Chapter 3: Mobile Personal Content Uncovered 51 Then, as so often happens, the company behind FotoX went out of business. Cathy learned – much to her dismay – that the application ceased to work when the Web-based licensing scheme no longer had any servers to connect to. Her painstakingly collected database was nothing but a pile of incomprehensible bits. The images were there, as fi les, but the keywords she had entered were apparently not in those fi les. Even her techie friend Steve could not bring the labels back, despite his array of conversion tools. Cathy considered re-entering all those keywords again, but never got around to doing so. Instead, she found herself shying away from digital cameras altogether. If digital information was so fragile, it would be better to stick to good old waterco- lour and gouache . . . The phenomenon described in the above scenario is familiar to those dealing with preserving digital information (Chen 2003). The fact that technology advances rapidly, resulting in devices, protocols, and fi le formats that are not backwards compatible, implies that a lot of digital information is lost forever. Content preservation is dealt with by Content Lifecycle Management (CLM). In the past, CLM has been discussed in the context of enterprise knowledge management; see e.g. Päivärinta and Munkvold (2005); however, it is becoming increasingly important in the personal content domain. With some mobile devices the approach is somewhat different. Most devices, at least those targeted towards other than traditional computing tasks, intentionally hide the fi le structure from the user in the tasks where it is not explicitly required. As a result, an application such as fi le manager may never be needed. Typical examples include 3 mobile phones, such as Series 60 smart phones. In those cases, the concept of a fi le is not required in most tasks. The inherent problem is that even though the concept of a fi le system is not abstracted to the user interface level, the system itself is still based on fi les. This has many indirect implications for the user, yet they have no means of addressing them. Challenges arise, for instance, when moving fi les from a PC to the mobile device. Locating the transferred fi le with the mobile device’s user interface may be diffi cult. Above, we have briefl y discussed a transition from fi le manage - ment towards managing content. What, then, distinguishes mere fi les from content? Now it is time to dive into some discussion involving defi nitions and characterisations, so be prepared. 3 http://www.s60.com/