The Mobile Developer

The Mobislim project is now entering its marketing campaign phase. Maria Bunter has been put incharge of marketing and we’ll be working with her as she drives traffic to mobislim. We have incorporated lots of mobile analytics into the mobislim site, so that Maria can track the effectiveness of her campaigns.

Maria has compiled a good list of mobile advertisers which she is going to use. I’ve dealt with some of them but there are some new names here. I’ve realised that an added bonus of this project is that I will be able to rapidly collate data on mobile traffic providers, and use this knowledge to make recommendations to our customers.

Maria’s list includes 4th Screen Advertising, Admob, Amobee, Adstar, Ads Handy and Mojiva .

We deployed Mobislim to its production server today so that Bango Bunter can check it out. We’ve got more categories too add but I’m pleased that our new CMS and analytics enhancements are giving us the flexibility we require for the project - and Bango Bunter is pleased with the way the site’s looking and working and particularly happy with how quickly we got it running - even despite the server issues we had with our hosting provider - fasthosts.

Here’s how the site’s looking at the moment:

After a load of our customers lost billing thanks to the efforts of one particular transcoding company - Novara - who software has been stuck infront of Vodafone’s internet getway - the COO of that company goes and insults the entire mobile community by showing her complete ignorance of anything mobile, and hurling unfounded (and blatantly false) accusations at Luca Passani - hero of the mobile developer! Check it out here http://www.mobilemarketingmagazine.co.uk/2008/05/talking-transco.html

It seems that content for mobislim requires a couple of enhancements to the CMS. That’s great because we love a bit of development ; )

Development of these two enhancements can now begin as I have informed my wife that I will be working this weekend. In case this is of any help to people like me who speak without thinking, when your wife asks what she is supposed to do whilst you are working, “tidy up the house” is not a good answer. My wife is consequently now not talking to me.

Here’s what we’re adding:

Adding Article Support: To date all the sites we have built have been designed to deliver content such as mobile wallpapers, ringtones, screensavers, themes and videos. However, Bango Bunter has sent a load of text articles for upload. We need our customers to be able to edit assets themselves so we need to have a way for the customer to enter Device Independent Markup into the CMS so we’re enhancing asset description to either take some text, or text provided in some XML. This will allow for the use of styleclasses on divs , for XHTML compatible devices, and for the align attribute, which can be used on paragraphs on wml  / chtml devices.

Adding Tracking Options: Since the main point of mobislim is to test out mobile tracking and analytics, we need to test out the various ways in which pages and assets can be tracked. There are 2 main types of tracking we are adding. We are adding support for indiviudal assets, so that an individual asset can be linked to a bango number. This is kind of a regression from the use of the bango relay, however we are putting it in so that we can compare the various ways in which different types of users might deploy tracking into their applications. The excting bit is that there is a new API coming out which will support page tracking with dynamic bango number creation. This means that if we have a view-article page, which displays an article asset, all we need to do is pass the asset id and any bango number in the package we are using for a project to bango, and it will automatically create a new bango number for tracking the hits on this particular article. This is super cool. We are creating a <tt:bango-tracking/> custom tag, which takes attributes required to control the bango api it talks to. This tag is tightly interwoven with our cms so that it gives site administrators as much control over tracking as possible with the greatest ease. I’m also toying with the idea of creating an open source version of our tag, which is more general and which will just let people drop it into their JSP’s so that they can add mobile tracking to their site, regardless of the CMS they are using. (Well, as long as they’re using Java anyway ; )

We’ve just started development work on a mobile internet site called MobiSlim. Assides from the usual requirements of devleoping a mobile internet site, this particular project holds some extra bonses in store. Key goals of this project are to examine first hand the various requirements of the customer, the site builder, the company providing the analytics and the end user. Also, since this is a project for Bango, we will be able to work with the latest releases in the Bango Analytics product range.

Our key contact for this project is Bango Bunter, (CEO of Mobislim) who is trying to add as much realism as possible to this project. In that capacity he has just sent us some intial content for the site and wants it built by Monday. It’s time to tell the wife I’ll be working the weekend.

There’s been some seriously lame developements in the world of mobile recently. So lame in fact that I’ve decided to start a blog - just to moan about them. One such event is the emergence of transcoding solutions. On the face of it - the idea is great - transcoders take a website and make them readable on mobile… and that’s handy. Sometimes they make a bodge of the job but they at least let you see some of the stuff. The main problem is that nobody has bothered to tell the transcoders not to transcode a site which is already built for mobile. When this happens they just ruin a perfectly mobile site. Luckilly Luca Passani - one of the biggest names in mobile has created a Manifesto - and is trying to get the transcoder manufacturers to sign it - so that they promise to not do super lame things, like transcoder sites which are already designed for mobile. Check it here http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/manifesto/index.htm