emconsteroids

We have started a new blog about all the silly things you can find in the mobile industry and all its facets. Since the mobile industry is such a young industry, there are a lot of silly decisions being made. But because it’s so fast paced and the big players are holding their power and trying to stick to hold to their power, a lot of irrational things happen as well.

This blog is the attempt to capture the one or the other finding and preserve it in time. Hopefully, we will be able to read these posts with a sufficient smile on our faces thinking: “Gee, this was stupid.”

A few examples of silly or simply stupid things which happened in the mobile industry could be:

1.) The .mobi top level domain: I already blogged about this. The details about my opinion can be read from my blog or the .mobi’s post. Funnily some senior members of the .mobi top level domain people have engaged with me in a lively conversation. The success of the .mobi domain, if you want so, could have proven them right, although I am still convinced the idea is fundamentally faulty. “A lot of flies fly on shit – shit must be a good thing.” goes the saying. In my personal opinion, it reflects what happened to the .mobi domain.

2.) The Vodafone rendering engine: Often quoted as one of the most disastrous projects in the mobile history. The idea was simple, particularly for the marketers: “If you are on Vodafone, you have the Internet on your phone.”. The way it worked was, whenever you request a website via mobile phone gateway, this gateway will take the source code of the website, apply some clever logic to it and turn it into a mobile page. The images will also be resized accordingly. Sometimes, the site would even change the whole navigation. It simply does not make sense to create an engine which tries to transform the normal internet sites out there into mobile sites. It’s simply not possible. Deal with it. You’ll simply end up with unmatched expectations. For example as soon as there is some interactivity such as a login, the system breaks. To make things worse, it tried to do the same thing to already mobile-optimized sites. When doing so, the Vodafone gateway would override the original user agent (which was necessary to detect the device) the whole mobile site functionality was compromised.

The blog may also touch on topics such as the mobile strategy of device manufacturers, operators or web site and mobile service providers in general and how they would go about changing the space or being changed within the space.

Happy reading!