Apart from a Apart from a of domain activity going on, the dotMobi Technology Team sneaked out not one, but two important pieces of work this week.
We know that a little bit of a holy war has spilled out across the internet between mobile developers and Vodafones UK & Ireland: who have recently introduced transcoding proxies to improve the experience of users accessing not-made-for-mobile-sites.
We thought it was helpful to actually provide some constructive ideas for how developers can deal with the transcoding vogue. And at the same time, we’re hoping our relationship with standards bodies and network operators will help others to understand and mitigate the pain that developers feel.
I’d actually believe that transcoding is really just a safety net for users (who probably don’t actually know that many made-for-mobile URLs off the top of their heads). If, over time, such sites became more ubiquitous, one would hope that the need for blanket transcoding might decline.
2. As if that wasn’t enough, we launched a beta of our mobile web directory this week. We call it find.mobi because we think finding things when mobile is more important than searching for them.
We have a web UI on the front of the directory (which you can go ahead and try at http://find.mobi). We think there are some interesting aspects to the way this works, specifically intended for the mobile context. Ronan has the details.
We’re not trying to compete with existing search providers (including our own investors!). Rather, we are demonstrating how it is possible to showcase and champion made-for-mobile sites – which Find.mobi contains exclusively – and we’re able to syndicate the directory and the indexes to other parties to help them improve their knowledge of made-for-mobile sites. Enjoy.
Oh – and do I need to say we’ve still a global device database in the works? 🙂