Abstract
A large proportion, if not the majority, of the world's population, including those in large parts of India, China and Africa, will experience the Internet and computing solely through a mobile phone. Furthermore in rural settings there may be no possibility of access to a PC or laptop – everything must happen through the mobile and many of the end-users may be illiterate. However, the applications available are typically simply those developed for western urban users. If these 'next billion' users or those close to them had the right tools they could create their own content and applications, better suited to their needs. However, current environments for production of web sites, programming and even plain content management, all assume that the developer or content author has a large display, not the tiny screen available on a mobile device. This paper discusses whether it is possible to create rich content or to code using such a device, to create content or applications 'through the keyhole' of the mobile phone screen.
keywords: near-end-user programming, content production, mobile-phone applications
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