Ubiquitous Social Cams

Web 2.0 is evolving and offering services based on the wide popularity of smartphones and the possibility of gathering data ubiquitously from these mobile devices; this new paradigm is often referred to as Web2. In this paper, we hence present and discuss a Web2 application designed to enable users to interact with remote smartphones' cameras to receive a video generated in real time. In essence, users can individuate on a map which mobile cameras are available in a location of interest and request the remote user to generate and send back a short video of the surrounding environment or event. We discuss technical issues related to implementing such a service and the solutions we devised to address them. Finally, we also present experimental results we obtained from a preliminary testbed evaluation that encourages the prosecution of this work.