MobileWebsiteWatch

In a fantastic and comprehensive article in the Wall Street Journal today, reporter Nick Wingfield illuminates a very prescient analogy of the mobile world today: in the same way that companies were once eager to deploy laptops to executives and technicians to increase mobility, today smart phones are stepping up to take over that role thanks to the significant advantages they have in power and portability.

This is not to say that the laptop will got eh way of the dodo, but the truth is, more often than not business travelers leave their laptops in hotel rooms and rental cars while going to meetings and about routine business activities armed only with their lighter, and more portable smart phones. These souped-up cousins of ordinary cellphones, with email and other Internet functions, have become much more powerful in the past year.

For years, mobile workers have been ditching their desktop computers for laptops that they can take wherever they go. Now road warriors are starting to realize that they can get even more portability — and lots of computing punch — from smart phones…The result: Many travelers are now using smart phones the way they once used laptops — and laptops the way they once used desktop computers. Mobile workers rely on their laptops to create PowerPoint presentations and do other heavy-duty computing. But then they leave the laptops in their offices, homes or hotel rooms and take their smart phones out into the world.

Many are going even further opting to leave the laptop behind entirely and the demand for mobile devices that can handle more heavy duty business specific applications is huge.  In a report published in January by research firm In-Stat based on a survey of 1,402 technology users, roughly 52% of respondents to the In-Stat survey said they could envision using a smart phone in the future as their sole computing device.

The overall result of this shift toward mobile has obvious implications on the need for mobile web optimization.  For many Software as a Service (SaaS) companies such as Salesforce.com and Netsuite, mobile optimization has become a pressing and urgent need as well as a massive revenue driver.  Salesforce.com offers business people access to its cloud CRM software from their mobile devices with a hefty price tag, starting at about $600 per user/year–almost twice the price of a copy of Micrsoft Office.

When deployed effectively (note keyword “when”), many companies are discovering that these costs are actually a real bargain price for the massive boost in efficiency and employee accessibility to work data.  A study released by the Aberdeen Group highlights some of the advantages and audit-able improvements in efficiency and cost realized by the Salesforce solution. The supporting factor that makes mobile web optimization from both the customer and company standpoint is the explosive growth and demand for services in the mobile market.  THis growth is occurring at a breakneck pace and both has not only executives and emplyee clamouring for more and more services they can access right from their phone but from customers, investors, and interested parties of all types the world throughout.  After all, isn’t each road warrior exec who depends on their Blackberry for everything just another human who also wants: to order food, buy gifts online, book hotels and travel deals, check in on investor relations areas of compaines in their porfolios, get movie/concert tickets, or any of the million other things we all do on the Internet everyday?
Today, smartphone sales well outpace laptops, and that trend is rising faster than the switch from desktop to laptop occurred.  See graph.

With this kind of growth coupled with the rapidly increasing adoption or inclusion of data plans in most mobile contracts (many smartphones like the iPhone and the G1 cannot be used without an unlimited data plan) companies of all sizes can no longer afford not to embrace mobile both internally and externally if they hope to be competitive and in touch with their customer, consumers, employees most importantly, their competitors.

From MocoNews via BBC: the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK has ruled that original Apple iPhone television advertisement is misleading for consumers BBC reports. The ad, which says that “all the parts of the Internet are on the iPhone”, omits the fact that the iPhone does not support Flash or Java - two programs that “form part of many online sites”, the authority says. Apple, while not issuing an official statement in its defense, claims that the ad referred to the availability of Web pages, rather than their specific appearance.

The ASA said the ad “gave a misleading impression of the internet capabilities of the iPhone”, and should not be aired again.

The ruling states: “We noted Apples argument that the ad was about site availability rather than technical detail, but considered that the claims “You’ll never know which part of the internet youll need” and “all parts of the internet are on the iPhone” implied users would be able to access all websites and see them in their entirety. We considered that, because the ad had not explained the limitations, viewers were likely to expect to be able to see all the content on a website normally accessible through a PC rather than just having the ability to reach the Web site.”

This turn of event really goes to back up many of the points brought up in one of my earlier posts: “iPhone Proves Bigger Not Always Better.”  All of the companies that are featured in the ad now have mobile Web sites and/or iPhone optimized sites.  This is about all the proof you need to see that even with the newest technology both network and hardware, the desktop Internet as we know it is never coming to mobile.  Even as this technology improves, the public demand for optimized and streamlined content is not going away but rather growing. The screen is just not big enough to hope to avoid mobile view optimization.

In the second of a recent two part article on MocoNews, the major Olympic mobile WAP sites are reviewed and rated.  Credit has to be given to the writer for taking note that the sites reviewed in this part of the article were not up to the standard of mobile site that can be found outside of the realm of WAP, the elephaont in the room remains ‘why are these sub-par WAP sites the mobile homepages of these major news organizations if such better experinces can be put together for one event?’

In our second of a series (first is here) of reviews on mobile content from the Olympics, we took a look at the major sports news sites – ESPN (NYSE: DIS), NBC Sports, CBS (NYSE: CBS) Sports and Fox Sports – to see which is providing the best mobile experience on their mobile site’s homepages. Using a Nokia (NYSE: NOK) E71 and Nokia’s web browser, we compared each of the companies’ mobile WAP sites to determine which gave more credence to the global competition and how each presented Olympics-related content on a mobile phone. Albeit richer experiences can be had outside the constraints of WAP, results we encountered for purposes of this review were disappointing.

Two specific areas that were particularly bemoaned were:

1. The lack or video content available, and;
2. Poor mobile search architecture and content structure within the site

While the lack of streaming video content is not particulary suprising, since it is probably not offered anyway and also the Nokia E71 browser does not support video output when in WAP mode.  The more relevant gripe tot he world of mobile web enthusiasts at large is the issues about search performance and overall organization.

In the first installment of this article, the “medals” awarded to the mobile sites lay out their overall performance and all the top performers were all noted for intuitive layout and releveant content.  In fact, some of the sites were even noted as offering more content and still not ranked as highly.  This is just a simple fact of the mobile world, it doesn’t take much content before the user experience gets messy.

As far as getting bad results on these sites search pages on the phone for detecting mobile optimized content goes, the soltuion is to do something othe than WAP.   Namely, build a site ethat outputs to WAP only if it has to.  By optimizing the pages that already exist, you can be assured that the search box will not call content that the browser can’t display.

The worst performer was CBS, according to the review. “Not a single mention of the Olympics on CBS Sports Mobile main page and nothing under its menus and categories. Only after clicking on ‘more headlines’ did we pull up a few Olympics-related stories. After searching specifically for ‘Olympics,’ the site returned more than 100 links to news articles aggregated from various news outlets.”

That highlights a persistent problem across many WAP sites: the fact that many search boxes doesn’t seem at all tuned for mobile use. It’s painful to discover that on the go, when suddenly your handset freezes up because it’s trying to download and digest a huge desktop site that it can’t even render properly.

A good example of a website that truly employs best practices and avoids all these WAP woes is one like American Airlines.  If you go http://aa.com on a Nokia N70, for example, you will be automatically redirected to mobile.aa.com and will see a WAP view.

Now take an iPhone and also go to http://aa.com.  You are, again, detected and automatically redirected to http://mobile.aa.com, but this time you see a special view for the iPhone.  If you use a Blackberry, same thing, it always looks perfect.

The platform that spits this view back to you is much more intelligent than a simple WAP site.  Ideally this is the way that all mobile Web sites should be designed.  WAP site are cluncky and need a lot of maintenence to keep them up to date.  CMS sites that are just smaller versions of content are even worse.

Luckily, the tide is turning and major brands, like American Airlines, are making the appropriate adjustments to properly support the rapidly growing number of people who simply won’t accept a WAP-experience.

AT&T reports a surge in revenue, subscription and use of it mobile data networks last week.  A few inescapable stats can be found below:

• All mobile internet use revenue was up by 52% in Q2 08 over same period last year
• Mobile revenue from mobile web browsing up 100% - while other services like SMS and e-mail were up 50%
• Number of subscribers with smart phones and active data plans up 225% over last year

The company had only been selling the new iPhone 3G for 2 weeks when these numbers were issued and so continued strong growth is to be expected.  Sprint, Verizon, and others are expected to have similarly strong revenue growth in these areas despite a weak economy and other losses/write-off to acquisitions etc.

Here is a really great article from NewsFactor that addresses the misconception that is all too common that mobile web optimization will be made unnecessary by advances in phones’ browsers. Since Apple’s commercial that advertised “the whole Internet in your pocket”, ALL of the sites they demonstrated (NY Times, JetBlue..etc) now have optimized iPhone interfaces if not full blown mobile websites.

By John Markoff - July 15, 2008 7:27AM

In a look at the custom interfaces for each iPhone-aware Web site, it’s obvious that reading a Facebook newsfeed or looking up the value of a friend’s home on Zillow doesn’t require a 20-inch computer display. It may also make more sense to keep the grocery list, play a game or read an online newspaper while mobile.

When Steve Jobs introduced the Apple iPhone 18 months ago, he contended that viewing the Web on it was comparable to browsing on a desktop personal computer.

As it turns out, Jobs may well have understated the quality of the iPhone Web experience. Visiting Web sites that have been redesigned for the iPhone is often a quicker and more pleasing experience than it is on those increasingly cinema-style desktop displays.

It seems counterintuitive, but small really is beautiful.
…continue reading iPhone Proves that Bigger Isn’t Always Better