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.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, February 08, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, January 14, 2008
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!
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!
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
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?
Friday, June 08, 2007
30Mb/month = "unlimited"
Read it and weep ...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/04/orange_caps_at_30mb/
30Mb a month is "unlimited" - and I thought the Voda deal was bad! Still unclear how punitive it will be in terms of the "limit" and "acceptable use". Will going over cause you to get a phone call to tell you to moderate or upgrade; or cause a nasty surprise on your bill at the end of the month?
Geoff.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/04/orange_caps_at_30mb/
30Mb a month is "unlimited" - and I thought the Voda deal was bad! Still unclear how punitive it will be in terms of the "limit" and "acceptable use". Will going over cause you to get a phone call to tell you to moderate or upgrade; or cause a nasty surprise on your bill at the end of the month?
Geoff.
Vodafone and the "Mobile Internet"
Wednesday seemed like a normal day at first - then we started getting the first reports of content not being correctly delivered to Vodafone contract customers and so the fun began!
I should say from the start that I actually think that what Vodafone are trying to do, provide sensible access to the "real" internet across the majority of phones, is a very laudable thing. Unfortunately it is also very hard to do right - as they have discovered.
The basic principle of their system is to pass all web traffic from phones on their network through a number of transcoders which both try to reduce the size of any images etc in the pages, and make the layout easier to browse on a standard xhtml handset.
They key problem is deciding when to do this. They are taking the approach that since the majority of named sites are non-mobile they will assume that any site they don't specifically know to be mobile should be run through their transcoders.
Initially all hits to our sites were coming through
They do allow users to choose whether or not they see a transcoded or raw view - but this is expressed along the lines of an "optimised for mobile" view vs a "PC" view - the vast majority of users will plump for the first without understanding the implications.
As I said at the start I do see the reasoning behind their overall direction - now the "but"s!
Key things they have done badly wrong at a practical level are to roll out a system with this fundamental an impact ...
Looking at the wider view it is at best questionable for Vodafone to unilaterally set aside the usual standards and conventions to impose their view of what people should see when viewing the web through the Vodafone network.
That said the whole area of the mobile web is necessarily a process of compromise.
Geoff.
I should say from the start that I actually think that what Vodafone are trying to do, provide sensible access to the "real" internet across the majority of phones, is a very laudable thing. Unfortunately it is also very hard to do right - as they have discovered.
The basic principle of their system is to pass all web traffic from phones on their network through a number of transcoders which both try to reduce the size of any images etc in the pages, and make the layout easier to browse on a standard xhtml handset.
They key problem is deciding when to do this. They are taking the approach that since the majority of named sites are non-mobile they will assume that any site they don't specifically know to be mobile should be run through their transcoders.
Initially all hits to our sites were coming through
They do allow users to choose whether or not they see a transcoded or raw view - but this is expressed along the lines of an "optimised for mobile" view vs a "PC" view - the vast majority of users will plump for the first without understanding the implications.
As I said at the start I do see the reasoning behind their overall direction - now the "but"s!
Key things they have done badly wrong at a practical level are to roll out a system with this fundamental an impact ...
- without warning anybody in advance
- without full testing - since if they had tested it many of these issues would have been obvious
Looking at the wider view it is at best questionable for Vodafone to unilaterally set aside the usual standards and conventions to impose their view of what people should see when viewing the web through the Vodafone network.
That said the whole area of the mobile web is necessarily a process of compromise.
Geoff.
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