Apparatus and method for dynamically limiting information sent to a viewing device

A system comprising:

• a document server;
• a handheld device configured to receive a document transmitted from the document server, the handheld device being further configured to edit selected portions of the document in response to user input, and to generate control signals indicative of the user input;
• and
• a gateway device configured to respond to the control signals by controlling a flow of information transmitted from the document server to the handheld device in accordance with the control signals;
• wherein the gateway device is configured to dynamically restrict the flow of information transmitted from the document server such that user selected portions of the document are removed in subsequent transmissions of the document from the document server to the handheld device.

A system for dynamically filtering user-defined sections of data, comprising:

• a database configured to store documents;
• a control device configured to perform dynamic filtering of a user defined section of a document received from the database;
• and
• a user interface and viewing device remotely coupled to the control device, the user interface and viewing device being configured to convert user input based on selected portions of the document to filter signals and to transmit the filter signals to the control device so that the control device subsequently filters the document according to the filter signals and the interface and viewing device subsequently displays the filtered data.

A method, comprising the steps of:

• requesting a document through a wireless device coupled to a host device;
• receiving the requested document at the host device from a document server;
• filtering the received document using a predetermined set of filters;
• filtering the received document using a dynamic filter based on user-defined criteria transmitted to the host device from the wireless device;
• transmitting the filtered document from the host device to the wireless device;
• displaying the filtered document on the wireless device;
• storing user input based on the displayed document;
• converting the stored user input into the user-defined filter criteria;
• transmitting the user-defined filter criteria to the host device;
• and
• storing the user-defined criteria at the host device to define the dynamic filter;
• wherein the user-defined criteria is based on a selected portion of the document and wherein subsequent requests for the document through the wireless device are filtered to remove the selected portion of the document.

A method, comprising the steps of:

• fetching a document from a document server;
• restricting the fetched document using fixed criteria;
• restricting the fetched document using dynamic user defined criteria;
• transmitting the restricted document to a viewing device;
• receiving user input based on the restricted document;
• and
• converting the user input into the user defined criteria;
• wherein the user defined criteria is based on a selected portion of the document.

A system for controlling the transmission of information to a wireless device, comprising:

• a world-wide web (WWW) server with a plurality of web pages;
• and
• a gateway device configured to receive an information request from the wireless device identifying the WWW server and to establish a connection to the WWW server over a computer network, wherein the gateway device comprises:
• a fetch and cache component that retrieves and stores information from a web page on the WWW server;
• a restricting stage that removes at least one predetermined data type from the information retrieved from the web page to generate a filtered output;
• means for transmitting the filtered output to the wireless device;
• an additional restricting stage that receives a filtering command from the wireless device and that uses the filtering command to remove additional data from the information retrieved from the web page and generate the filtered output;
• and
• wherein the filtering command is generated by the wireless device in response to user input made by selecting a portion of the web page to be removed in subsequent transmissions from the gateway device.