Volantis' Mobile Web

The fanfare around transcoding crescendoed last week after the COO of Novarra gave an ill-advised interview to the Mobile Marketing Magazine. In 5 paragraphs she managed to infuriate the entire Mobile Web Developer community (again) and dismiss the need for Mobile Websites entirely.

While I’m not going to wade into the crossfire between Novarra and the Developers I would like to pick up on a particular point from the interview:

“So developers of content will have no need to create mobile sites (When transcoders are available on every network). You won’t have issues where your site only works on nine phones on T-Mobile in Germany or seven phones on Sprint. … It enables the mobile content provider to stop thinking about the specific constraints of the browser on the device.”

It seems that Novarra feel that transcoders are the future of the Mobile Web and that the height of innovation in our industry will come when users can view the “regular” web on their phones. It’s a shame that they don’t have more vision.

I should start by saying I do believe that transcoders, when implemented correctly, are important to our industry and at Volantis we’ve had a transcoding product for a number of years. The Mobile Web is still growing and there is already a huge amount of useful Web Content that users will want access to. Transcoders give them an opportunity to do just that and even though the user-experience isn’t great, it’s certainly a good way to get people accustomed to the idea of using their mobile devices to access the Internet.

However we must make sure we don’t enable transcoders to the determent of current Mobile Web services and developers. The W3C Content Transformation Task Force has already been working on producing a set of standards (The first draft version can be found here) that will ensure that Content Adaptation technology, like transcoders, is deployed in a manner that will compliment the Mobile Web. Volantis are actively involved in the task force and are implementing the guidelines in our transcoder product. We have also recognised the suggestions Mobile Web developers have put together in the Manifesto for Responsible Formatting and these too are being implemented.

While transcoding does have its place in the current Mobile web ecosystem, it is only ever going to be a short-term solution to the Mobile Web: the experience is just never going to be that compelling. Services which cater specifically for Mobile Devices and crucially the Mobile Context are always going to be more user-friendly and in most cases will be a lot more useful and functional (You don’t see Vodafone using a transcoded version of vodafone.com as their Mobile Web portal for example) As these types of services become more visible to the end-user the people who started using the Mobile Web because they could access websites via a transcoder will turn to these more usable and more relevant services.

A recent example of this is the number of iPhone-specific pages that are starting to pop-up. While the iPhone has the best browsing experience on any Mobile Device and can display regular websites, more and more web services are putting out iPhone versions which are more user-friendly and more relevant to the Mobile Context. Most recently Google Reader released an iPhone version which has a vastly superior user-experience and only displays unread feed items unlike the Web version which displays new and past items on the same screen. It also only lists feeds which have unread items instead of all the feeds you track.

So why is the Mobile Context so important? Simply put, users who are on the move and accessing web services on a Mobile will be after different content and will be looking for different functionality than if they were at their desks.

There is also the fact that most Mobile Phones have features that a regular PC doesn’t. They have GPS and cellular connection that provide location information, they have cameras that can take pictures and record or stream video and soon they’ll have compasses which will enable services to know what the user is facing. This is unique functionality that is useful to all Mobile Services like application and games, not just Mobile Web.

Location Based Services alone will see a huge amount of Web services which have functionality that is exclusive to Mobile users. Recently an MIT professor asked his students to use Googles Android platform to design Mobile Services they would love to use. The vast majority of these were LBS applications which included a Social-Networking program that would allow you to connect to other users who were in the same immediate area as your were.

These types of services will never be viable in a Mobile Web environment that is exclusively delivered through transcoders. Nor can other next generation Mobile Web services such as Widgets, Mobile Banking (security issues at the very least) and Mobile User-Generated content. These services are mostly going to be pioneered by the same companies and developers who are leading the way with built-for-mobile services today. The same companies and developers that Novarra seem to think will be made redundant by their transcoding technology.

In the end what it comes down to is that a one-size-fits-all solution is never going to be the future of the Mobile Web. Transcoding can help us develop the Mobile Web, but it it isn’t its future. The Future of the Mobile Web if far more technically advanced than that.