2007 June

Why You Need A Mobile Web Site NOW

June 24, 2007 on 4:56 pm | In The Mobile Web | No Comments

The use of mobile phones for accessing the Internet is exploding. Did you know you need a separate web site for these phones to access? If you assume your normal web site will suffice, you are going to leave a ton of money on the table.

First of All, the Hard Data

On May 14, 2007, Telephia and comScore announced the results of their latest study of mobile vs. PC-based Internet usage. The study reveals that 30 million (or 19 percent) of the 159 million U.S. PC Web users of age 15 or older accessed the Web from a mobile device during the same month.

Secondly, the Reasons Why Web Access from Mobile Phones is Growing

There are several reasons for accessing the Internet from mobile phones.

One is that search engines are providing more information than ever before about the street addresses and phone numbers of local establishments. This information comes in really handy when you’re driving.

For instance, if you are driving down Madison Avenue in Manhattan wondering where the nearest Pizza Hut is, you just access Google Maps or Yahoo Maps on your cell phone and type “Pizza Hut Madison Avenue NYC” . Bam, the search engine sends you back a list of the Pizza Huts on Madison Avenue with their street addresses and phone numbers. Clicking on one of them brings back driving directions and the phone number. Click on the phone number and your mobile calls the restaurant. Veggie delight anyone?

In a similar manner you can find where the nearest hotels, restaurants or stores are. Or maybe a specific office where you are due for a meeting. You will probably also want driving directions and data on the weather on the way.
Also, an increasing number of web services are being made cell-phone friendly.. banking and downloading your email automatically (as soon as a message comes in) are examples ( Gmail has a program that you download into your phone to get your Gmail on the fly).
Apple’s Iphone is hitting the market on June 29, 2007, and 10 million Iphones are expected to have sold by the end of 2008. The Iphone features a very easy-to-use web browser which will result in millions of new mobile phone-based web surfers.

Non-Apple cell phones are also becoming radically more web-enabled: user-friendly browsers, such as Microsoft’s Deepfish and Yahoo’s Yahoo Go!, are being released for them.

The net result is that surfing the web from your cell phone will no longer be as difficult as writing a book on quantum physics, and there are going to be a flood of new people doing it.

Google is going to drastically lower the costs of mobile surfing. According to TechCrunch, Google is going to become a mobile phone operator in the UK along with mobile phone company O2, and offer cheap handsets preloaded with various Google mobile applications like Google Maps. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt is even talking about making mobile phone usage… free (of course this means your cell phone would be like a free newspaper, the kind filled with just ads).