Mobile takes center stage at the 2010 South By Southwest Festival Interactive Track, which runs March 12 through March 16 at the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, USA. The following is a partial list of seminars and training on the schedule.
What’s Hot in Mobile at SXSW
- Maps 2010: How iPad Impacts the LBS Market
- The UX of Mobile
- Touch + The Holy Grail of Delight
- Organizational Pitfalls on the Path to Multichannel Experience
- Time + Social + Location. What’s Next In Mobile Experiences?
- Mobile – the Great Channel Equalizer
- iPad: New Opportunities for Content Creators
- The Real Mobile Scoop – Agency, Manufacturer, and Carrier
- Web Evolution: The Rise of Mobile, APIs and Runtimes
- Is App-vertising the Answer
- Augmenting Your Brain With Android
- Google Hackathon: Mobile Maps, App Engine, Chrome Extensions
- What If Your Phone Had Five Senses?
- Cross Device Accessibility: Is This For Real?
- Building Mobile Games on the Windows Phone Platform
- Mobile Computing and it’s Contribution to Technology’s Exponential Growth
- The Final (Mobile) Frontier: Battery Life in Africa
- How We Built the SXSW Mobile App
- Convergence 2010: Ten Cool Things That Could Happen This Year
- Mobile Development with the Flash Platform: iPhone and More
- Augmented Reality – Gimmicky Trend or Market-Ready Technology?
- Pass it Back! Kid Apps on Grown-up Devices
- Location Beyond iPhone: Locating 100+M Phones
- Location-Based Marketing and Advertising: Targeting the Mobile Consumer
- Mobile Content is Social
- Mobile Advertising in 2010: How to Pay the Bills
- QR Codes and 2D Barcodes: Bridging Physical & Digital
- Mobile Commerce
- Mapping and Geolocation: Turnkey Approaches You Need to Know
The full SXSW Mobile schedule (may not be viewable on some phones) includes information on presenters and a summary of what each session will cover.
While you’re there, check out the updated SXSW.mobi site for mobile access to the South by Southwest Festival.
Business owners and developers who are serious about making money on the mobile web need a product to sell and a way to collect payments. Paypal has an entire section in their Paypal Developer Network devoted to answering questions about adding the famous “pay now” button to mobile sites and apps.
The Paypal Mobile Payment Library contains sample code and a Paypal Mobile demo site.
There’s also documentation for Paypal mobile, which includes:
- Security on the Mobile Web
- How Mobile Checkout Works
- Customer Activation for Mobile Checkout
- Mobile Checkout Processing Flow
- Merchant Integration Points
- Documentation
If you are viewing this post from a phone or computer that can access youtube, here is a video featuring Osama Bedier of Paypal demonstrating mobile payment integration:
Video: PaypalX – Osama Bedier demos Paypal integration
Note: this is a revision of the original post which was deleted at the site owner’s request. This post was re-created with a different site than yesterday’s post.
Via Twitter, I was asked a question that is on a lot of mobi Enthusiast readers’ minds: “I have a site that is NOT mobile friendly and I want it to be – suggestions?”
The Challenge of Making a Computer Website Mobile-Friendly
To answer the question, let’s look at some of the reasons a website is not mobile friendly, and in the process you’ll want to do the opposite to get the ball rolling. Thanks to Jay Ehret’s mobile web podcast we have a number of small business owners and marketing people joining us, so I will keep this as non-techie as I can. (Thanks again, Jay!)
Those of you who are reading on a computer can follow along and check out this site, but if you have a phone other than an iPhone, wait until you are on a computer instead because this site is going to jam your phone browser for sure: sibmira.com.
Look around: The site is an example of a professional theme on a dark gray background. It has graphical links across the top, a large photo of hands holding the world, and several small graphics and photos of people in business suits looking at mobile phones. Don’t let the small size of the photos fool you – they average 20 kb each in file size (also known as weight). There isn’t much text on the site.
Next, let’s take a look at the site on ready.mobi. Ready.mobi is a site that analyzes a given website for how mobile friendly it is. Here’s the bad news: Not only does the phone emulator on ready.mobi show a full screen of dark gray, but our example site scores the lowest possible, a 1 out of 5, and receives this message: “It will definitely display very poorly on a mobile phone. Your mobi.readiness score is calculated from the results displayed below. Failing tests and large page sizes both lower the score.”
Not only did it score a 1/5, it has 9 code compliance failures for a mobile site. The worst offenses for this site are: it uses tables for structure, it has large file sizes for graphics, and it uses nested tables. It could be a lot worse. Other sites have fails which include using pop up windows, form submit buttons, and iframes.
Next, let’s take a look at what the site would look like if it were transcoded, or recoded for use on a phone as-is. Go to mowser.mobi and type in your site. Well, you don’t have to, I did it for you already. Here are the results. Sibmira transcoded by mowser. Now the site looks long and skinny, and it might load on a mobile phone, but then again it might not. Using mowser.mobi the pieces of the table used to create the structure are stacked on top of each other. It’s not very attractive, is it? It has a lot of gray blocks and pictures sprinkled randomly across the screen. The pictures are still too large and too heavy, meaning the file size is too large. In my experience, I do better with graphics if I keep them under 10 kb. People without unlimited internet plans are paying to download these graphics and are waiting for them to load. Phone internet users aren’t a patient lot, so you want these graphics to load practically instantly.
Think about your site. Is this how you want it to look? Other sites with fewer graphics show up with a lot of text and a lot of scrolling down. With mobile internet sites, it’s important to distill your information down to the smallest bites and serve those to your users.
Those of you on a mobile phone can see that this post is probably making your wrists hurt from all the scrolling down to read your long, skinny web page.
As a side note, the site we profiled is owned by a developer friend of mine who is adept at making mobile sites. He also owns the name sibmira.mobi and has it reserved to make a mobile site at a later date, which is also a good practice.
This is a first look to get you started. Take a look at your own site on ready.mobi and mowser.mobi to see what you will need to do differently when designing your own mobile site.
So, until next time, think about about the smallest screen. Don’t try to cram every little detail you can about your company on there – people will just leave. Make sure the graphics fit. Think about how much (or how little) reading you would want to do if you were visiting the site. Then edit, edit, edit.
At the request of the site owner whose site was profiled, this pre-case study has been deleted. A newer version is located here.
Mike Rowehl of Mowser fame announced via twitter and his blog computer link mobile link it is official and he has joined Skyfire. His official job title is “Scalable Architect” but his business cards say “Deliverator.”
Congratulations, Mike, and we’ll all be watching to see how you influence the mobile internet in your new post.
If you want to work with Mike over at Skyfire, they are hiring. computer link mobile link
Ok iPhone developers, here we go… the new SDK is now available at Apple Developer Connection” (computer link, not mobile) This is the 8th SDK released by Apple for the iPhone. To download it, you need to register at Apple (no charge). To use the SDK you’re going to need a mac with the latest version of OSX. Sorry PC and Mac Tiger users.
Let’s see what kind of brilliant iPhone apps you will make with your shiny new SDK.
Twitter is a wonderful thing. I found a website called Branding Strategy Insider (link below) today thanks to Jay D. Ehret’s twitter microblog. Jay has a marketing blog called The Marketing Spot over on Blogspot. Here’s the computer link to The Marketing Spot and the mobile link to The Marketing Spot. Check out his blog if you are interested in marketing – it’s a good read. But I digress…
The main reason for my post today is to alert mobile web designers to something many brand managers have known all along – colors have meaning. According to Branding Strategy Insider, “You’d be wise to consider the psychology of color when designing your marketing materials. Be it business card, brochure, web site, posters or other material, you’ll be making color choices. Colors not only enhance the appearance of the item — they also influence our behavior. You will do well to consider the impact that the colors you use will have on your target audience.” Read the rest at Branding Strategy Insider (mobile link) (computer link) .
In what seemed like the blink of an eye, thirteen premium dot mobi domain names found a new home today with one, company.mobi, still on the shelf after not meeting reserve price. The names that sold include:
computers.mobi $ 9,500.00
airlines.mobi $ 9,500.00
boats.mobi $ 6,000.00
mortgage.mobi $18,000.00
men.mobi $10,000.00
sales.mobi $10,500.00
forsale.mobi $ 5,000.00
drugs.mobi $17,500.00
films.mobi $10,000.00
show.mobi $ 5,000.00
escort.mobi $10,000.00
religion.mobi $ 3,000.00
records.mobi $ 8,500.00
Congratulations to buyers and sellers today. Mobi Enthusiast is pleased to know that several of these names are now in the hands of domain name portfolio holders known to develop domains as viable businesses, and we look forward to seeing what you build.
Today’s announcement that the dotMobi registry mTLD purchased the publicly executed Mowser is, in the opinion of mobi Enthusiast, wonderful news. This means more .mobi sites will be able to include content that was previously unavailable due to the labor necessary to convert documents by hand into a form readable on a mobile phone. One example of how this technology is being used to help people is recalledtoys.mobi, which is updated frequently with warnings and recalls about unsafe toys and other products used in the home. Edit: Unfortunately, the site is not serving these warnings at the moment due to changes within Mowser, and we hope it will be fixed shortly. Congratulations to Russell Beattie and Mike Rowehl, the creaters of Mowser, and we are glad that we have conclusive evidence that the mobile internet is not only not dead, but ready to move full speed ahead.
MobiEnthusiast mobi would like to point our developer and domainer audience to a recent post by Jamie Parks of DomainerDeveloper.com. He asks: “What are you going to do when the mobile masses show up at your domain?”
“Smart people from all over the world with mobile devices are starting to poke around. They’re looking out across the vast universe of mobile content in an attempt to find something unique and worth while (other than porn and parked pages) to interact with. Will your domain/site be a special enough destination that the mobimasses will digg it? Only time and your mobile development strategy can answers those questions.”
To read the rest of his blog post on a mobile phone, use this link to DomainerDeveloper.com via mURL.mobi Mobile Browser (You may need to click a link when it appears to load the page. Warning: it is very graphics-heavy.) To read the rest on a computer, use this link to DomainerDeveloper.com.
