First, I want to thank Luca Passani for speaking at RoNewMedia. We at StarTech are members of the WURFL community for several years and we appreciate Luca’s efforts in managing this vibrant community.
What is StarTech? It’s the first .ro company that took mobile web seriously. That is.. the web for mobile phones. [Slide 2].
And this includes them all: starting from smartphones, pdas, iphones, androids, to older nokias, motorolas and so on. Even phones that are not “compatible” with Vodafone Live or Orange World.
So our challenge can be expressed like: your site on any mobile.
If you’re a web designer/developer, you know how it’s like to make a web page look very good, or.. just as good, on the 2 browsers: IE and FF. Even a simple design/layout can be tricky. And if you consider some of the older versions of these browsers, so you have like 3, let’s say 4 browsers, it can get really challenging.
Now imagine you have to make web pages for… let’s say… 30 different browsers. [Slide 3]. Well, that’s how the mobile web is. You have tens of different browsers, that know different markup types (wml, chtml, xhtml), have displays with different sizes, support different image and video formats, and so on. And if on the web, the first 3-4 browsers make 95% of the traffic, on mobile web the situation is much more fragmented.
Now let’s see how we develop for mobile web. [Slide 4]. One way would be to simply make a “smaller” html… like some of the Romanian online publications do have. In this case, the site would not be accessible from any mobile, but we would cheer ourselves naming it PDA version. Another way, like somebody said at Mobile Marketing Conference, would be to consider the weakest device when you design for mobile web (Least Common Denominator). It this case, although the site would be accessible from more devices, the user experience would be very poor.
Well, our solution, presented on MobileWeb.ro, is the optimal solution. Let’s see why. [Slide 5].
The idea is simple. We detect the mobile making the request, we know exactly the capabilities of that device, so we generate the web page at runtime according to these capabilities.
Obviously that this way, we are able to customize the design for each and every mobile, offering the best possible user experience.
We actually get the most out of any device.
Now let’s get to technology. [Slide 6].
We’ve built our solution on ASP.NET Mobile platform. This platform exists for few years now, even since WML… or WAP 1.0 was very trendy. We have developed the device specific rendering mechanism and, moreover, enhanced a lot the device detection part. For this we are using WURFL, a database with the capabilities of all existing devices, approximately 6000 user agents. This database gets updated with newest devices. How do we actually make the detection? A smart algorithm based on REGEX - regular expressions - applied on useragent and other http request headers and also on the useragents from WURFL. So the match returns the device and its capabilities. All of this at runtime. Everything about device detection happens in a single place, a xml web service, so it’s separated from the actual mobile sites.
Let’s take an example. HotNews Mobile. [Slide 7].
This is how it’s made. The design is customized for several types of devices - it’s optimized for iPhone, BlackBerry and so on - and based on the screen width. For example, on homepage you can see the lead of the articles only if the phone you’re using has a display with more than 176px width. The mobile site is hosted on our dedicated server running Windows, ASP.NET and SQL Server… and the content is automatically fetched from the HotNews CMS in xml format, and stored in a buffer database. The images are also fetched and thumbnails are generated based on the defined types of mobiles.
We build the mobile web sites following W3C and dotMobi guidelines. You can evaluate the quality of any mobile web site using ready.mobi. [Slide 8]. As you can see for yourself, any of the sites we’ve built gets the highest mark. That’s 5.
Other kind of results, perhaps more interesting, you can find on MobileStats.ro. [Slide 9].
MobileStats.ro tracks the traffic on most important .ro mobile sites at the moment. About HotNews Mobile I can tell that there was a 120% increase of traffic since April this year.
iPhone doubled it’s traffic share after the Orange launch. We’re now working on some relevant reports with MobileStats.ro data. To be published…
Something nice is MobileStats.ro/Live. You can try it out. Point your phone browser to any of the registered mobile sites and you should instantly see your device on the map.
Here’s something else quite nice… if you’re a twitterer. [Slide 10]. MobileStats.ro automatically updates on Twitter.com/StarTech, daily, top3 traffic for the day before… and if there was any traffic record… which happens often. And check out the source: it’s mobilestats.ro :)
By the way, I am ducu.
