents

Various tools have been developed to allow recording of collaborative online meeting contents. Tools also exist which provide mechanism for visualisation and browsing of shared documents and audio recordings of such meetings. However, in the past these tools have required the level of processing power only available in standard desktop computers. In recent years mobile handheld computing and communication devices, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), have experienced great increases in processing power as well as popularity. The enhanced processing and multimedia capabilities of these devices has made them suitable for a wider range of applications than simple personal information management tools for which they were originally intended. This paper presents techniques that exploit such capabilities for visualising and browsing multimedia meeting memories. These techniques have been embodied in a prototype handheld meeting browser, called HANMER, which supports browsing of synchronous audio and text produced in online collaborative meetings.