Small and medium businesses should welcome a fast, free way to
translate their websites' homepage into a page suitable for any
mobile phone that runs a web browser.
Software house DotMobi will
launch the conversion service, Instant Mobilzer, next week at
Mobile World
Congress in Barcelona. The service is free when customers
register a .mobi domain name. These are currently selling for
around $10 a year, depending who is registering domain names.
Catrina Sheridan, vice-president of product deployment at
DotMobi, said the product was aimed at SoHos and SMEs to help them
get onto the mobile web quickly and cheaply.
"We think it's perfect for businesses such as restaurants and
estate agents," she said.
The program takes key elements from the original website such as
the logo, a Google map of the business's location, and telephone
number. and transforms them for presentation on virtually any
mobile phone screen.
Users can check what their mobilised website looks like before
buying their domain name. Some tailoring is possible, Sheridan
said. It usually takes about 24 hours for the mobilised website to
register with the web's domain name servers.
DotMobi uses a database of phones and their features to optimise
the look and feel of the mobilised website. This allows users who
access the mobilised website to "click to call" the contact phone
number.
At present the software, originally developed by Mowser, does
not support Flash, Java scripts, secure web access or transactions
such as eBay or Amazon purchases, but Sheridan said these may come
later.
"These are usually things that bigger companies with their own
dedicated mobile web development teams will do," she said. "Our
initial target market is 23 million SMEs in Europe and the 27
million in the US," she said.
Sheridan said emerging markets such as India, Africa and China
are also very attractive because of the penetration of mobiles
phones, but they generally have fewer PCs and websites.