Following Mobile Search: the dotMobi Way - Mowser Who?
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Russell Beattie (a co-founder of Mowser) announced that www.mowser.com would be shutting down as a provider of mobile technology for the Internet. The one-year-old company was wracked by debt and
Russel Beattie issued a damning indictment of the North American Internet community, stating that he had expected development of the mobile web in the West to follow the upward trajectory of Japan and Korea, but is now sure it isn't going to.
Mowser develops technology for browsing websites from mobile phones. According to their website, "Mowser mobilizes the web by taking HTML pages normally viewed on a PC and adapts them so they work on a mobile phone. During this translation process, Mowser converts the page in a predictable, linear manner." DotMobi snapped them up almost immediately; a report on dotMobi buying Mowser can be found here. DotMobi plans to integrate Mowser technology into new business-grade and consumer-grade mobile development tools, and to include aspects of it into dotMobi's popular content creation tools like http://find.mobi, DeviceAtlas and http://ready.mobi.
This technology works for both blogs and websites, and developers can find resources and code examples for their web applications at their wiki page here. The plug-ins on this page allow for modification of WordPress blogs and also for web sites.
As a web developer I would really love to see where this will take web development in the future. With the particular plug-in for word press found here, the developer can redirect devices that seem to be mobile devices to the Mowser version of his/her blog. It also adds headers to the HTML that WordPress generates to inform indexes that any inbound mobile requests should go through Mowser instead of getting adapted by the search provider. You can also use domain redirection to provide a mobile domain which can be configured to use that instead of going to mowser.com.
To anybody who is still wondering exactly how all this is going to affect SEO, any technology that changes how web sites are designed and what devices are connected to the Internet is going to create new and unique marketing channels which we cannot even imagine. Indeed, .mobi may even replace WAP as the default for the mobile web; everybody interested in the future of mobile search and monetizing the mobile web has to watch trends, and if necessary jump on them -- on the Internet, not jumping on a band wagon can be fatal. Let's now look at the advantages of dotMobi for SEO and accessing websites from mobile devices.
Next: dotMobi and DeviceAtlas >>
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