mocca is a pilot project to show the possibilities for mobile computing in the context of conferences. it was developed for the FabaSoft-Design-Pattern conference. at the opening visitors would get a "pda" with information about the conference and new tools to communicate more efficiently with other participants. the focus was to unobtrusively assist the participants in usual conference situations [take and organize notes, annotate presentations, exchange info, chat ...] without taking center stage.

although pda's are commonly designed to interact with a pen many users still try to get away with their fingers — and run into difficulties. our approach was to let the user control the mocca-pda with the thumb of the hand which is holding it.

we therefore divided the screen into different horizontal areas, each with a certain functionality of the software, which could be [both visually and functionally] resized by "kneading" the fuzzy border with the thumb or with predefined hardware-buttons.

mocca assists the speaker, the moderator and the participants both during the presentation and the following discussion. participants can annotate right on the slide and even place requests to speak to this subject. once he is next to speak he gets feedback via mocca and the possibility to revoke his request. he will then use the mocca-pda as a microphone so that everbody in the audience can listen to his statement. everybody else can view relevant information of the speaking person [eg name, affiliation ...] on their mocca-pda.