Kudos All Around

I wanted to take a few minutes to thank some folks out there who have been spreading the good word about Mobileplay. Dan Tynan of PC World listed us as one of the best “Five Ways to Put the Web in Your Pocket.” Although the article had one small inaccuracy—we are not part of the Bitty.com empire, they are just linking to us--it was picked up by the Washington Post site among others. Both PCW and the WP, coincidentally, are partners in our mobile portal. And last month we were honored by AlwaysOn: The Insider Network as one of the Top 100 emerging technology companies to watch. Our five-star rating placed us in some amazing company. In addition to several of our competitors in the mobile advertising space, such as AdMob and Third Screen Media, the honorees included such Web 2.0 favorites as Digg, Facebook, FeedBurner, Spot Runner, Yelp and Zango.

What's next? II

Many praised the launch of our mobile web portal a few months ago as the next best thing to back-lit phone pads. Extensive, easy to navigate, fast-downloading. See Mediapost, for example. Now that our friends at Opera and BlackBerry have bundled a link, it's even easier to access on many devices. And, of course, anyone else can just type "Mobileplay.com" into their mobile browser and up it will pop. Practically every week new links are being added, and we continue to optimize for more and more mobile browsers. But we aren't stopping there! The next step is to let YOU create, access and, of course SHARE your own content. We're going to keep it as simple and fun as possible. Nothing to download, nothing to pay. So stay tuned, and look for some cool new stuff taking off early in 2007!

Sharing the Love

From my desk...

I wanted to personally thank everybody who is using our "share" features, both to share the Mobileplay service as well as individual article or application content with your friends and colleagues. And don't forget mom, even if she doesn't have the latest mobile device she'll appreciate a forwarded article from you now and then! We just added the ability to share (and, of course, win prizes!) from the mobile browser version of Mobileplay. We have also partnered with online video game rental site Gamefly to offer an "instant win" prize of a free 30-day trial, so I hope all you gamers out there will take advantage of this opportunity! As an off-carrier deck mobile community we depend upon our members to spread the word and share the love! Keep up the good work!

One Billion Mobile Pages Served and Counting

From my desk...

Kudos to our good friends at Opera who announced yesterday that they had reached the milestone of 1 billion web pages served in the first 7 months since they launched their awesome Opera Mini browser. Interestingly Russians topped the list of most avid mobile browsers, followed by U.S., India, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom. High mobile usage in many countries is a reflection of low PC penetration, though U.S. users would seem to want to consume their web anywhere and everywhere. Sony, which this week unveiled its Mylo handheld web surfing and email device--with Opera bundled, is banking on this growing popularity. But for $349 couldn't they have matched the Sidekick and built in a phone?

It's All in the Wrist, er, Thumbs...

Filed from my desk...

Despite our name--as many of you have pointed out--our initial content offering has leaned more towards news and services than games. But we're actively trying to put the "play" back in Mobileplay! A half-dozen or so game developers are currently or will shortly be integrating with our ad-supported network. When you have 5 or 10 to kill waiting for that bus, sometimes a wee Tetris goes just as far as the latest smear from ValleyWag to relieve the tedium. Since my mind has been on games lately, I was pleased to see a column from Pocket Gamer's Chris James with 10 Tips for improving the quality of mobile entertainment. One I particularly liked, which goes for any mobile app, was "Provide the player a reward within the first 30 seconds." Since the likelihood is high that a mobile gamer has spent a hefty slice off life struggling to get the darn thing onto the phone that's advice well-heeded. The other was to add a dash of "madness or humor." It is just a game after all. We'll definitely keep his advice in mind and maybe just maybe we can help get the other 97.7% of the U.S. public engaged in one of our favorite pasttimes.

Opera Mini + Mobileplay=?

Filed from my desk...

When we first started playing around with Opera's new Mini 2.0 browser we couldn't believe what a huge improvement it was over other mobile browsers. And we're not just talking about WAP. That included browsers like Pocket IE and Blazer designed for powerful smartphones. The secret is that Opera does a lot of the formatting, compression and compiling on their servers so the download and display speeds on device are incredible, even via slower data networks. This makes a lot of sense for phones, particularly lower end models.

So that is why we decided to partner with them to deliver a browser-based version of our content on Java-enabled phones. That's not to say we aren't stilll big believers in applications-based content delivery. There are huge advantages for many forms of content when they are delivered via sync, and can be cached on device for offline viewing when you don't have a data connection. This is particularly true for mobile games and some of our more database-driven and location-based applications for smartphones.

The world of mobile content delivery is still in its early stages and involves a lot of experimenting, especially when you want to be out on the pioneering fringes. We look forward to your feedback as we provide new and different options for viewing content and services for your mobile device. Browser vs. Application? You decide.

Java Phone Support--Coming Soon

A lot of regular phone users who had heard about our service for Smartphones and PDAs were disappointed when they learned we did not support J2ME handsets. We are pleased to report that their disappointment will be short-lived. Early this summer we will be launching Mobileplay service on about 80 handsets that we don't currently support. In the meantime, give us your email address and we will notify you when we launch. Like our Smartphone service, the Mobileplay Java phone app and all the content will be available free and ad-supported. No more fees to your carrier to get news, sports and weather! Unlike our current service for Palm and Win Mobile devices, there will be no desktop updating and only limited caching. But we promise that like its Smartphone big brother, the app will be 10x faster and 10x easier to use than a browser.