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Johan Wikman and Ferenc Dosa began the project after realising the modern mobile phones have processing power equivalent to or even greater than that on the earliest Web servers and that there is no reason why people could not create and maintain their own personal mobile websites.

Rather than write the server from scratch, Wikman and Dosa exploited the fact that the phone's Symbian OS has a 'Posix' layer that provides, in their words, 'a fair amount of typical Unix functionality'. This enabled them to install a modified version of Apache httpd, the world's most prevalent Web server software, on Nokia S60 phone.

Once the server was up and running, they were able to access it via Bluetooth PAN (personal area network) which, although useful in itself and potentially making it possible to access the phone using a big screen and proper keyboard, is not the same as making the phone visible to the Internet.

To do that Wikman and Dosa implemented a custom gateway in the firewalls that

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mobile operators deploy to prevent access to phones on their network.

'We are now able to provide a Web server on a mobile phone with a global URL than can be accessed from any browser,' they explain. 'In a sense, the mobile phone has now finally become a full member of the Internet.'

As phones already contain personal data, automatically generating a personal home page proved relatively straightforward. Moreover Wikman and Dosa realised that there are implications from the fact that 'administrator' - the phone user - is in almost permanent and immediate contact with the device.

'For instance, we have created a Web application that prompts the phone owner to take a picture, which subsequently is returned as a JPG,' they note. 'That is, on a personal device the website can be interactive.'

It's not just interactive with regard to the phone user, but also with the person who is viewing the phone's content from the Web. Normally, servers are geographically fixed, and the Net user has no idea, nor do they need to know, where that is. The mobile-based server on the other hand is, by definition, mobile.

'As long as a website resides on a stationary server the physical location of that server lacks meaning, because it will never change,' Wikman and Dosa write. 'With a mobile website it does change and it is meaningful as the content that is shared may depend upon the current location and context. For instance, if you browse to a mobile website and ask the "administrator" to take a picture, the image you get depends upon the location of the website.'