I recently had the pleasure to speak with Simon Hunt, Novarra‘s CTO. The goal of my phone call was to know more about the the deal they signed with Yahoo!. Novarra will automatically repurpose websites that are part of Yahoo’s OneSearch results.

I was quite worried when I heard about the partnership, since I didn’t want to experience the same issues than with the Vodafone UK case (which is now partly solved). I then contacted Novarra to get more details. Simon Hunt immediately got back to me and replied to the questions I had.

– Yahoo OneSearch provides two kind of results: traditional web results, and mobile web results. The good news for mobile commerce sites is that Novarra won’t transcode sites from the mobile web results.

– Only sites from “web results” will be transcoded. However, not all web sites have to be transcoded. If your site is properly coded, it doesn’t have to be transcoded to render properly on a handheld device.

Novarra stated that they have created a W3C Content Transformation task force, whose goal will be to work closely with the W3C in order to improve their service, and find signals on web sites that indicate that they do not need to be transcoded.

The team will operate publicly so that people that are active in the mobile web community can provide input.

I’m really glad to hear about the efforts made from Novarra, and wish them good luck in their endeavors.