Mobile Web News & Articles

It is now official. Microsoft and Nokia have formally announced a new, groundbreaking partnership that will see the creation of a set of productivity solutions designed specifically for a mobile workforce.

The partnership involves the design, development and marketing of a set of productivity, collaboration and communication solutions for Nokia smartphones, starting with the Nokia Eseries.

What are some of the solutions that will be included in this new mobile partnership?

• Create, edit, view and share Office documents including mobile-optimized versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote
• Access to SharePoint based Intranets and Extranets
• IM, presence awareness, conferencing and collaboration using Microsoft Communicator Mobile
• Device Management with Microsoft Systems Center

Nokia is the largest smartphone provider with over 200 million customers worldwide, so it does make sense that Microsoft would choose to partner with them to push their mobile solutions to the world.

What is good to know is that there will be dedicated mobile teams within each company working on these mobile solutions and that they are not just an extension of existing product teams. We would expect this means a true effort to deliver truly mobile software.

Mobile solutions have a specific user experience that needs to be considered. Many vendors are already developing mobile-optimized versions of their applications, including business apps for the iPhone.

With explosive growth of the mobile workforce, Microsoft may be primed to take the lead thanks to their partnership. Of course it won't hurt Nokia either.

It's a mobile epidemic! And trust us, "epidemic" is in no way too strong a word. Opera's mobile browser, Opera Mini, proves it with recent numbers: for the first time ever, users viewed more than 10 billion pages in one month according to the State of the Mobile Web report by Opera.

Opera (news, site) got on the mobile hype way back in 1998 when they developed their first mobile browser. Since then (especially in recent times), they've done a pretty good job at staying in the spotlight. The mobile browser has seen a growth in user base of over 4.2% globally since May 2009, and over 143% over the past year. Their page views have increased by over 8 percent over the figures for the month of May and for the first time, breached the 10 billion mark in June.

Opera's numbers reflect a quickly growing trend: “More than 10 billion page views in one month underscore that the Web is already the platform of choice for mobile devices," explained Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. "Web standards provide a more efficient way to create flawless sites across all devices."

If you're ready to join the movement, it looks like Opera's a good place to start. The self-proclaimed "most popular mobile Web browser" is currently available as version 4.2 and features personalized skins, better video support and synced notes. Check it out here.

It's no secret that regulatory policies often dictate the way that information can be accessed, shared or otherwise managed. Internationally-based companies face challenges posed by privacy laws, like the U.S. Patriot Act and the EU Data Protection Directive, which prohibits the transportation of electronically stored data from the U.S and Europe.

Kiersted Systems has addressed this issue by launching a mobile service for processing electronic discovery data. Prompted by such challenges, Kiersted's mobile processing capability allows companies to perform eDiscovery wherever clients may be: down the street, across the country or around the globe.

Only by living on Mars could one have avoided hearing about the iPhone or BlackBerry and their entrances into the corporate world. Millions of consumers and business people are testament to the popularity of the handheld devices that have made accessing the web on the move cheaper and easier.

The new iPhone 3G S could well hasten this trend as its applications can now potentially operate twice as fast.

TenDigits Software, provider of mobility solutions for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, recently had a lot to say. In addition to the announcement of a cool new mobile alerts capability called Smart Actionable Alerts, the company also released version 4.5 of their flagship product, MobileAccess.

Smart Actionable Alerts is a different approach to automating notifications and facilitating productive responses, while MobileAccess 4.5 includes new features like the ability to upload images, GPS coordinates, or any file from your BlackBerry to Dynamics CRM.

If anyone was in any doubt that competition in the mobile web market is really beginning to heat-up, then yesterday’s release of three new widgets by Nokia (news, site) that will convert web code and scripts created on PCs into mobile applications will fix that.

Possibly concerned that it might be losing out in the battle to win the hearts -- and pockets -- of a market that is increasingly looking to the mobile web, Nokia is hoping these widgets will attract web developers to extend content to the Nokia platform.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (news, site) is back at work, this time developing best practices for the development and delivery of web applications on mobile devices.

Developed by the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group as part of the Mobile Web Initiative, each best practice is intended to be a possible measure towards "the goal of providing as rich and dynamic an experience as possible on a mobile Web browser."

On the whole, the best practices relate to the appropriate technologies and techniques to use for managing a Web application's data. Here's a glimpse into some of the recommendations made by the working group.

David Pogue, tech columnist for the New York Times, shares his viewpoint at the J Boye Conference on three tech trends that are likely to make a difference in the next few years.

It looks like its going to get crowded out there in mobile web land very soon.

While this might draw a wry smile from those involved in traditional website development, a (very) quick search across the web would indicate that we could well be surfing on a cresting wave that is only starting to grow.

Only this week, mobiSiteGalore (news, site) was selected as Honoree in the Mobile Applications category for the 13th Annual Webby Awards.

The Singapore-based mobile content developer, Suvvo has just launched a new Content Management System that allows users to build dynamic mobile pages and sites for web-enabled mobile devices without programming knowledge, or complex integration processes.

We have been keeping our eyes on the browser wars for quite some time here at CMSWire. While the battle has been heating up on desktop platforms, the new and cool thing is mobile browsing.

Mozilla has been lagging behind in the mobile arena, but that may have changed with Mozilla’s latest mobile browser — Fennec. Fennec enables the very things that made Firefox so popular: extensions. The first extension has been released and things are moving quick.

Building a mobile website is not as simple as one would imagine, but mobiSiteGalore wants to change that. This service allows users to build mobile websites for free with a simple interface. However, what makes mobiSiteGalore truly special is that the site building can be performed directly from a mobile device.

A new player in the mobile web browsing playground is rapidly changing the mobile web content game. By launching their downloadable mobile web browser Skyfire has the potential to compete with Safari, Opera and other mobile browsers that are out there. The browser is fast, simple, supports rich media and, what a shocker, is absolutely free.

Yahoo! is to open up its mobile platform to developers in a desperate bid to steal a march on Google on the Mobile Web.

The move was announced at the CES in Las Vegas and is just one of a number of Mobile Web initiatives launched by the beleaguered company, which sees Mobile as the medium-term battlefield where the war with Google will be won or lost.

Free OSS forum platform phpBB 3.0 has just gone live. It offers a range of new features designed to make your forums better and brighter than ever before and to bring them to the small screen.

Key highlights of the release include security augmentations, more collaboration features, built-in SEO and delegated administration features. The whole thing has been optimized for the challenges of the mobile web.