dotMobi

Building a mobile site has never been easier

dotMobi wants to de-mystify the process of developing a mobile presence, and one of the ways we are trying to make this happen is through a partnership with Akmin. They've developed an extremely easy-to-use mobile site builder called MobiSiteGalore.

Through the "Go Mobile" programme, this is something that our domain registrars offer to their customers, and it's proving a great way to get content live on new domains.

But if you want to find out what all the fuss is about and put it through its paces, feel free to try it out today at Site.mobi - after a very simple sign up process, you'll be led through a wizard that lets you design, structure, format and deploy your mobile site.

Your site then automatically gets tested against Ready.mobi

It really is easy. Please let us know how you get on!

Ready.mobi Goes Gold

Some of you may be familiar with our Ready.mobi page checker (previously known as "MobiReady").

Well, hot on the heels of our exciting developer guide announcement, and after an extended period in beta, we're taking v1.0 of Ready.mobi to 'gold' status - meaning that this version of the tool is functionally complete, pretty much all of the bugs have been nailed, and we've reached our stability and performance goals.

What's Ready.mobi for? Well, as you know, the .mobi extension is partly about ensuring that the user is going to have a satisfactory experience when they access a site with a mobile handset.

If you're developing or deploying content, we want to help you easily test that your content meets a range of basic criteria that will make that more likely.

So the idea of Ready.mobi is to take a URL of your domain, site, or page, and simulates a real mobile device accessing that content. With the content that is returned, we check it over for .mobi compliance, size, adherence to W3C best practices (using the MobileOK tests), and so on. We also aggregate the results to produce a single "mobi-readiness" score - out of 5.

With the report, you're then able to identify issues, see what you need to do to improve the quality of the page, and even see an emulation of what the site looks like on a couple of common handsets.

I guess I should mention some nifty new features we added in the last few weeks:

• An 'advanced options' tab allows you to specify which device you'd like the checker to access. If you're performing content adaptation on your server, you'll be able to see how that affects the results.
• http://ready.mobi is now accessible on a mobile handset (as of course it should be), providing a summary of the testing in a way that is suitable for the mobile context.
• 'Fixit articles' tell you more detail about how to actually solve some of the common problems we detect. Click 'help me fix it' on any failing tests for more information on how to do so.

But there's much, much more in there too - so please take a look and see what you think. Also please let us know of any improvements or features you'd like to see in v1.1 - we're already starting to plan our next major release of the tool for the summer.

DotMobi Mobile Web Developer's Guide released

I am happy to announce that dotMobi recently released the Mobile Web Developer's Guide . The goal of this guide is to provide web developers with enough knowledge to get started on the creation of Web content for mobile users. It covers the benefits of publishing for mobile users, how mobile delivery differs from desktop delivery and how to design for the mobile context.

We felt the need for this guide because, while there are plenty of standards and best practices already out there, it's nice to have a document that covers the standards and how to actually implement them, in one place, in a readable way. This guide takes the standards that are out there (W3C Best Practices, XHTML MP etc) and fills in of the surrounding information, along with techniques and code samples for putting these into use.

One of the biggest problems that desktop web developers have in transitioning to mobile is understanding the complexities of the mobile landscape -- data charges, mobile operators, device diversity, adaptation and so on. The dotMobi guide goes to great lengths to try to cover these issues in detail. We also cover the "mobile context" - since this is so important in creating a useful mobile experience, and quite different to what a PC web developer may be used to.

A big thanks to the guys in Blue Flavor and Brian Fling in particular for their work in producing this guide for us. Thanks also to Jo Rabin and for his contributions. Last but not least, thanks to Ritva Siren and Serge Haumont at Nokia, and Hans Ovesen and Peter Yeung from Ericsson for their advice and guidance.

You can find the guide here (600Kb PDF) Enjoy!

.Tel and .Mobi - let's get the facts right

A couple of days ago, someone forwarded me a blog entry trying to compare .tel and .mobi.  The conclusion the author drew was that .tel is similar to dotMobi and hence a "threat."  Happily, when I looked at the comments, many had chided the author for not checking the facts behind his stated opinion. I am glad the Internet is a "self governing" body. 

Fact: Look at our site and the .Tel application , they are entirely different. 

Tel is a "universal text based communications identifier".  Keep in mind a URL is a text-based identifier for an IP address -- hence easier to remember.  They want to take advantage of the IP infrastructure and emerging VOIP to link various contact data to an easy to remember .tel name.  They say that this allows individual and organizations to manage their various contact info as well. The example they use is hertz.tel.  Hertz can potentially route the calls to any of of their call centers based on what may be most appropriate for the customer. 

.mobi is a discovery method and a set of open-source tools for mobile content that ensures the mobile site you are accessing works on your mobile.

What about these two services (or even companies) sound remotely similar?

I wish Telnic and the smart and capable people behind .tel  (some of whom I know) all the success.  I am sure they are eager as well to make sure the market and the public get the right idea about their offering.  Bloggers who wish to stir up controversy are doing a disservice not only to us but more importantly to their readers. 

Mobile ad space heats up with the entrance of Nokia!

The mobile ad space is heating up. Nokia's entrance is significant, as they enter the fray with traditional players such as Google, MS, and Yahoo as well as smaller but nimble start-ups such as Admob.

It also confirms some of the predictions about the promise of mobile advertising.  It shows they recognize the opportunity and want to build on their brand and leverage their market power building services connecting operators, advertisers and publishers.  And they figure they are at the nexus of it all.

What they announced yesterday was two services. First, the Nokia Ad Service: a fully managed service for advertisers to do targeted advertising on mobile services and applications. The second was the Nokia Advertising Connector, which is a private label service.  What is cool about the connector is that it selects and then feeds to the device text, visual, audio or video ads -- depending on the user's context.

The services have already had some favorable pilots but will not be commercially available till later on this year.  The question is will operators see them as a good alternative to the traditional players, or will they see this as a potential threat long term given the power of the brand. 

Overall though, this is a great sign.  More competition from players small and large will mean content providers will increasingly have a means to monetize their content.  We are working to get tools in their hands to help them build that content.  After all, without enough good content, there won't be much out there to "monetize."

Hat-tip: Mobile Entertainment.

SXSW Goes Mobile

We don't often blog about great .mobi sites that we come across, although we probably should.

But http://sxsw.mobi is one that seems totally worthy of coverage. (South by Southwest is a series of media, film, and music festivals)

As the site itself says, SXSW.mobi is "South by Southwest's new adventure in mobile content delivery". Being a Brit, I'm hoping the BBC gives it some coverage too.

The site itself is very easy to navigate, and stylistically consistent with the non-mobile site. (The only disappointment seems to be that the .mobi site is not promoted on the first page of the .com site, which is where it deserves to be!)

But what's really notable is how the site designers have clearly thought about what you'd want to access on your mobile device, rather than trying to cram in all the non-mobile site's content.

So, naturally, the focus is on breaking festival news, directories of other registrants (to find out who to meet up with), and - coolest of all - trailers of the movies (and clips of the bands) that are on at the festival.

Are you wondering why everyone is queuing outside a packed venue at the festival? Fire up your mobile, check out the trailer, and see what you're missing. Genius.

If you're going to the festival, have fun. And don't forget to give the site a try when you're there.