dotMobi

Flagship mobile tool grows up

I hope that many of you are familiar with ready.mobi, our page checker for mobile content.

Since we launched, we've helped test literally hundreds of thousands of web and mobile web pages - putting them under scrutiny to see how well they're likely to behave on mobile devices, how well they comply to industry Best Practices, and whether they are dotMobi compliant.

It's been a roaring success. Thanks for using it!

The current version is a very quick and efficient way of sanity checking a single page. But many of you (especially those that are developing mobile content yourselves) have asked us whether we can help you test whole sites.

Hmm. Well we thought about it. And then thought some more. And then wrote some software. And then we tested it. And now we can proudly reveal the beta of the new version, with our welcome note here.

The new version is a radically step up in terms of functionality of the tool. (In fact, although we're calling it v1.1, it's far more like a v2.0). Most noticable is the fact that you can test whole sites - the tool will follow links and crawl multiple pages - and of course report your "mobile readiness" for all of those it finds.

If you want to take part in the beta process, please sign up for a user account at dev.mobi, and check the box that says "ready.mobi v1.1 beta user". You'll then be able to sign in to beta.ready.mobi and get started.

It's not perfect yet, but we're pretty proud of this - hopefully another demonstration that we're  trying to help developers build compelling mobile content and that we're about a little more than just domains alone...

Have fun, and let us know how you like it. We'll be actively canvassing for final improvements that we can make before we unleash it properly on the world.

The "Go Mobile" Program -- What, How, And Why

Today we announced the "Go Mobile!" program for our channel partners.  This program is the culmination of months of work aimed at helping businesses and individuals create mobile optimized content, easily and cost effectively. 

Here is how:

1) Any individual or business can now use the Mobile Ready Tool to see just how optimized for mobile their site content is.  If you are the CEO of a big company, you might want to know what is the overall score and what are the costs you impose on your customers, if they were to access your site via a mobile phone.  On the other hand, your in house web development team would be interested in knowing exactly how the site performed in each of the 28 separate tests done.  Let me emphasize that this is free to use and in the public domain for all content owners.  Go ahead and test a few of the dotMobi showcase sites as a comparison.

2) Web developers now have one centralized forum; http://dev.mobi -- again, free to join and use -- to share information, participate in forums/blogs/polls, have access to open source tools and get FREE on-line training.  Up to now, there has been some excellent developer forums available, however, their focus has been quite specialized, e.g. development issues related to a specific mobile phone manufacturer or for a specific application suite.  Again this is what dotMobi is about: proposing an open, standards-based platform, sharing knowledge across the mobile eco-system and making available valuable resources for free in the public domain.

3) Many businesses already have access via their registrar to a tool that helps them create a mobile optimized site that is already .mobi compliant.  GoDaddy, the largest provider in the US for example has a tool called "Website Tonight®".  As of last count more than 15 separate well-known resellers had announced a tool of this kind all based on the dotMobi content development style guide.  To ensure all resellers have access to these tools, we will soon announce a free tool that enables anyone to create a mobile optimized site that is guaranteed to be .mobi compliant.  No coding experience of any kind required!  If you can upload a picture, or copy and paste... you will be able to use it. 

We have long maintained that the growth of the Internet on Mobile is highly dependant on how easily content providers of any kind ( large and small) are able to create and update relevant local content.  Availability, ease of use and cost of content creation tools (in this case, FREE) is a key motivator in convincing the majority, not just the early minority.

4) Lastly, we have provided our channel partners marketing incentives to push out to these tools to their customer base.

The "Go Mobile!" program is another step in continuing to deliver on the promises of an open and mobile Internet.

Emulator update

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the mobile phone emulator that are now running on our website. There were some sites that didn't work on the emulator, despite the fact that they did work on real phones. We've made a few changes since to fix some of these problems (there was a problem with a particular type of redirect) but I'd like to repeat the call for people to try this out and let us know of any problems that you have to help make this tool as useful as possible.

The dotMobi Mobile Emulator

Some of you may have noticed that we recently put a mobile phone emulator on mtld.mobi. The purpose of the emulator is simply to raise awareness to the fact that the vast majority of existing websites do not work well (if at all), on most phones.

There have been a few issues with this. As with all emulators, the emulation is not 100% perfect -- in some cases a site that may work (or partially work) on a real phone may not work on the emulator. We'll try to fix these problems as we reproduce them. Nonetheless, we feel that this is a worthwhile effort.

Feedback from around the blogosphere has been mixed -- it worked well for some, not for others.

We'd appreciate any additional feedback, specially if it helps us replicate and diagnose problems.

Please let us know!