MWC 2008: Mobile website population booming

This year will undoubtedly be the year of the mobile internet, with the number of mobile websites having grown phenomenally from 25,000 in November last year to around 150,000 today.

So says dotMobi who completed its latest trawl of the web to update its figures just last night and spoke to IT PRO this morning on the penultimate day of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

dotMobi spiders the whole of the internet, using some 200-plus servers to conduct its analysis, the figures from which have helped to confirm that this year will be a momentous one for the mobile web, according to Paul Nerger, vice president of advanced services and applications at dotMobi.

"It's amazing. We find the rate of change really encouraging. I've been in this industry a long time and over the last 10 years I've heard colleagues and competitors say that 'This year will be the one of the mobile web.' I've never said that. This year I'm saying it. I had this feeling before I saw this data and now that I have seen this, I have an even greater feeling," he said.

"On my way here the taxi driver was using the mobile web [to check current flight information] and when a taxi driver in London uses the mobile web you really know it has started to take off!"

Nerger doesn't think that any one application or service will cause the impending mobile internet boom. Moreover, he thinks it will be a change in thinking that will lead to the domino effect of more people using the web so therefore more sites being created and so on.

"I think what will happen this year is people will no longer engage in dotcom thinking. They won't take a big, fat website and cram in down to a mobile site and make it a poor relation of the fixed web," he said. "This year, I think there will be a move to what we call dotMobi thinking where it's about how to build a really compelling mobile web application. It's the utility and usefulness of mobile applications that causes adoption."

Given the rate at which the mobile web is gaining in popularity, dotMobi used the Mobile World Congress event to launch a new tool called DeviceAtlas, which provides mobile handset information for mobile content developers.

"The reason we've launched this is because we're all about making the mobile web happen. That's our charter, our mission. But we and our investors felt that what was holding up the development was access to high-quality development information at an affordable price," added Nerger.

The tool came out of beta in January and, although it has been launched this week, the product will be continually evolved to swell in the volume of data it holds and also to keep pace with the rate of industry change.

"There is lots more we want to do [with this product] and lots of things we want to add. It has a very robust roadmap," Nerger said.

"There are so many sources of data and our work isn't done until we get a much larger [supply]. At the congress people were asking for more Japanese data, more Chinese devices, more Israeli devices... Our job is not done until we are the definitive database of all the handsets in the world."

A number of mobile players are already supporting dotMobi in its aims, including Nokia, Vodafone, Telecom Italia Mobile, Argogroup, Volantis and Zandan.

"The introduction of DeviceAtlas will help internet web developers and content providers build tailored Internet experiences for a range of devices," said Timo Skytta, Nokia's head of technology management.

"As Nokia expands from a handset company to offer a range of internet services - making these experiences powerful and valuable is very important."

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