Mediacast for mobile communities: When the web and telecommunications converge

Social communities are emerging as cloud-based service platforms for communities that also offer communication channels to their users. At the same time, modern telecommunications providers are currently seeking for new sources of revenue by exposing network capabilities to 3rd party providers. Moreover, both mobility and the possibility to access services anyhow, anywhere and at any time are becoming the user´s pre-requisites for next generation services. By combining these concepts, it becomes clear that mobile social communities will play a predominate role in our society. This paper presents Mediacast, an innovate service that on the one hand allows users to share and consume multimedia within web social community environments using their mobiles and on the other hand promotes collaboration by providing a set of communication tools for hybrid (web/mobile) communities.