Mowser is dead. But forensics has yet to indicate whether the business’s demise is a sign of an epidemic or simply a predictable casualty of the tumultuous wireless Web space.
Russell Beattie, a former mobile developer for Yahoo Inc., launched Mowser just a year ago in an effort to compete with Google Inc., Greenlight Wireless’s Skweezer and other developers that customize Internet content for mobile phones. But “active development on Mowser has stopped,” the entrepreneur said, citing decreasing traffic to the transcoding site and a lack of funding.
“We haven’t been able to raise funding, and as a site, growth has been flat or falling for the past couple months because of various search-engine tweaks I’ve done,” Beattie wrote in a 1,200-word blog post. “We’ll keep the site running for the time being, but we’re going to encourage others to not rely on the service as it could disappear in the future.”
Too much porn?
A longtime evangelist for the mobile Internet, Beattie wrote that he’s come to believe the market “is limited at best, and dying at worst.” Mowser was designed as a “short term bet against Moore’s law,” serving to bridge the gap between wireless and the traditional Web, Beattie said, but the lack of quality traffic – 80% of Mowser’s traffic was porn-related – indicates that consumers won’t embrace the Internet on mobile until Web-friendly phones such as Apple Inc.’s iPhone become more commonplace.
“What’s going to drive that traffic eventually? Better devices and full-browsers,” Beattie continued, pointing to M:Metrics figures that show 85% of iPhone users surf the mobile Internet while only 13% of all wireless consumers do. “It would be easy to say that the iPhone ‘disrupted’ the mobile Web market, but in fact I think all it did is point out that there never was one to begin with.”
Those comments sparked a firestorm in the blogosphere. Some mobile enthusiasts and developers backed Beattie’s proclamation, saying mass-market phones produced for voice make for an intolerable user experience. Others, pointing to the success of on-device portals and downloadable browsers like Opera’s Mini (which recently passed the 40 million-download mark), insisted Mowser’s problem was its strategy: transcoding technologies have failed to deliver an acceptable user experience, according to some, and will become superfluous middlemen as more Web-friendly phones become cheaper and move into the mass market.
Transcoding needed
But transcoding developers say their wares are a necessary step as mobile phones evolve from voice vehicles to on-the-go Internet devices. A behind the-scenes PC-to-mobile service is easier for consumers to use than a downloadable application, of course, and doesn’t have to be installed by a manufacturer. Which is why developers such as Novarra Inc., an Illinois-based developer, expanded beyond mobile browsers into white-label transcoding services.
“Eighteen months ago, when massive interest started to happen in server-only (transcoding), we said people are going to want our client,” CEO Jayanthi Rangarajan said. “We would look at the client, look at the server side-by-side and be like, ‘No, people need the client.'”
Carriers pushing
That’s not to say that transcoding technologies haven’t caused some major headaches on the mobile Internet. Sprint Nextel Corp. last month took a beating by tech enthusiasts when it rolled out a new offering from Openwave Systems Inc. that replaced phones’ User Agents with its own identifier, preventing Internet publishers from using device-detection technology and rerouting surfers to sites optimized for handsets. And Novarra received a similar lesson last year when partner Vodafone deployed its technology only to have it bypass made-for-mobile sites.
Transcoding developers say they’re learning with every deployment, though, and that their technologies allow online publishers to produce content for a single platform – the traditional Internet – instead of building a host of sites for different devices in different markets.
“I tell publishers, ‘Don’t worry about the kind of phones people have, do what you want. Make it mobile friendly, though, and don’t put 40 images on it,'” Rangarajan said. “We believe that by deploying a server solution you actually enable the world of mobile content to get richer, and you don’t have to worry about the type of phones people use.”
