Mowser is now in dotMobi

I am late as ever in noticing but am delighted to see that the Mowser assets have been acquired by dotMobi. Great to see those ideas continuing on as part of a greater whole! It is well described by Russell Beattie, Mike Rowehl and James Pearce.

The feed aggregator approach - Mippin

Following on from the demise of Mowser which went for full on transcoding of sites to allow efficient access from mobile my attention was caught by Mippin. They portray their service in the same way but require that the site provide an RSS feed so in fact what they are is a feed aggregator.

That said they do it very well - all nicely tied together and a nice widget to help people get your site onto their phone etc -

Monetisation is via advertising - with some careful validation done to ensure that a user isn't trying to monetize a feed that isn't theirs - and implemented in conjunction with admob so the site publisher gets the primary revenue.

All in all a very smooth experience - though the key question as ever is whether they can get enough footfall to make it all worthwhile.

PS. Carnival #126 is now up.

UPDATE: After my messing around yesterday I got as far as enabling advertising but then didn't have time to go and create an admob account so left it without one defined. It turns out that in these circs Mippin will serve ads from their own account - and a number of them were of the sort you tend to see in late night TV or spam email - not ideal!

This morning I have created my own admob account - with "age appropriate ads" disabled. The short term effect is that no ads are yet appearing but hopefully when they do they will be a little more appropriate!

UPDATE2: This is apparently not intended (see comment below) and they plan to fix it today so that ads don't appear at all until a valid admob id is provided.

Surfing the web on mobile

Sad to see that Russell has had to throw in the towel over at Mowser. Rather emphasises the fragile nature of startups and how they are completely dependent on the belief of their backers, but also, as Russell himself says, it also brings the whole mobile web proposition into question.

Mowser acted as a proxy which reformatted conventional websites for viewing on mobile. It is thus related to, though much less intrusive than, the various transcoders being inflicted upon users by various mobile networks.

These have generally caused problems for mobile content and site providers due to their indiscriminate deployment and lack of any coherent and consistent way for a site to avoid transcoding.

For the last few months Luca Passani of WURFL has been driving a campaign against indiscriminate reformatting and has proposed a standard methodology for mobile optimised/aware sites to avoid transcoding. Recently one of the major transcoder providers, OpenWave, have signed up to this. Hopefully more will follow!

In a few years time everybody will have a device and connection which allows full on web browsing and we will be looking back on all this somewhat bemusedly wondering what all the fuss was about. In the meantime the mobile web sadly must remain a somewhat brittle thing, and thus unlikely to really crack the mass market.

PS. The latest carnival is up at 3-Lib.

Analytics for the price of an ad

Mobilytics have created an intriguing little service where for the price of a small ad on each page of your mobile site you get free detailed usage stats covering referrer, search sources, country, carrier, and handset etc etc.

Even better if you have over 10000 page impressions a month they will share 70% of the revenue they earn on the ad space back to you.

What a nice simple and compelling idea!

PS. The latest carnival is up.

More data charge lunacy

I guess I should start with a small disclaimer. This was reported on the register and they have been known to skew their facts a little from time-to-time. That said - back in December they published a remarkable article on data charging gone wrong.

The problem with this - and other similar stories that do the rounds - is not that the operator can set some rules and then charge based on them. The problem is that the typical end use has no idea when they will be charged or not. There is no warning given - first you know is a five figure phone bill.

*If* vodafone really act like this then they need to look very hard at their processes and procedures.

A very long silence!

Looks like I got out of the habit of this! Only excuse is how busy we have been with rolling out new things like mixibodz - our new mobile and web 2.0 bridging avatar builder.

Now that GSM (sorry MWC - will take a while to get used to that!) is coming round again it is time to get back into the habit of posting. There is certainly no lack of things to say - and will no doubt start off with a rant about how the operators are dealing with mobile data charging before wandering off onto newer ground.

In the meantime I note the latest Carnival is up at Mobile Point View - will worth a look as ever - and that there will be a gathering of mobile bloggers on the Sunday evening before MWC that looks like it will be fun!

First post from mobile

The E61i seems to be a pretty practical tool for this - though perhaps a dedicated app might be a bit more streamlined than just logging in to the blogger website in the browser?