SIM Card As Web Server?

SIM card company Axalto says it's got a new product that allows mobile users to publish a blog on their SIM cards, which then acts as a Web server, allowing publishing "with a single click" and immediate access by others to view the site.

Huh?

From the company's press release:

Now this multimedia content can be easily published as it is directly stored on the new SIM which acts as the user’s web server...Users do not need a PC nor do they have to upload their content on a remote web server, making the whole process much simpler. Once the photo has been taken, it only takes one click for the user to decide to publish it on his/her blog. Then his/her friends can have immediate access to it from a PC or a mobile phone. This breakthrough was made possible by an innovative implementation of the web server onto the SIM card which supports large memory as well as the USB (Universal Serial Bus) protocol. The tremendous card capacity allows to store large amounts of multimedia content while the TCP-IP protocol enables connectivity between the SIM card and the Internet world."

My technical advisers are skeptical of the claims and suspect some miscommunication between the engineers and the marketing department. My question is this, though: even if you could put a Web server on your SIM card and publish a site from there, via your phone, why would you want to? I'm hard pressed to think of a single situation where it would be preferential or advantageous to just simply sending photos and blog entries to a remote server.

Comments

[C. Enrique Ortiz]

The concept of web server on a smartcard is not new -- I first encoutered it on 1999 applied to eWallets (see http://www.umich.edu/~urecord/9900/Dec13_99/9.htm).

You can see a running web server on a smart card at http://smarty.citi.umich.edu/

In any case, the concept is actually neat and interesting -- don't look at this just for blogs, but as a way to exchange information using HTTP and RSS/Atom. Addint RSS protocol to the equation is huge because it enables for simplified communications/interoperability for things such as micropayments, synchronizing your PIM/contact information, etc, using open/standard protocols. I have given thought to this exact thing before, and I think it is worth researching further.

ceo