Author Archives: Nadir Garouche

Firefox Mobile

Below is a concept video of Firefox Mobile, currently being developed by Mozilla Labs. You really need to watch it, note that the final version may not look like what is presented here but it does explains the directions Mozilla is thinking in : touch screen interface, large screen, hidden controls while browsing, and more.


Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Health care is high-priced, that’s why certain patients cannot order the medicines they need. Currently more than quoter of men aged 40 to 70 reported some degree of erectile difficulties. Of course most popular is Viagra. What about sexual dysfunctions and “questo link“? What is the most momentous information you have to study about “”? The very significant point you need look for is “”. A scientific research found that just 14 percent of patients taking Wellbutrin told about sexual dysfunction. If you get any prescription drugs like Viagra, check with a physician that they are healthy to take with your other remedies. Do not give Viagra or any medicament to anyone under 18 years old without medical advice.

ABphone Launches Mobile Game Search Engine

So on Monday I mentioned that a mobile search company was about to launch a mobile game search service. It’s now formally official, the company in question is abphone, a mobile content search engine based in France.

abphone may have a low profile but it’s currently a very popular off-portal mobile content search engine, users can easily find and images or videos, and download them for free on their mobile phone.

In April 2008, abphone said that is reached half billion searches.

Today, abphone adds a new vertical: mobile games. For this beta launch, the mobile search company has partnered with Gameloft to index its entire catalog of premium games (about 200) and make it accessible via a search box.

This is the first mobile search engine that allows people to find cell phone games.

abphone has also indexed free mobile games from Greystripe.

The service is only available in France so far, but more countries will be added in the near future as well as more mobile game providers’ catalogs (paid and free ones).

Like other mobile content search engines, the indexing of games is made via XML feeds. Rankings are based on relevance, but also on some factors such as ratings or popularity.

Below is a demonstration of the user interface.

Premium games are displayed on top of the search result pages.

A link to the free games (“jeux gratuits” in french) search results page is displayed at the bottom.

A content page, with information such as user ratings, comments and number of downloads.

abphone is available at this address from a mobile device: http://m.abphone.com

Mobile Games Search

A well known mobile search company will announce tomorrow the launch of the first mobile games search service. What I can tell you is that this will be a threat for big branded mobile search players such as Google or Yahoo!

It’s already possible to search for off-portal mobile content such as wallpapers, ringtones or MP3s from a mobile phone, but mobile games search was an untapped service until now.

More information will be posted on Wednesday on this blog so make sure to come back if you’re interested in this area.

Microsoft Announces Display Advertising on Windows Live for Mobile Services plus Mobile Search Advertising

During advance08, Microsoft’s online advertising leadership forum held in Redmond, the company announced that display advertising (banner ads) was now available across two Windows Live for mobile services, and also “the launch of new markets for Windows Live for mobile services and upcoming advertising plans for its Live Search Mobile offering.”

Advertisers from France, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. can now buy banner ads that will be displayed acorss Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail.

“This builds upon Microsoft’s initial launch of mobile advertising for MSN Mobile in, France, , Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. where mobile ads are available alongside premium MSN Mobile content. Advertising on Windows Live for mobile is already available in Spain, and later this month will be available in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, further extending its availability for advertisers. All ads placed on these two popular services will adhere to Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) guidelines.”

Microsoft also announced that it plans to expand its mobile sponsored links offers on Live Search Mobile in the second half of 2008. A beta is currently available in the U.S.

The press release is available here.

Opera Mini Report: WAP is Dead Again, Social Networks Dominate Traffic

Opera published some very interesting data yesterday regarding Opera Mini users’ habits. They looked at aggregate and anonymous traffic of more than 44 million cumulative Opera Mini users worldwide.

Key findings of the report are that:

– Opera Mini users go mainly to social networking sites, it accounts for almost 41% of traffic. Those sites are either desktop websites that people want to access from their phones (ie. Facebook), or sites specifically designed for use on a mobile phone. (ie. MocoSpace).

– More than 11.9 million people used Opera Mini in March to browse 2.4 billion pages. Thus far, more than 44 million cumulative users have tried Opera Mini.

– “One Web will triumph over WAP content:” translate: “WAP is dead”: Opera reports that “full” web surfing comprises more than 77% of all traffic, and traffic to WAP sites has declined. Well, that’s no surprise, Opera Mini users are aware that they can browse desktop websites from their phone so they prefer to do so, but remember that there are 3 billion mobile phones worldwide, and a large part of them access more to mobile sites than full websites, since they mostly use the native WAP browser pre-installed on their phone.

So unless every mobile user downloads Opera Mini or buy a high end phone, WAP (WML) and mobile sites will still be used in majority.

– Nearly a quarter of all traffic is headed to content portals or search engines.

Also included in the report is a snapshot of the top 10 countries for Opera Mini ranked by usage, you can see that most of the top countries are not the richest ones, which again proves that developing countries represent a major opportunity in terms of mobile services.

Snapshot: China

  • Web portal content and search engine access is extremely popular in China, accounting for nearly 55% of the traffic.
  • E-commerce and e-mail are not yet as popular in China as in other parts of the world. Together, these two categories combine to create less than 2% of overall Opera Mini traffic in China.

Top 10 sites in China

China
  1. www.sina.com
  2. www.baidu.com
  3. www.google.cn
  4. www.ko.cn
  5. news.sohu.com
  6. www.xiaonei.com
  7. www.3g.cn
  8. www.paojiao.com
  9. www.188bet.com
  10. www.feiku.com

Snapshot: United States

  • More than 63% of U.S. Web traffic on mobile phones is to social networks, tying it with Indonesia for the number one spot.

Top 10 sites in the U.S.

United States
  1. www.myspace.com
  2. www.google.com
  3. www.mocospace.com
  4. www.yahoo.com
  5. www.facebook.com
  6. www.live.com
  7. www.hi5.com
  8. www.wikipedia.org
  9. www.itsmy.com
  10. www.ebay.com

Snapshot: United Kingdom

  • The United Kingdom is the world leader in mobile e-mail, although that number remains small. More than 11% of traffic in Q1 was to Web-based e-mail services.

Top 10 sites in the U.K.

United Kingdom
  1. www.facebook.com
  2. www.google.co.uk
  3. www.live.com
  4. www.bebo.com
  5. www.mocospace.com
  6. news.bbc.co.uk
  7. uk.yahoo.com
  8. www.itsmy.com
  9. www.faceparty.com
  10. www.ebay.co.uk

Opera Mini: The Cheaters’ Choice?

Today, Opera announced the public availability of the latest version of Opera Mini (4.1). See the press release here.

The press release explains the new features available and cites Opera’s CEO saying that more than 44 million people have downloaded Opera Mini so far.

There’s also a citation from one user which is rather funny. It’s from a student from Lithuania:

“Opera Mini 4.1 is just great,” says RamÅ«nas Monkevičius, a student from Lithuania. “I use it at school to find information on Wikipedia, […]it really helps me at school. I can just save my Wikipedia pages and access them whenever I need to. My history grades improved drastically, thanks to Opera Mini.”

Did the guy just say that Opera Mini was an innovative technique for cheating at school? O_o I believe so 🙂

AdMob Launches Free Mobile Analytics Solution

AdMob, one of the largest mobile advertising networks, has recently announced the launch of AdMob Analytics, a free mobile web analytics solution.

According to the press release, the main features will be:

“The AdMob Analytics suite allows mobile site owners to track site performance metrics such as unique visitors, duration of visit, page performance, as well as user details including geography, operator and device specifics”

” AdMob Mobile Analytics will also provide site owners visibility into their sources of traffic including search engines, direct traffic and advertising. Combined with the ability to track conversion of the specific events and actions that the campaign seeks to drive, this enables measurement of campaign performance”

I wonder what is AdMob’s definition of “unique visitor”. Unlike on the desktop Internet ecosystem, the mobile Internet doesn’t allow the use of cookies or Javascript on all mobile devices. To my knowledge, the only reliable way to identify unique visitors is by using it’s MSISDN, which is only retrievable by carriers or mobile billing companies such as Bango (which are linked to carriers).

AdMob Analytics is not open to the public yet, you need to request an invite for their beta version on the site.

I cannot say much about the service since I haven’t tested it yet and they aren’t many information on the site. But that’s good to see someone launching a free mobile analytics solution, this will help marketers and mobile site owners get useful information about their visitors, and tune their sites to improve user experiences.

ACID Test-like for Mobile Web Browsers

The “Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group“, a W3C group whose goal is to provide test suites for mobile Web technologies just recently announced the launch of its “Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers”.

In the same spirit as the well known ACID tests for desktop Web browsers, the Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers (no, they couldn’t find a better name :)) allows to test 12 Web technologies “ranging from well-deployed (but often poorly implemented on mobile devices) technologies such as HTTPS and PNG, to technologies we believe will matter in a year or two (like SVG animation and CSS Media Queries).”

To perform the test, you need to point your mobile web browser to this URI: http://dev.w3.org/2008/mobile-test/test.html or this one (shorter): http://tinyurl.com/37e33p

Each technology is represented by a square, if the technology is supported, the square will be green.

Opera mini 4.1 test

Test of Opera Mini 4.1

As more and more people go online from their mobile devices, this test will help decide if the browsers installed on their phones can provide them with the most enjoyable experience.

That’s really a nice move from the W3C. More information here .