The 2009 Mobile World Congress was a great experience for Mobiletech. Even if the credit crunch has hit hard globally, we experienced great interest among new and old customers.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who stepped by our booth! We look forward to a great year of mobile in 2009 and hope that we will do more business ASAP.

See you next year in Barcelona!

Regards the Barcelona team

Bjarne Solhaug, Jon Arne Sæterås and Nick Robertshawe

TeliaSonera has re launched SurfOpen. SurfOpen is a transcoding service making web sites made for desktop browsers readable on older mobile phones. Last time TeliaSonera launched SurfOpen, it caused a massive riot among the Swedish publishers and media interest groups, resulting in the “SurfClosed” initiative (www.surfclosed.se). The reason for this was that SurfOpen brutally transcoded all kinds of content, both desktop web sites and also already mobile optimized web sites. This was destroying both business models and editorial control and freedom was deprived from the content owner.

This time around, however, things are looking somewhat different. Novarra is wisely replaced by Byte Mobile and the rules emerged from the international mobile community are acknowledged more or less.

The transcodingproxy is now an integral part of the infrastructure and acts as a transparent proxy. This means that urls are not changed. Wap billing, and other CPA services seem to work as usual. The proxy is identified by the http-via header with the value “1.1 Bytemobile OSN WebProxy/4.1”

Mobiletech does not have the complete list of which devices that are configured to use SurfOpen but it is mostly older, less capable phones. As far as Mobiletech knows, at least these devices are affected: SE K800i, SE K810i, SE K530i, SE T650i, SE K850i. The screens hots below are from the wap-browser on a Nokia E65 (the safari web browser is not affected).

Mobiletech, TeliaSonera and Byte Mobile have been working closely with the technical functionality of the transcoding proxy. At this point, all requirements seem to be fulfilled by all parties.

How can we say that when the below screen shot shows a transcoded www.aftobladet.se?

Note the advertising banner and the navigation bar at the top of the page. The advertising banner is currently only used for promoting internal TeliaSonera services, but will probably be used for other external ads in the future. This should be hard for content owners to accept since it’s stealing attention from other ads on the page. The navigation bar provides functionality for moving back/forward, adding site to favourites,entering a url,searching,settings and go back home to surfport. So the whole page is wrapped in a TeliaSonera look and feel. By the looks, kind of walled-garden-ish. Many of Mobiletechs customers have expressed concern about this kind of advertising. TeliaSonera control the most valuable ad space on their site wich is destroying their business model.

Mobiletech distributed a paper describing the functionalities of the transcoding proxy in early December 2008. Not all our customers, including Aftonbladet, have implemented what is needed to make the mobile experience good, so we repeat it here:

1. Adding a line of markup
   Add this line of markup in the tag on your pages:

   This line tells the transcoder where to find the mobile optimized site.

2. Changing your HTTP response headers
   Adding    
   Cache-Control: no-transform
   Vary: User-Agent
   to your response headers on your servers serving your www-site.

www.SvD.se have implemented the above, and the result is a perfect mobile portal. The user-agent is untouched and no advertising or nav-bar on top stealing attention and screen:

Sample HTTP header

Here is an example of how a http header through SurfOpen looks like (sorry for the php formatting):

Note the operamini-phone-ua. This is because the Byte Mobile proxy is actually the same software as Opera Mini use for transcoding.

Below are some screen shots from different sites.

	Surfport startpage. Top banner promotes SurfOpen.
	When you hit the www icon you can enter the url you want to go to. The result is the same as when you enter the url directly in your browser.
	The transcroded web site of www.dn.se look like. Dn.se has not implemented according to recommandations. Advertising banner on top of the page. Currently promoting TeliaSonera services.
	More from www.dn.se
	Aftonbladets web site www.aftonbladet.se, through the transcoders eyes. Aftonbladet has not implemented the required actions to control the transcoding.
	More from www.aftonbladet.se
	More from www.aftonbladet.se. Not very good user experience ….
	More from www.aftonbladet.se.
	A sample from the Norwegian newspaper www.dn.no, which have a “mobile swithcer” in front to redirect mobile phones to the mobile portal. Works well!
	www.svd.se have implemented the recommended actions to prevent transcoding, resulting in a untouched mobile portal when entering www.svd.se.
	Enter url to go to. From SurfPort.
	From the settings page, you can activate or deactivate the service. Tried to deactivate, seems to work as expected.
	Bookmarks page in SurfOpen
	More from the bookmarks and history of SurfOpen
	Settings for image quality
	Settings for text size and whether to do stuff with secure connections

Transcoding in general is scary stuff. Especially when it comes to placing advertisements, thereby monetizing, on other peoples intelectual property. It deprives editorial freedom and control, ruins business models, breaching secure connections and poor user experience. However, for TeliaSonera this is a step in the right direction, which probably will result in more traffic on the mobile web for those content owners with a mobile strategy and a good mobile optimized portal. So, it is highly recommended to implement the changes as described above on your www. site to tell the transcoding proxy that there is a better way of showing the site to a mobile user. If you experience any trouble or have any questions, Mobiletech is happy to help!

Feel free to use the screen shots on this page, but please refer to Mobiletech. 

In the Norwegian online magazine Digi Opera says that they can reduce the cost of using mobile internet by 20%. Might be true but we here at Mobiletech feel the need to throw light on a few things regarding that.

The article concerns surfing using Opera Mini on web sites made for desktop browsers. In these cases Opera is doing a great job in terms of minimizing the data cost and making the content displayable on a small screen. Thats good!

On sites that already are optimized for mobile, however, by Mobiletechs own brilliant products for exaple, this is not the case. Mobile optimized sites, made to fit the mobile context and utilise the features in the end users browser are way lighter and does not produce much data traffic as they also are compressed. So in terms of datatraffic on mobile optimised sites, as most of the popular sites are, there is not much to gain by using Opera Mini. In adition you get a superb presentation, editorial -controll and -freedom by making a mobile optimised portal.

So Opera is doing a great job on the sites that do not have a mobile optimised presentation, but for the rest of the mobile portals out there the moral is “use your favourite browser, mobiletech will make sure it works, it looks good, it’s cheap and it’s fast”.

UPDATE: Christian replying to Opera (transleted to english by Google) 

Yesterday the landrush period of .tel domain names opened. What it .tel? Well, it’s a tld such as .com, .net and .mobi. It is administered by Telnic. Do we need another tld, you say? There is a difference from what we are used to, so you decide. I’ll give a crash course here.

A .tel domain name can look like this: example.tel. So what. Well, what is different from other tld’s where the DNS contains the IP address to the server serving a web page (or other resource), the DNS of a .tel name contains contact information such as phone number, address, location, SIP-stuff etc. So this has nothing (or little) to do with internet and web. It’s kind of an online global contact directory for companies or individuals to register contact details that will be avalable to anyone. This information can be accessed through a web browser of course, try for example http://telnic.tel/, used by social networking sites such as facefook, twitter, skype etc. or by applications of course.

So, do you need a .tel domain name because you have a mobile internet site? No. We have other tricks for that.

Drammens Tidende has been a Mobiletech customer for a while and they have really taken the mobile channel seriously; mobile portal of course, dedicated short number for sms and mms and (here it comes) they are doing an excelent job in telling their readers how to utilize the mobile channel.

This is a pic from the back of their newspaper:

(sorry for the poor quality…)

Good work! Heia Drammen !