Retailers with existing e-commerce stores can benefit hugely from a well executed mobile site – learn about what you can do to make it a success!

We will discuss best case practices and share success stories from retailers.

Register for the Webinar now!

YOU WILL LEARN:

• Mobile design basics
• Improving PPC conversions on mobile
• Optimizing checkout flow on mobile
• Combining mobile web and apps
• and much more!

We hope you join us Thursday, February 24 at 10am PST / 1pm EST to discuss this exciting topic.

NEW YORK, NY / VANCOUVER, BC– January, 2011 – IEEE Spectrum announced today that they have chosen Mobify, the leading mobile web platform, to take IEEE Spectrum Magazine mobile.

The evolution of wireless technology has made communicating through mobile devices part of today’s society. Whether it’s emailing, posting links on social media, or reading the latest article, mobile browsing is predicted to dominate desktop browsing by 2014. With a technologically savvy audience, IEEE Spectrum wanted to provide their mobile users with the same experience and content found on their main site. By mobifying their site, IEEE Spectrum hopes to increase its unique visitors and provide IEEE members with an enhanced mobile experience.

“It’s important for Spectrum to be available to its audience anytime, anywhere,” said Harry Goldstein, Editorial Director, Digital, of IEEE Spectrum. “We wanted to provide a seamless mobile experience for our audience and have our content available to them when they want it.”

“IEEE Spectrum is an engineering magazine with rich history,” said Igor Faletski, CEO of Mobify. “We’re thrilled to be selected as the mobile platform of choice by one of the leading technology resources in the world.”

As seekers of cutting-edge technology, IEEE Spectrum Magazine was able to make their mobile site using the Mobify Studio platform.

About IEEE Spectrum
IEEE Spectrum magazine is the flagship publication of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional technology association. It is a magazine and Web site for technology innovators, business leaders, and the intellectually curious. Spectrum explores future technology trends and the impact of those trends on society and business.

IEEE Spectrum magazine is read by over 385,000 technology professionals and senior executives worldwide in the high technology sectors of industry, government, and academia. Subscribers include engineering managers and corporate and financial executives. Deans and provosts at every major engineering university and college throughout the world are also Spectrum readers.

About MOBIFY
Mobify was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. Its solutions optimize web sites for mobile and tablet devices. Mobify’s customers include global leaders in e-commerce, online publishing, and digital advertising. By using Mobify’s mobile web platform, these companies have achieved significant growth in mobile traffic and revenue. Learn more at www.mobify.me

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Jan 18, 2011

Mobile Economics Will Tred Toward Web Economics
Business models that work best on the web will ultimately work best in mobile. For example, disappointing magazine sales on iPad are not surprising, as people are unwilling to purchase the same content on the web.

The Movement from Apps to Mobile Web Sites
The hospitality industry may be starting to shift away from apps to mobile web to help cope with device fragmentation and SEO requirements.

The Great Rise of the Mobile Web
A handy infographic with some interesting stats. For example, there are over 5 billion mobile web users in the world, with 3.81% of the world’s total web usage being mobile. And it’s only getting bigger!

Mobile Development: 5 Tips for Small Businesses
Some useful tips for small businesses to expand their web presence onto mobile. Not being tech-savvy is no longer an excuse for not having a mobile site!

2010: Breakout Year for E-Commerce
7.3 million mobile phone users shop via mobile monthly, 3.9 million weekly, and 2.1 million daily!

That’s it for this week folks! Have a terrific weekend and we’ll see you all next week!

I think that we’ll continue to see more companies <…> who put us [Groupon] to shame a couple years from now with their rate of growth.

According to Andrew, Groupon grew so quickly thanks to its social features. What’s going to drive web hyper-growth in 2012? The mobile web – but it’s not ready yet.

Consider Instagr.am, the darling of early adopters this winter. It’s up to a million users, growing through Twitter and app downloads – which is awesome. However, many are lost at every stage of the acquisition funnel – clicking the AppStore link, installing, learning the native UI. What if you could start taking photos & applying filters via the mobile browser – right after clicking that very first instagr.am link? They’d probably be at 5-10 million users by now. Today, the Instagr.am website isn’t even mobile-friendly.

Universal JavaScript APIs for mobile cameras are on their way (you can use PhoneGap in the meantime) – but not today, limiting growth opportunities for mobile-centric web services.

Another good example is online advertising (search or display), where every mobile click leading to a desktop page will convert at a disastrously low rate. This inhibits a lot of mobile innovation in pay-for-performance advertising – especially in e-commerce.

Mobile web has to get more mobile in order to facilitate business models of tomorrow. Let’s do our part to make it happen!

Google Beats Facebook On Mobile Web, Says Opera According to Opera, Facebook was dominating the mobile web traffic in 2009 but was overtaken by Google during this year.

New, Improved and Easier to Use Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Maemo Among many improvements in speed and usability, new additions to Firefox Mobile include a new add-ons interface, better syncing and more hardware-accelerated WebGL support.

360 Panorama: iPhone 4 surfs the Web with gyroscopic support in Mobile Safari Interesting concept website allows visitors to viewa 360 photo of a public park just by gliding their iPhone through the air.

Snow reveals airlines’ poor mobile strategies Interesting article on how (some) airlines are using mobile to inform their customers about flight conditions, delays and provide them with up-to-date travel information.

That’s it for this week, folks! Wishing you Happy Holidays from all of us at Mobify! Have a good one!

2010: The Year Of Mobile Exploding consumer demand for everything mobile has been driving the industry forward to new heights. From 3 out 4 photos on Flickr being taken with an iPhone to Facebook mobile serving 200+ million mobile users, 2010 has been an dynamite year for everything mobile.

In Q3 Google searches from mobile devices grew 130% year over year According to Mobile Marketing Association research, 59% of holiday shoppers will use their phones for shopping this year. To capitalize on this explosive growth Google is adding Seller Ratings to mobile to provide a better holiday shopping experience.

European mobile operators say big sites need to pay for users’ data demands European mobile operators say that companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple should pay for the bandwidth generated by users accessing their sites. Interesting article on the state of the European telecom market.

Retail 2011: Five Action Items Last week, Verizon Retail’s Ravi Bagal put down five trends that he says will be apparent in online retail in the near future. The first item on the list was a sharp spike in mobile commerce next year.

Shake-up at the top in this week’s m-commerce site performance index Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index measures the loading times of the top 15 mobile commerce destinations.  The rankings board had some interesting changes this week—see who went up and who went down!

What Shoppers Want from Retail Apps Earlier this year Adobe research has found that many consumers were unimpressed with retailers’ mobile apps and preferred to browse the mobile web instead. A recent Accenture survey has asked consumers what they would like to see on retailers’ mobile sites and here are the results!

That’s it for this week folks! Have a terrific weekend and we’ll see you all next Thursday!

Form detection woe

The problem has led to the use of the metatag below, which disables format detection on most WebKit based phones.  This prevents false-positives in format detection, but also means implicit click-to-call support is disabled.

 <meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no">

The most reliable solution for click-to-call is to wrap the number in an A tag with tel: scheme as per RFC 3966. If you have CSS styled telephone numbers in your mobile site, an easy way to make them into a tel: style tag is with a bit of javascript. I’ve provided a snippet below to do just that. Given a CSS query selector (the selector must wrap the telephone number, and ONLY the telephone number), it will create an anchor tag with the tel: scheme as the href for the phone number, adding in a prefix you specify. (For example, if the number embedded in your site is 310-222-2222, you might want to prefix it with +1 for international callers.)

(function(){
    function $(selector) {
        if (document.querySelector)
            return document.querySelectorAll(selector);
        // we could fall back better using something like sizzle
        return [];
    }
    function telefy(selector, prefix) {
        prefix = prefix || '';
        var aEls = $(selector);
        for (var i=0,ii=aEls.length;i<ii;i++) {
           var nEl = aEls[i];
           var nText = nEl.firstChild;
           if (nText.nodeType != 3) continue;
           var sPhone = nText.nodeValue;
           // create the new element
           var nA = document.createElement('a');
           nA.innerHTML = sPhone;
           nA.href = 'tel:' + prefix + sPhone;
           // replace the old element
           nEl.replaceChild(nA, nText);
        }
    }
    window._telefy = telefy;
})();

Now we make it go! Let’s say our phone numbers are wrapped in a tag such as:

<span class="phone">310-222-2222</span>

We could call the telefy code above like so, to wrap it in a manner supported by most handsets:

_telefy('span.phone', '+1-');

@media only screen and (min-width : 321px)

Will every smart phone device always have a visible display width of 320px in portrait orientation?  Not at all. In fact, this code will force landscape orientation CSS rules for a Blackberry Torch in portrait orientation — the usable display width of the Blackberry Torch in portrait orientation is 360px. We can expect even more diversity in mobile handset  display sizes during 2011.

The usable width of the browser for Blackberry Torch in portrait orientation is 360px. There are no guarantees on device widths or screen aspect ratio in the devices coming to market.

This is a fundamental problem with using media queries to solve the device orientation layout problem.  We recommend you look at a body class based solution such as the one provided by master-class by John Boxall instead!

Image credit: Isriya Paireepairit

E-commerce has grown to billions of dollars per year thanks to taking advantage of Web fundamentals. Here are just some of the strategies that are crucial to long-term success of online vendors:

> SEO & SEM

> Affiliate Tracking

> Social Media Compatibility (through URL mapping)

All of which need to seamlessly work on mobile. It’s pretty much impossible to fully support these strategies in native apps, which have the added requirement of being discovered & downloaded prior to use. Mobile web alone has what it takes to implement a complete mobile commerce portal and retailers seem to agree. It’s going to be very exciting to watch this space develop in 2011.

Boston wins Digital Government’s “Best of the Web” Award We’re very happy for our friends in Boston for winning this prestigious award. They were recognized for many of their achievements including prioritizing mobile web accessibility for their city’s website. City of Boston’s mobile website was praised for being fast, functional, and useful to its visitors. (Stay tuned for an interview with the Boston team on their experiences!)

Opera Mini 5.1 for Windows Mobile Phones Released Opera gave the Windows Mobile crowd a breath of fresh air this week with their new release of the Opera Mini mobile browser. This is very good news for users who are on expensive mobile networks as Opera claims to cut down the amount of data transfer by up to 90 percent.

Why Your Business Needs a Mobile Commerce Strategy Great article by Bill Zielke, senior director of Merchant Services at PayPal on how Mobile Commerce is already becoming the next big thing to hit the web. Is your mobile website ready for the holiday shopping season?

Speed Counts Recently published survey: your visitors will leave your site and may never come back if it loads too slowly. 32 percent of visitors leave a slow loading website within one and five seconds. 84 will give up on a slow loading site after trying it a few times. This really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone but it’s nice to see some solid stats. Stats by Compuware.

UPDATE: Nokia Replaces CEO, Brings on Microsoft’s President of Business Division This move is long overdue but Stephen Elop was inaugurated this morning at Nokia. Nokia’s share has been threatened  ever since the release of the iPhone and Stephen is expected to reposition the company for a counterattack. At Microsoft, one of the things that Stephen was responsible for was Microsoft Office. Can he steer the hardware giant through the rough water? Only time will tell.

Wishing you a fantastic weekend and see you all next week!