Score one for the Developers!

The press release refers to the W3C work in this area, in particular the Content Transformation Task Force - Openwave actually participates in that.

Openwave does actively support the W3C and is a member of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative. However we also listen very seriously to the mobile developer community, including reading and commenting on blogs!

Discussions within the mobile developer community on the impact of content adaptation has helped us enormously to target the pain points and allowed us to focus resources on removing problems. Especially helpful has been Luca Passani; both with the technical ideas raised in his manifesto but also his constructive feedback outside of this.

Mobile content adaptation aims to make the estimate 90% of web sites that are not mobile friendly usable from a standard phone browser. This encourages users to browse wider and with more confidence, which will benefit the whole mobile ecosystem. Please keep the dialogue flowing so that we do not in our difficult task cause unnecessary problems to those of you who have invested in building a mobile friendly experience!

Many thanks.

Ed Moore
OpenWeb Product Manager

It is great that Openwave is leading the way and getting on the right track as it relates to content adaptation. I think that ultimately reason will prevail and the synergies between service-provided content adaptation and mobile-adapted web sites will be obvious. In the end, it is all about subscriber experience. Openwave can further help by educating their customers on this. It appears that other vendors are not.

Ed,

Thanks for taking the time to comment here. I appreciate what you're trying to accomplish for end users and am greatful that we're all working to find ways to reflect the developer/content owner's intentions when sites are authored specifically for mobile.

Ron

InfoGin, as the pioneer in the field of Web to Mobile Content Adaptation, always made sure that it's platform will not harm existing mobile content.
Our platform already deployed commercially with the capability to go out to the Internet with no User-Agent spoofing and detect automatically the nature of a site, to make sure that content providers' mobile version is not override by an adaptation of the Web version.
InfoGin applies smart algorithms for doing such detection.
We will continue to work closely with the mobile developer’s community and provide the tools as well as the infrastructure to enhance and support its efforts.
Eran Wyler
CEO & Founder
InfoGin Ltd.

Thank you Luca, Ed and Erlan;

It's great to see a dialog opening up between the mobile web development community and two of the content adaptation firms. It's really in both groups best interest to agree on what constitutes good adaptation practices.

Transcoding non-mobile sites is a good thing as long as it doesn't effect new and existing mobile services. More mobile content (including transcoded sites) means more mobile web usage which in turn will drive development of mobile specific sites.

I hope we will soon see Openwave, Infogin, et al. agreeing to follow a set of content adaptation guidelines, based on Luca's "Manifesto". I think that having a mobile web developer approved transcoding implementation would be a good selling point for these firms.

Dennis

My blog - It's all about the mobile web.
wapreview.mobi
wapreview.com/blog.

Openwave's Ed Moore, OpenWeb's Product Manager, has officially signed the Manifesto on behalf of Openwave today (april 13 2008):

http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/manifesto/

Please join me in congratulating Ed and Openwave for their choice.

Luca

Also InfoGin's Eran Wyler, founder and CEO, has signed the Manifesto.

Congratulations to InfoGin and welcome to the club of Developers' friends.

Luca