After my overview of ixenland I have decided to take a look at all of the large and growing actors in this space. Over the next couple of reviews I will look at all of the best known ones. Today we will start with a fairly recent actor in this space but who has acquired an impressive number of users :

MocoSpace is Boston-based startup launced in April 2007 that provides social networking for mobile phone users. Network features include photo, video, chat, and microblogging in a very Twitter like way.

They raised $3 million in first round of financing in January 2007. Investors included General Catalyst, Pilot Group and Michael Deering. The company has 15 employees (half in Boston, half in Israel).

As of late August 2007, the company claims to have almost 1 million registered users (with 6,000 more per day) and 500 million monthly page views !

Their mobile social network is simple to use and fast.. which is always a plus on a mobile. But lets start at the beginning. When you come to their home you get this on a Nokia and on an iPhone which looks quite a bit like the menu of a phone in fact :

Signing up is easy and fast. It is done in two quick pages :

Signing up gives you a profile (your sign in name is your public name too) a mobile site that you can personalize by making a personal message, changing photos and adding backgrounds or changing font colors.. Ã la MySpace. To say that this is simple to do is an understatement. You get an URL immediately.. mine is mocospace.com/u/evademel which is your site and you can send to friends (the only issue here I would say is it is a bit hard to type slashes /// on a mobile.. but well lets not split hairs).

After that there are the other classic features of a social network.. view profiles with some limited search features or a near me feature, send a message, make friends (there is a cool feature which is find me a friend which apparently randomly finds a person of the opposite sex..) and create a list of friends. When on a persons profile you can vote for that person as well. You then have the video section, the photo section, etc.. The chat and forums work very well and are quite busy so for new users this is great.

Basically there is a hodge-podge of social site tools and services.. you have a feeling you are on a MySpaceYouTubeFacebook on the mobile. This isn’t a bad thing… it just doesn’t seem to have 1) anything new, different or innovative and 2) it doesn’t take advantage of the mobility and geo-localisation possibilities of a mobile. Also the service as I said seems to hesitate as to what it is all about. Is it dating, is it a friends network or is it a video/phot sharing service ?

So my verdict is well guys you are doing a good job.. but you have to find that spark of innovation to make this a truly unique sticky service that will give you the staying power to outlast the big web guys that will figure out the mobile internet soon enough.

Join MobilOpen – the off deck mobile internet group : News, networking, cooperation…

AdMob has released their metrics of who visits in terms of countries and regions as well as what handsets generate traffic on their ad serving network. This data is particularly interesting because the vast majority of AdMob’s traffic is off deck and so the target of the members of MobilOpen.org.

This snapshot of mobile data talks for itself :

The numbers for the devices have a few surprises too :

What isn’t said here is also of key interest :

Three of the top five devices in the US are Smartphones (BlackBerry and Blackjack).

The iPhone is already generating meaningful mobile web traffic.

To get the full report just click here :

Nokia has a new nGage and a totally new strategy.

They are now looking to make the nGage games cross platform so that they work on PCs for example and on a variety of Nseries mobiles. Also and most interesting they are keen on taking a developers view rather than a handset manufacturers view.. they are planning to launch a community and even a game that is generated by users!

To know more read the exclusive interview with Nokia’s games boss Mark Ollila on Developmag.

With this and other developments it seems that Nokia is on a real rework of their dominiant position to become a player outside of purely handsets and become more of a content and even a community company.

This seems a wise and timely move. Nokia has superb brand recognition but hasn’t really banked on that properly over the years. Now they seem bent on it. Which is exciting for the mobile internet.

F1-live.com content is available on your mobile.

“”

They have an excellent series of web sites with news, scoops, images, video, podcasts and in depth info on each track. They cover Formula 1, Rallies and the Motorcycle Grand Prix. Their off deck sites have been launched over the last 3 months. Here you can see screen shots of them with links :

“” “” “”

Gaël Bonnafous who is Head of Mobile business at Racing Live is pleased with the results “After just 2 months, with no official launch we have passed the traffic of our premium sites in terms of volume. We are looking forward to see how things take off with the 2008 Forumla 1 season.”

We can understand why they are so please, their un-official numbers are quite impressive they have had a growth of 400% over the past couple of months. This type of growth shows the huge potential and the thirst that exists off deck for quality content.

What we like is that the sites are also multi language, you can get info in French, English and Spanish for the moment with other languages in the works.

Other existing features will be up coming promises Gaël, such as podcast interviews and some exclusive videos.

Meanwhile for your phone you can satisfy your selves with some cool images like this one :

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Join MobilOpen — the off deck mobile internet group : News, networking, cooperation…

I found a specially made for iPhone version of Hangman. The graphics are cool and make full use of the iPhone. I must say I have eagerly been awaiting content for iPhones.. and looks like finally we will get some.

Instead of loading a Java application to your phone it uses a flash like site that uploads quit fast.

And then voila you have your handman board.

Up to you to find the words… What is pretty cool is the little guy has an iPhone in his hand as he hangs. Lol. I liked that.. also the words are pretty cool because they have a tendency to use new economy words like QuickTime, YouTube…

Join MobilOpen – the off deck mobile internet group : News, networking, cooperation…

By Nigel Choi
Introduction

While experts agree that website reformatting results in poor user-experience,
this aspect may not be so obvious to the less technically savvy.
While Luca has blogged about how bad
making adaptation the default is, I figured it was worth spending
some of my weekend to demonstrate the point as visually as possible for
everyone who cares about this issue.

This document shows how Vodafone UK messes up a website that has
their own way of handling mobile access. I chose the
Wall Street Journal as an example: a popular website,
which also offers its subscribers a mobile-optimized version
of their site. Of course, the problem is the same for any site that
“multi-serves” their content after recognizing the device through the
HTTP user-agent header, the one that Vodafone is removing from all HTTP requests.

Note: I used the good
DeviceAnywhere to collect real
pixel-perfect screenshot of a Nokia 6288 on the VodaUK network.

Some Background Info

Using a PC web browser, the Wall Street Journal is largely a
subscriber-only website.

WSJ is designed with desktop use in mind. As with many other websites,
it’s full of navigation toolbars. These are quite common web development
patterns on commercial websites

“mobile”
The situation is different when users access http://wsj.com/ with a
mobile phone. In this case, users are redirected to http://mobile2.wsj.com/,
which offers WSJ content in a format specifically designed for mobile devices.

The image on the right gives you a feel of the mobile experience.
The UI is not as “cluttered” if compared to the desktop version,
which is a rather obvious choice when considering the costraints
of mobile devices (and mobile users!).
For example, major market indexes are near the top of the page, i.e.
real-time information that’s near the heart of many WSJ subscribers and
which will keep them coming for more multiple times during the day.

Immediately after that, come the latest news.

Interestingly, the mobile version offers access to the full version of
articles that are only available to paying subscribers on the web.
Obviously, someone in WSJ realised that loging in with username
and password on a mobile device was discouraging way too many users
from adopting the service in the first place. Talk about
the importance of usability!

…and then come Novarra and Vodafone

On Vodafone’s network, however, this user-experience is not achievable.
Instead of being redirected to the mobile website, Vodafone has decided to
masquerade every device on their network as a desktop browser:
according to Vodafone (and their vendor Novarra)
users are better off when Novarra’s proxy fetches the desktop version
of the WSJ site, transcodes it and and serves users this transcoded version.

So I went on and checked this out!

The following picture will give you a rather clear idea of what the
website transcoding operated (perpetrated?) by Novarra is all about:

“”

becomes »

“”

The transcoded page has also retained a lot of information that is probably best left
out of the mobile version. Not only is the use case different, but the extra information takes
up valuable screen space and clutters a UI that’s already hard enough to use.

Since the transcoder has no knowledge of what is immediately valuable and what is not,
it ends up retaining almost the entire desktop website, toolbars included.
The original web page is “chopped up” into several mobile pages. Novarra is smart enough
to figure out that those toolbars are not good candidates for the first mobile page,
yet the content that does end on the first mobile page is hardly “critical” for
a mobile user: I got “Site Higlights”, while latest news

would be a much better choice.

There are several other problems with the transcoding. As you can
see from the phone image above, the grey toolbar on the top and bottom
of the mobile page is added by the Vodafone transcoder. However, to a
user who does not know about the transcoder, there is no way to tell
that the page has been adapted from a desktop page to a mobile page,
and that the grey toolbar is added by Vodafone. This is different
from what Google
does, for example, by placing a note “Page adapted for mobile phone” at
the bottom.

Other User Interface Problems

There are other serious issues with the user-experience offered by
the transcoded pages. The issues are illustrated by the pictures below.

A user that intends to read an article will click their way
down to the “What’s news” section of the transcoded front page (lots of clicks,
and everyone knows what a pain it is to be forced to click endlessly on
a mobile phone).

After the new page has been retrieved and transcoded, the user will need to scroll
down (lots of extra clicks) before the beginning of the article shows up on the screen.

But the suffering is not over. A hurdle that was simply not there in the mobile version
shows its ugly face: “PLEASE LOG IN AT THE TOP RIGHT OF THE PAGE”.
Hold on a sec. Where is the “top right of the page”? I am
a power users. Regular users would be totally lost here and would simply give up.

Being a mobile professional, I know what is going on: the system
is referring to the desktop page of course, so I have to scroll
all the way back up, then click on the previous page [<<] button
in the tool bar and reach the first
transcoded page again, which probably has the login form waiting for me.

One little note: I waited too long before clicking on the Novarra page buttons,
and I was greeted with an error message (third picture).

Trying again, I am able to enter my username
and password. After clicking on the
“Secure” login button, and several confirmation screens

later, I am somehow greeted by a non-transcoded page.
By entering http://wsj.com/ again in the browser, I am able to see the
full article.

….if Vodafone just let the User-Agent header through, the Wall
Street Journal would have detected that I am using a mobile phone and so much suffering
would be saved! I could access mobile front page, where the
article I want to read is one of the first links. I could just
click on the link and get the full
article. One click from the front
page and I’m reading the full article text, compared to the multiple
clicks and hunting I had to do using the transcoded version.

Adding to the problem is that I am not able to logout successfully.
I can click on the logout link and is told by
the site that I am logged out. But
it seems that the web site uses some sort of Javascript for logging
out. Going back to the site, I am still logged in. Changing the cookie setting in the phone does not
work. Instead, I have to hunt down the “settings”
link in the bottom of the transcoded page, and clear cookies there.

Conclusion

The Novarra reformatting is a mess: all I could see are roughly chopped up
web sites which deliver cluttered mobile pages. From an user-exprience point of view,
pages reformatted by Novarra are simply a nightmare which are guaranteed to keep
normal users away from the mobile web. As badly as one can criticize Novarra, though,
one can only be amazed about Vodafone UK’s decision to masquerade the
User-Agent HTTP header and spoil the efforts of thousands of
companies who tried to deliver a decent mobile experience to their mobile users.
Replacing real mobile experience with the pathetic parody of the web provided by Novarra
escapes my understanding.

Luca Passani is the shadow behind WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource File), the open source repository for mobile device information which is key for mobile internet sites and content providers.

Luca Passani is an Italian software engineer with many years experience in Web and Mobile Internet development. Prior to joining AdMob, where he currently works, Luca has spent seven years with Openwave Systems and taken part in projects for Telecoms in the US and Europe. Luca is known to the community of developers for creating popular software tools such as WURFL and WALL. In addition to that, Luca has authored articles and co-authored books on Mobile development. Recently, Luca published the so-called GAP guidelines, Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web, which helps developers create mobile sites with minimal effort.

We are pleased to publish the interview of key questions on Luca’s thoughts on the mobile internet.

Q: Firstly what made you decide to create WURFL ?

Luca: that decision did not come overnight. I had been working with the problem of device fragmentation even before WURFL was born in 2002. In fact, as early as 1999, I was involved in the creation of the first WAP portal for a major operator in Norway. Soon enough, I realized that the WAP micro-browsers of the only two WAP devices on the market at the time, Nokia 7110 and Siemens C35, behaved differently when you tried to code for high usability (programming the softkeys, using keyboard accelerators, minimizing the number of clicks required of users to operate applications). It was already in 99 that I started wondering how, as a programmer, I could work around such ‘deficiencies’ and deliver a good user experience on both phones. Believe it or not, that was the beginning of a long journey that brought me to a basic intuition, the solution to mobile market fragmentation had to come from the developer community, since the industry was ‘genetically’ unable to provide device information and open-source programming APIs that the industry itself badly needed to take off.
Being the founder of WMLProgramming at Yahoo! Groups, a 3000-developer strong community, I had a great place to look for supporters. In early 2002, I created the WURFL schema and developers started pouring device information into the WURFL repository. Some offered APIs to access the repository in different languages (primarily, PHP and Java). More and more often discussions about development problems ended with the suggestion that WURFL was the way to go. The market was obviously there, but the tools were not. WURFL deserves credit for turning the mobile web into the development platform it is today.

Q: Are you forging partnerships with the device manufacturers ? Or are they not interested ?

Luca: I never really talked to device manufacturers. And they never came and talked to me. Manufacturers’ background is consumer electronics. Their business and culture is about keeping proprietary information confidential, go through strict legal loops when interaction with other entities is needed. My background, and the background of most developers in the WMLProgramming/WURFL community is different. Our background is the Internet and the web: discussing openly, sharing, open-sourcing…a very different story.
Anyway, to answer your question, I never really talked to manufacturers and they never really talked to us (with the possible exception of Nokia, who has made a substantial investment for developers through Forum Nokia). They already have UAProf after all. If manufacturers were interested in sharing, they would put their device information in UAprof. If they don’t, there is a reason for it. They do not want their competitor to know exactly what their devices can or cannot do. They prefer working behind closed doors. As with many different aspects of human activities, this can be traced back to culture and economics. WURFL tries to collect device information through channels that do not depend on the cooperation of device manufacturers (not carriers). Of course, if manufacturers or carriers wanted to talk to me about contributing device information to WURFL, I would be very willing to accept their contribution and to commend them for the choice. Finally, for sake of truth, when a new device leaves traces of its existence in someone’s logs, UAProf information is used to initialize a WURFL profile.

Q: There remains lots of holes in WURFL, have you thought about creating an API that allows developers the world over to update the database when they have the correct info ?

Luca: Yes. Will you ask me the same question three months later down the road? Things are moving in this area, but I don’t want to say too much just yet. I would like to make it simpler for people to add/fix WURFL information directly, thus maximizing developers capability to help one another with their common problem (device market fragmentation) and go back to what each and everyone of those developers knows best: their fantastic unique mobile idea.
I’ll use this opportunity to reaffirm a basic concept: WURFL will stay as open and free for everyone as it can be.

Q: How have the telcos reacted to WURFL ?

Luca: This is a great question. Operators have ignored WURFL initially. They figured they could keep track of their own devices with Excel spreadsheets and the cooperation of device manufacturers. Soon enough, GSM carriers realized this was not really working. They were losing track of devices on their networks and the situation is only getting worse. Today, also non-GSM carriers have the same problem: in spite of the closer cooperation with OEMs, it is not simple to figure out device capabilities for all the devices on their network. Today we are at the point where some operators have adopted WURFL in one form or the other, and endless more have evaluated it, even though they decided that WURFL did not cut it for them because they could not trust the information there and, more importantly, there was no company to call in case something went wrong.
Today all carriers are aware of WURFL and they are even recommending it more or less officially to their content partners who cannot afford the expensive commercial solutions in terms of money and flexibility (or, more precisely, lack of flexibility). Carriers are realizing of the big opportunity with mobile content and web, and they need to stimulate their ecosystem.

Q: Talk to us about Vodafone and the repercussions on the mobile internet. Do you think other telcos will do the same thing ?

Luca: As you know, I was really mad about what Vodafone did by forcing reformatting on all of its users. Let me take one step back. The fact that operators want to control their network, and find new ways to monetize it, is understandable and legitimate to some extent. But only as long as they are a good citizens in the mobile ecosystem and do not threaten the existence of everyone else. The discussion around the removal of the user-agent string from HTTP requests might seem academic and way too technical, but it is the lynchpin to demonstrating that VodafoneUK is trying to take possession of the mobile net in ways that would be unthinkable on the regular Internet.
By forcing the Novarra reformatting proxy on all of its regular subscribers, VodafoneUK has escalated the tension between carriers and the rest of the world to levels which were unheard of before. If we discard the ideas that Vodafone wants to kill the mobile web or that they are simply totally inept at what they are doing, the only explanation left is that we are in front of a re-edition of the walled-garden in the worst possible form: enlarge the list of partners a bit, but, at the same time, empower the network and turn HTTP-clients into the stupid thin-clients that the telephony world has always wanted them to be.
Vodafone’s move is a declaration of war against smaller players in the mobile ecosystem. If the first battle is lost, winning the next ones will be harder. Other carriers will feel entitled to follow suit. It will be increasingly hard for developers and smaller companies to sell content and services independently of operators.
On the other hand, I do believe that developers and companies have a chance to react and make their voice heard. And there are a lot of voices out there. With my Vodafone rant, I tried to catalyze this process and bring the “chorus” to sing the same hymn: “take your hands off our HTTP requests”.
The biggest problem here is that the companies impacted by the introduction of Novarra are typically too small to react to Vodafone. So small that they cannot engage Voda either at the business or legal level. Individual companies have tried to react, but their voice was to feeble to be heard and respected at the corporate level. Interestingly, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have remained suspiciously silent in all of this. Either they have not realized what is going on, or they have their own hidden agenda to squeeze smaller players out of the industry in cooperation with carriers. Even entities such as W3C and dotMobi, which one would expect to go balistic on VodafoneUK’s attempt to disrupt HTTP, only came up with a mild reaction (irresponsably mild, I would say). It is obvious to me that while everyone has been very good at filling their mouths with words like “developers”, “content” and “open-up”, when it comes to defending legitimate developer needs, all of this support disappears and everyone prefers to be friend with the big bad guy.
This being the situation, I and the WURFL community are first in line to pick up the developer flag and protect the foundation of the mobile Internet. History will show that this is the right thing to do. If we successfully protect everyone’s chance to offer services on the net, this will be to everyone’s advantage. Not only small players, but also carriers which will see their customer-base enlarge as a consequence of the plethora of content and services available on the wide open Mobile Internet.
If we lose, other carriers will follow VodaUK’s example and the Mobile Internet will be set a few years back.

Q: What do you see as the future for the off deck mobile internet ? Where do you see this space going ? Do you think that the web 2.0 actors are going steamroll the mobile players?

Luca: I don’t have a crystal ball, so I am not comfortable making projections. What I know is that I was there in 94, when the web was available to students in Universities and not many others. At the time, I did not believe that the Internet in general and the web in particular would become the medium of the new millennium. In fact, I wasn’t even considering the notion at the time. The internet seemed just meant for the academic world.
Yet, creating web content was so simple and the concepts so powerful that the Internet took the world by storm within a few years.
If I had to compare the mobile web with big web in 1994, I would say that there are a lot of analogies and that there is a decent chance that mobile web content will be so simple to produce and consume, that it will take the world by storm. More than that, I think this is exactly what is going to happen eventually, with the biggest questions being how many years this is going to take.
Having said this, there are also important differences between the mobile web and the web. When the web was born companies were not even noticing, and making money with the web wasn’t being considered by those who created the first generation of web content. With the mobile web it’s a different situation. Carriers and other companies are thinking of monetizing the mobile web even before the mobile web is an established consumer reality. If the industry prevents human greed from creating insurmountable obstacles to content providers (as Vodafone and Novarra are doing), there is obviously space for on-deck and off-deck content complementing each other, with both worlds thriving in their respective spaces. Carriers make a large investment in setting up and managing the network. Their investments sometimes involve placing expensive devices in the hands of users at a fraction of their real price (subsidizing). Carriers obviously deserve a share of the pie because of this. Smaller players will also invest money and time in setting up new services. They also deserve a share of the pie when successful. If this vision of mine is shared by people who can take a decision, carriers and off-deck portals will co-exist for a long time to come. If the two realities will go to war with one another, this will likely create obstacles that damage everyone along the mobile value chain.

Q: Can you tell us something about your move to join AdMob?

Luca: Absolutely. AdMob embodies the spirit of innovation in the mobile internet which I feared to be lost for good back in 2001. AdMob has an honest (yet solid) business model that thrives on the satisfaction of everyone involved in delivering great content to end-users. Advertisers get a great new channel to place ads. Publishers get a simple way to monetize their applications. When I met Omar (AdMob’s CEO) at 3GSM in Barcellona earlier this year, he illustrated me some very simple facts: AdMob uses WURFL and so does a large chunk of their publishers. If I joined AdMob, I would be using a lot of my paid time to support WURFL and the mobile ecosystem. To me this was an offer I couldn’t refuse…

Thank you Luca for those pertinent comments and for your time.

Yahoo has announced its largest mobile search deal to date, inking an agreement with Telefonica to launch Yahoo’s oneSearch, e-mail and Flickr photo-sharing services in early 2008.

These services will be provided the operator’s 100 million-plus subscribers across Europe and Latin America. Telefonica is in Spain, and via O2 in the UK, Ireland and Germany.

The firms said they will split revenue generated from mobile advertising efforts.

This is of great import to off deck and on deck actors because search will change how mobile internet users surf the mobile web.

In fact I am interested on reporting on any of you who have significant traffic or interaction with search giants like Yahoo, Google or MSN on the mobile internet. Just email me to Shaun at Texom dot com with your experiences.

Mobile media developer and distributor Handmark named former Sprint VP Paul Reddick its new CEO. He succeeds August Grasis III, who will transition to chairman of the board. During his tenure as Sprint’s vice president of partner development and product innovation, Reddick spearheaded the operator’s push into the mobile data arena, building out a series of content and location-based service initiatives.

“The demand for mobile content and services is poised for tremendous growth, and Handmark is in a great position to make it happen,” Reddick said. “This company’s dogged focus on quality services and ease of use will be a great catalyst to drive not just adoption, but more importantly use. I’ve had the great privilege of growing with this industry as a carrier executive, and I am ready to lead this business through its next stage of growth.”

Handmark is one of the largest US based distributors of mobile applications on the web. Handmark aggregates mobile apps and develops in house their own. They have a strong focus on PDAs and smartphones.