Common Paradox Tech Blog

Mobile ad network Greystripe recently partnered with ad placement service Tribal Fusion to allow online ads to run on iPhones, diminishing the need for mobile specific ad formats. The partnership allows online ads to run on iPhones, eliminating additional mobile campaign creative production and dealing with an additional mobile advertising vendor. And of course, online ad budgets tend to be higher than mobile ad budgets, so Greystripe says this saves companies money.

Greystripe, which extended the ads to over five hundred online to mobile campaigns, says that advertisers are seeing 10-20 times higher performance with the mobile-online ad compared to the same online campaigns with average click through rates above one percent.

It’s a great time to be in the smartphone business, unless you’re Microsoft or Palm. According to the latest data, they’re hardly doing any business at all.

This chart from Fierce Developer shows that while Apple and RIM have been booming, and Symbian and Android have shown decent growth for smaller players, Palm webOS and Windows Mobile have been largely stagnant. Microsoft even managed to lose market share between May and July. At the rate this is going, the two carriers will need some drastic changes to stay in the game. For Palm, the answer could be as simple as an expanded or refreshed product line. For Microsoft, though, it looks like a fix won’t be coming any time soon. [Comscore via Fierce Developer via Electronista]

The rollup of entertainment startups by MySpace might not be over. Fresh off the acquisitions of music services iLike and iMeem, the social network is now reportedly eyeing Flixster, a popular movie rating site that also has its apps on social networking sites and mobile platforms.

The reason for the interest, according to AllThingsD, is “to combine it with Rotten Tomatoes, another News Corp.-owned site run by its IGN Entertainment division.” The report calls the deal price “unclear.” While such news seemingly comes out of nowhere, the companies have worked together in the past, and Flixster is one of the biggest sites that uses MySpace ID, the social network’s competitor to Facebook Connect.

As MySpace looks to build a business around entertainment-based page views and eyeballs (see: music and movie exclusives), Flixster might make sense as another piece of the puzzle. On the other hand, if traffic stats from Compete are to be believed, the movie site’s best days might be behind it (also interesting to note: A huge percentage of its traffic apparently comes from Facebook).

Reviews: Facebook, Flixster

Tags: flixster, myspace

Mozilla’s hinting that the first version of Firefox for mobile phones will ready for distribution in the next couple of weeks. That’s good news–more competitors only serve to keep everyone on their toes.

Despite its popularity on PCs, Firefox has been noticeably absent from the mobile market, which has been left mostly to WebKit-based browsers. “If things go smoothly, says Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s vice president for mobile platforms, “we’ll have a version out in the next few weeks.”

Firefox mobile is based on the same code as Firefox 3.6, a beta version of which is now available for PCs. And, using a plug-in called Weave, the mobile version will be able to sync bookmarks and passwords with its PC sibling. (It’ll have it’s own logo, though: the Pocketfox! The fennec was unavailable for comment.)

Firefox is expected to be first available for the Nokia N900, with later roll-outs for Windows Mobile and Android smartphones.

Image Credit: Mozilla

Cable companies, to this point, have mostly been bit players in providing content–the life-blood of the cable system. People won’t watch if you’ve nothing to show them. Comcast has just altered the landscape on content production, buying a majority share of NBC Universal, which it will now jointly run with General Electric (G.E.). Comcast’s entry price: $6.5 billion in cash and $7.25 billion in other value, for a total of $13.75 billion. (And you thought we were in a recession.)

Comcast, which has been jonesing for this deal for more than a year, said in an announcement, the deal is “a perfect fit for Comcast and will allow us to become a leader in the development and distribution of multiplatform ‘anytime, anywhere’ media that American consumers are demanding.” The deal between G.E. and Comcast was completed weeks ago, but held up by G.E.’s having to buy out Vivendi, which owned a 20 percent stake in NBC. Vivendi will get $5.8 billon for its share.

Benefits of the deal revolve around NBC having valuable content, such as CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, USA, and SyFy channels, and Comcast having the means of delivering that content via cable, Internet, and mobile platforms to over 45 million subscribers. Because Comcast is already deriving fees from subscribers, it could well mean that online content from NBC Universal will become readily available, at least within the Comcast system.

This is only the first stage, however. The deal has to past the muster of the Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and the Justice Department’s antitrust division. Could be another year before the deal is finalized.

Image Credit: Comcast, NBC Universal

Last week at the Professional Developer’s Conference, Microsoft showed off the first developer beta of Silverlight 4, which includes support for Google’s Chrome browser.

It turns out that Chrome isn’t the only competitor’s product with Silverlight in its future though. Betanews interviewed a Microsoft manager who revealed — and showed off — Silverlight video streaming on the iPhone.

What’s even more interesting is that this wasn’t a skunkworks proof-of-concept project, Microsoft got the OK from Apple. This is in stark-contrast to Apple’s stance on Adobe Flash, which currently has plans for all mobile platforms except for the iPhone.

How It Works

A big underlying concept behind Silverlight has always been about the ability to deploy the same content on multiple platforms without having to create a platform-specific version. The same concept exists for Adobe Flash and Adobe Air (and Silverlight has many of the same potential use cases as Air, Flash, and Adobe Flex).

Although largely associated with streaming video, Silverlight actually has the ability to run full web applications. However, where Microsoft will first be focussing its efforts is in bringing Silverlight video streaming to the iPhone.

Silverlight’s native content type is MPEG-2 v8. What Microsoft did was build a server-side solution with IIS Media Services. What this means is that when a content owner uploads content that has been optimized for smooth streaming, they can have the option of enabling that content on the iPhone.

Then, using HTML 5’s <video> tag, Silverlight is able to communicate a QuickTime request to the IIS server, which then decodes the MPEG-2 v8 file dynamically and starts streaming it to the iPhone.

This is extremely similar to how YouTube content currently works with the iPhone. Because Silverlight already supports GPU acceleration (a feature that is coming to future versions of Flash Player 10), battery life and overall performance has the potential to be quite strong.

This could be a big win for Microsoft and Silverlight content developers because having the ability to get content to mobile phone users is extremely important. Although Silverlight has uses far beyond video, it does streaming video extremely well.

What do you think of Silverlight coming to the iPhone?

Reviews: Chrome, YouTube, adobe AIR

Tags: Flash, iphone, microsoft silverlight, Silverlight, streaming video

Having a mobile-optimized web site can really make your site stand apart from the pack. Even though smartphones like the iPhone and Google Android devices can display “the full web,” having a web page formatted for smaller screens and with features that can take advantage of a touch screen, geolocation, or address book functionality can make the mobile web browsing experience that much better.

Even just a few years ago, optimizing websites for mobile browsers was a painful and difficult process, in part because of the limitations of most mobile browsers. Today, thanks to the proliferation of WebKit (which powers the browsers on the iPhone, Android and webOS devices, with BlackBerry expected to join the mix next year), it’s much easier to decide on a strategy for making your website pop on mobile platforms.

We’ve put together a toolkit of resources for the designer and non-designer alike to get you started. Did we miss your favorite tool or service? Let us know in the comments!

Services for Optimizing Your Content for Mobile Browsers

If you don’t have experience with HTML and CSS (or you don’t have the time), there are a number of services that can create mobile versions of your website for you.

MoFuse and MoFuse Premium — MoFuse has been offering a simple way for bloggers and businesses to easily create mobile versions of their websites for quite some time. For bloggers or smaller sites, the company offers MoFuse for Blogs, which is a free and easy way to quickly mobilize your web site (it uses your RSS feed to generate the new site) whenever it is accessed by going to “m.yourdomain.com.” For businesses or larger sites that want a little more control, MoFuse Premium offers more customizable options.

Disclosure: MoFuse powers Mashable’s mobile website.

Mippin — Mippin is another free service that can create a quick mobile version of your website using your RSS feed. The options aren’t extensive, but the version that Mippin creates should be viewable on almost any WAP compatible mobile phone.

mobiSiteGalore — mobiSiteGalore can create quick mobile versions of websites, offers users some customization options, and can take advantage of the .mobi TLD. mobiSiteGalore will let you create your mobile site from a computer or from your phone.

Plugins for WordPress and Other Publishing Systems

Having a WAP-formatted site is fine, but if you want to be able to offer visitors from an iPhone or Android device some really great optimized mobile features, you want to consider creating a separate stylesheet for your website. For users of WordPress and other publishing systems, there are a lot of plugin options available that make adding a mobile theme to your site extremely easy.

WPtouch — WPtouch is a fantastic plugin available for WordPress.org users (WordPress.com users can also take advantage of WPtouch with the recent addition of mobile themes) that automatically makes your site easy to read and access from an iPhone or Android device.

The plugin is extremely robust and even offers backend features like the ability to set an iPhone Favicon (so that when users add your web page to their iPhone’s home screen, it has a great looking icon), the ability to work with other WordPress plugins like FlickrRSS and Blip.it, support for AJAX, customized headers, and more. What I really like about WPtouch is that users can choose to turn it off and access the full version of a website at any time by flicking the mobile on/off switch at the bottom of each page.

WordPress Mobile Edition – Crowd Favorite created this plugin that allows users to easily define what type of devices should be shown a mobile web page (and what shouldn’t — for instance if you want BlackBerry users to see your mobile page but you want iPhone users to see the full site) and it comes with Crowd Favorite’s Carrington Mobile Theme which is easy on the eyes and also fully customizable.

WordPress Mobile Pack — The WordPress Mobile Pack is from the dotMobi team and it is a whole suite of tools for mobile web optimization. It includes a base mobile theme, which is very attractive, a mobile admin panel, mobile ad support and the option for visitors to switch between the full and mobile versions of a website.

WPtap — WPtap is a plugin for WordPress, and the site also offers up some alternative themes for users who want a more customized look and feel to add to their sites. WPtap looks very similar to WPtouch, but the emphasis seems to be on offering pre-built mobile styles.

WordPress Mobile by Mobify — This is a plugin for the Mobify service (see description in the next section). It handles automatic redirection of mobile clients to your Mobify mobile view page.

Mobile Plugin for Drupal — Mobile Plugin offers Drupal sites a mobile optimized view, comes with a mobile version of the standard Drupal Garland theme and includes device detection, hooks for adding mobile-specific features and automatic YouTube mobile replacement.

OSMOBI — OSMOBI is a service and plugin for Joomla and Drupal users that makes it easy to customize your blog for mobile visitors. The service is free for 150 page views every day but premium plans are also available.

Tools for Designers

Mobify — Mobify is a really interesting service because it makes it easy for designers or users who know HTML and CSS to painlessly modify and optimize their website for mobile access. The service is free (though paid monthly plans are available for more features) and it works extremely well with systems like WordPress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine and any other system that has predictable URL patterns and well formed HTML.

Mobify has a visual editor that lets you see what your content looks like on different device types and you can then modify the CSS and see the changes in real-time. Some sites that have used Mobify to create mobile optimized versions of their content include A List Apart and revered web developers and designers, such as Jonathan Snook and Veerle Pieters.

iPhoney — iPhoney from Marketcircle gives Mac users a pixel-accurate web browsing environment that is powered by Safari. Why does this matter? Because when crafting the mobile version of your site, it’s important to be able to see how the final product will look on your phone. iPhoney hasn’t been updated in a while but is still a really useful tool.

iWebKit — iWebKit is a framework of sorts for creating iPhone-optimized websites or web apps that can take advantage of the iPhone’s UI elements and other features.

jQTouch — jQTouch is a really innovative jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone and iPod touch. With it you can create websites or web apps with animations, support for forms, customized UI elements, additional extensions, swipe controls, and more. The developer is really active with the project and some of the stuff you can do with it is amazing.

iPhone Compatible CSS Layouts — Matthew James Taylor created a bunch of liquid CSS layouts that are iPhone and iPod Touch compatible and free for anyone to use. If you’re looking for a starting point for building a mobile optimized site, you might want to give these layouts a look.

Other Resources

Mobile Web Design by Cameron Moll — This is a really great book (available in print or as an ebook) with tips, best practices, and examples on styling and optimizing your site for mobile content. If it suffers from anything it is that it was written before the iPhone explosion really took off, thus it isn’t as up to date as it could be. Still, for mobile web enthusiasts, there’s a lot of great information here.

Craig Hockenbery’s “Put Your Content in My Pocket” — In August of 2007, Craig Hockenberry (from the Iconfactory and one of the brains behind Twitterrific for the Mac and the iPhone) wrote a great article for “A List Apart” and although some of the technologies have evolved, much of what Craig wrote then still applies today. A great read.

Smashing Magazines’s Mobile Design Showcase – Need some inspiration? Smashing Magazine did a great roundup of iPhone optimized designs in September.

CSSiPhone — CSSiPhone is a CSS gallery dedicated to iPhone optimized site designs. Like Picasso said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal!”

Opera Mobile Developer Community — As some of our commenters pointed out, the Opera browser lets you see what a website will look like on a mobile handset by pressing Shift-F11. Also check out Opera’s developer documentation for optimizing pages to be viewed on mobile devices. Opera Mobile and Opera Mini is a common browser on many cellular phones.

Your Thoughts

What do you think about the direction of mobile web development? Do you have any favorite mobile sites or mobile design tips? Let us know!

Reviews: Android, BLIP, Drupal, Joomla, Opera, Safari, Twitterrific, WordPress, YouTube

Tags: android, iphone, List, Lists, mobile web, mobile web design, resources, web design, Wordpress

The iPhone, iPod touch, and still rumorware iTablet (among other mobile platforms) are so compelling that publishers like Condé Nast and now Time Inc. and Hearst are racing to get their slowly dying print media content all prepped and ready for an iPod-like digital savior. Says the New York Observer (via MacRumors) says:

The [...]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Old World Publishers Unite For New Media iPhone, iTablet

When it comes to the mobile Web, increasingly there are only two mobile platforms which matter: Apple and Android. According to AdMob’s October, 2009 mobile metrics report, the iPhone/iPod Touch and Android phones accounted for 75 percent of mobile Web traffic in the U.S., as measured by all the mobile ad requests it tracks. That number is up from a combined 65 percent in September, 2009.

The iPhone is miles ahead of everyone else, but Android is quickly rising as a strong second. While Android phones managed to increase their share from 17 percent in September, 2009 to 20 percent in October, 2009, the iPhone and iPod Touch gained even more, going from 48 percent to 55 percent share. Meanwhile, during that same month the Blackberry ’s mobile Web traffic share went down from 14 percent to 12 percent, and Palm’s webOS shrank from 10 percent to 5 percent (Ouch).

Add Vimeo to the list of YouTube, Ustream, and Stickam — sites and services making H.264 versions of their content available for iPhone and other mobile platforms either via the web or via apps.

We won’t beat that drum too loudly right now, but H.264, and the new video tags in standards-based HTML5 are where we [...]

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Vimeo Adds H.264, Getting iPhone Friendlier