I am attending the Mobile Web Americas conference in Orlando, Fl., together with over 100 other mobile businesses, specialists and the plain curious. There’s not much controversy to report. It’s all very polite.
Novarra says they are intending to recognise mobile specific sites, though Randy Cavaiani says that they will still take content designed for mobile and downgrade it for less-capable devices.  To me, that sounds like mobile-specific sites still won’t be sure that they won’t be able to prevent a Novarra proxy from modifying their carefully crafted content.
Google does not plan to add a “find only mobile sites” feature to their mobile search, according to Gummi Hafsteinsson. He did say, however, that they work with carriers to get [click title to read more…]
Zaragoza was the host city for MWeb’07 and I was very happy to appear as an invited speaker, to summarise the current activity in standardisation of mobile-related Web technology. Unfortunately, I don’t speak a word of Spanish. (OK, so cerveza is in my lexicon.) Thankfully, the audience had an excellent grasp of English. You can read a summary of the event as recalled by Alan Chuter.
I also had the benefit, at various times, of having someone sit beside me to translate. Many thanks guys!
At first, it looks like Vodafone were trying to enable more mobile access to the Web. Without much warning, they installed a Novarra transcoding server to intercept their customers’ traffic to the Web, and deliver a version of the content that is supposed to be better for the mobile device. All very well, until the proxy encounters a site that is already perfect for mobile devices. Such a site, having been crafted to the point of pure perfection for any mobile device that requests content from it, is suddenly faced with a request from the Novarra proxy. This proxy gives the impression that it is a desktop browser, and reveals nothing of the true nature of the mobile device that [click title to read more…]
Not exactly a big gathering, but when 20+ busy people gather in a room adjacent to a hotel’s private bar, where food and drink is but a smile away, and spend two hours talking about nothing but mobile phones, it’s got to be something to note. MoMoDublin took off on April 2, with a fair smattering of mobile specialists enjoying some banter about all things mobile. It’s not unusual for Dubliners to conclude a day’s work down at the pub, educating a pint in the ancient arts of thirst quenching, coupled with endless “shop talk”. This was no different, except it had a new sign over the door.
The dotMobi people were the hosts for [click title to read more…]