Posts Tagged ‘mobile+industry’

In the latest attempt to make the ‘traditional’ Internet, and Mobile Internet into “one place,” Sprint has rolled out OpenWeb, an Openwave product. OpenWeb is “a content adaptation platform that transparently intercepts requests for all standard web sites and converts the web pages into highly compressed, functional WAP2 pages.” In simpler terms, OpenWeb is a process that takes an existing Web site, and does its best to make it a decent experience on a mobile device.

The Good
With access to the Mobile Web by the average cellphone user still in the vast minority, it is a great step in getting users used to visiting the mobile web on their handset. While there may be some underlying reasons for Sprint rolling this out (competing with the iPhone web experience), I do feel like Sprint is looking further down the line on progressing the industry in the right direction. The more people they can get on the mobile web, the more of an opportunity there is for everyone.

The Bad (and the Uuuugly)
As you may expect, there is truly no “one algorithm to rule them all.” Since it is hard to find consistency across most web sites, as you can imagine, the task of re-purposing a web page into a screen less than 1/5th the size yields a pretty messy result. Additionally, the compression algorithms can wreak havoc on image quality. For the mobile developers out there, say goodbye to the User-Agent (active mobile developers may have seen this as OpenWeb was being tested regionally in February), it gets replaced by an OpenWeb User-Agent. If you use this at all you must double check your site isn’t being put through OpenWeb.

Fear not, Mobile specific sites
Fortunately, in true form, Sprint has provided an “ignore my site” capability for companies with mobile specific destinations. Under the new system, as a global “ignore”, anything starting with “m” or “wap”, including the word “mobile” in the URL, or ending in “.mobi” will NOT be transcoded or optimized (these are just a few, full list available in the Sprint developer forum). Additionally, Sprint has allowed submissions of URLs to not be put through the OpenWeb process.

While its sometimes daunting to see the Carriers flex their muscles, and show how one simple changes can force an entire industry to comply, I feel Sprint did a great job of keeping the community informed of the rollout, and offering sufficient means to work with the new system. As a whole, this can only be good for the industry, we just hope some standard gets set and each carrier doesn’t follow suit with their own idea of how to do this.

Several members of the Fresh Team had the exciting chance to attend the 2008 CTIA Wireless trade show in Las Vegas. The show was amazingly huge, walking the show end to end was a task in itself, with exhibitors ranging from manufacturers, wireless hardware, software, entertainment, content, aggregators, and on and on. The Las Vegas convention center was a great venue to house such a large show in, allowing plenty of space for the event itself as well as ample meeting areas. In comparison to March 2007 event in Orlando, this show was noticeably larger, a great sign that despite a possible US recession, the mobile industry worldwide continues to see great growth and potential.

From the perspective of mobile content management, detection, delivery, and marketing management - we were surprised to see very little new innovation compared to what we saw six months ago. Most of our competitors were more or less pitching the exact same product or service. In comparison, over the same 6 month period we had a very productive cycle and have continued to innovate our mobile platform in the areas of device detection and content delivery, as well as extending the marketing and reporting availability for an operational client.

Content developers continue to push out extremely popular J2ME games, which have helped content sales continue upward, despite stale performance with ringtones. This was also recently covered by Mobile Entertainment magazine. Of interest to Fresh was the XM/Blackberry collaboration on launching an application (link) which allows users to listen to their favorite XM Stations on most newer Blackberry’s. The subscription based service (using Bango) is a great example of a company taking advantage of what they already have, to successfully enter the mobile space.

There seems to continue to be a challenge getting the carriers to become more prominent at these events. With respect to the mobile Internet, they are the gatekeepers, and the show was tens of thousands of people telling you how they were going to get past the gate. On the flip side, this feeling of being locked out is diminishing; either because we accepted the current state of off-deck mobile, or carriers and manufacturers are loosening their grip just enough to see the ramifications of fully opening up. Only time will tell.

Overall, from what we’ve seen at CTIA and knowing where we stand, we are very comfortable with the development schedule we have laid out in continuation of the ever improving Fresh Mobile Platform. Our clients have, and continue to provide us ‘from the trenches’ feedback, allowing us to rapidly deploy features and updates to fulfill the needs of our ever evolving clients in a rapidly changing industry. Be sure to stay tuned to the blog to keep up to date with new features, research, and results!