Talking Transcoding

Novarra came in for a lot of criticism last year when it deployed its transcoding solution for Vodafone UK. The solution effectively rendered some WAP sites invisible to Vodafone users. We caught up with President and COO, Jayanthi Rangarajan, to ask her about the affair

DM: Now when you deployed that transcoding solution for Vodafone UK, you came in for an awful lot of criticism from some quarters. Was it justified?

JR: The criticism is aged out. The problems were in the first few weeks, and while there is a community that continues to complain, the facts are that the operators are very happy and the mobile content partners are very happy. The actual fact, versus the hype, is that Internet usage in Vodafone UK is now around 1,000 times what it was before we launched with them and it has increased mobile content consumption.

DM: So just run us through the problem if you would please.

JR: What we launched within the first week was a solution in which the mobile user agent was not being passed for some sites because they were not partners of Vodafone UK. There were some specific sites where they were selling wallpapers and they had embedded pricing information into an image, and this is not standard. It was something we had not come across and did not support.
The problem only arose on mobile sites that were not .wap or .mobi. We don’t touch those sites, we never did. But there were a lot of people who didn’t address their mobile sites as .wap or .mobi. They addressed them as .com, because in the world they were used to, it wasn’t possible for their regular website to be rendered on a phone. And people made a big fuss about Vodafone UK, but it was exactly the same solution for Turkcell in Turkey.
So you had certain websites where, because of the way our solution had been implemented, we could not deliver the mobile version. The reason for this was because they were not following the standard conventions, so we could not detect that it was a mobile site. So we were screwing up some sites, and one of them, which was a Bango site, made a huge fuss. We had not tested some of these Bango sites, just as we have not tested all of the 1 billion websites. We were early in the market and trying to deploy as fast as we could. But there were hundreds of sites where we could detect and deliver the mobile site.
There were also some people who thought the solution did not work and that Vodafone was forcing people to use the regular website, and that’s not true. For partner sites that had a mobile version, the consumer had the option to see the mobile version. But it was the long tail sites that caused the problem, and some people got very worked up about it, and there was a lot of misunderstanding. I heard someone saying we had screwed up Vodafone Germany’s mobile Internet, and we were not even deployed on Vodafone Germany! But we just had to keep quiet and be sensitive to Vodafone UK. So now we provide the mobile user agent and the desktop user agent so they can choose which to deliver to the handset.

DM: So how long did it take to fix the problem?

JR: We implemented the change within 20 days, but I would have to find out how long it took Vodafone to implement it.

DM: So if it was fixed so quickly, why did people go on about it for so long?

JR: Well there’s one guy still going on about it. Now he sells a database of handset profiles and he’s frustrated because we don’t use his database, because we don’t need one. So he continued to rant because he believed we threatened his business. Another valid reason was the user agent, which tells you what type of phone it is, we were not passing that to the content providers. Because if we passed this to, say, CNN, they would not give us the regular website, they would give us the mobile version. But the service that Vodafone UK wanted to launch was the real web on your phone. But how do you tell CNN you want their regular web content? Anyway, fast forward a few months, and now, we provide this information to every content provider, so the content provider can process the regular information, but we also give them the type of phone and browser, so they can react to that and present a dedicated mobile site if they have one, or the regular website if they don’t.

DM: And despite the criticism, you are convinced of the merits of your transcoding solution?

JR: Of course. Look, we have done about 15 Internet deployments in the last 18 months, and they all work pretty much the same way, so it’s not a Vodafone UK issue. It’s really a quiet change happening in markets that soon you will have the technology on your phone that will allow you to go to any website using the phone in your hand, and you’re not limited to CNN and the weather and sport, though we also include those dedicated WAP sites created for phones, and because of our technology, looking at any website will be a good experience on the mobile.
So developers of content will have no need to create mobile sites. You won’t have issues where your site only works on nine phones on T-Mobile in Germany or seven phones on Sprint. With the Internet, you have the ability to reach across every device. It enables the mobile content provider to stop thinking about the specific constraints of the browser on the device.
Our service has being launched round the world, with Turkcell, which has 34 million subscribers;  Vodafone UK, 17 million; 3 Italy, 7 million. All these people can access any website on their phone, so long as it has a browser. And we have usage data that show that consumers use it many times a month, and they will pay for accessing the net as a core service. The stats also show that less than 30% of traffic goes to the top sites. So this user activity data shows the long tail of the Internet.
We are on version 7.0 of our solution. The company has being going for eight years, and the reason we are winning most of the opportunities we go for is because we have been doing it for eight years. We have a patent to do on the server what used to be done by the browser on a PC.
The competition is trying to catch up, but we are so far ahead that when we launched streaming video with 3 Hong Kong, which had had our Internet service for a year, within a month, 15% of their users were using it, and users view videos between three and five times a month, and in any one session, they view an average of seven videos. You need scalability to deploy that type of application in a Tier 1 operator.
Also, unlike the competition, we have always had a single vision of what we were going to do. We have people from Motorola and from Lucent and from Spyglass, the company which created the browser that became Internet Explorer. That’s a great heritage. The Internet is 41 million pages a minute and we are bringing that traffic into the operators’ networks. 
There are other people out there making a lot of noise, but they don’t have the people or the technology that we have. If you look at the service that Sprint has launched with Openwave, it takes 60-70 seconds to load. That would take Novarra five seconds, so it’s critical that the industry does not deploy solutions that do not have the quality. Sprint is responsible for 40% of Openwave’s revenue so someone made a decision because they got a really good price, but this is really complex technology. Just because you do compression, it doesn’t mean you are qualified to do it on the server.

Comments

[Jon Arne Sæterås]

Novarra continues to surprise me with their arrogance and ignorance. As many before me have stated, there are a vast number of misunderstandings, mistakes and lack of industry knowledge in what Jayanthi Rangarajan is saying.

Daniel Appelquist mentioned the Telia Sonera implementation of Novarra. I wrote the blogpost he is refering to and know the situation in Sweden very well. The situation points out a very interesting thing; the IP rights. The editorial freedom and control over the content is taken away from the content owner, undermining any business model. This is basically the reason why all major newspapers blocked Novarra requests and making the statement at surfclosed.se.

So to comment on the "Well there’s one guy still going on about it" - Not quite! In addition to the developer community, content providers and portal owners, large media companies are also starting to see the bad that transcoding can lead to. In my company (Mobiletech AS) we are experiencing a huge demand after mobile optimized portals as the transcoding option just does not work when you want to meet your customers in the right context.

Jon Arne Sæterås
Head of Product Development, Mobiletech.no

[Daniel Appelquist]

The draft content transformation guidelines document may be found at http://www.w3.org/News/2008#item73.

[Daniel Appelquist]

I think the real story is being missed in all this controversy: that a number of companies, including Novarra, Openwave, Google, AT&T, Drutt and Vodafone, have come together, within the context of the W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative’s Mobile Web Best Practices working group, to develop a best practices for content transformation document which attempts to address the issues in this space once and for all. As we learned during the course of this work, these issues can be thorny, but we think the technical guidelines described in this document will greatly help the mobile Web ecosystem get past these current teething problems. As stated in this document: like it or not, content transformation “is being deployed widely across mobile data access networks. The deployments are widely divergent to each other, with many non-standard HTTP implications, and no well-understood means either of identifying the presence of such transforming proxies, nor of controlling their actions. This document establishes a framework to allow that to happen.” The document has just been released in draft form from the W3C and the working group is currently seeking public comment. I would like to urge all interested parties to read and comment back into this document, which has been produced through a rigorous and thoroughly transparent process of consensus. Comments may be sent to public-bpwg-comments@w3.org.

Daniel Appelquist
Vodafone Group R&D
Co-Chair, W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group

[Larry Larmor]

Just came across indications that Telia Sonera were forced to withdraw transcoding by uproar from content providers at http://www.mobiletech.no/index.php/blog/6-blog/739-transcoding-novarra

The Swedish media companies do not agree with TeliaSoneras approach. All requests to their desktop web pages from the SurfOpen/Novarra gateway are now redirected to http://surfclosed.se.
Media coverage:
Tidningar blockerar Telia - protesterar mot Surf Open
Surf Open closed - Telia bojkottas!

26.02.2008:
We are experiencing a constructive dialogue with TeliaSonera.

29.02.2008:
TeliaSonera has now removed SurfOpen from the portal.
Dagens Media: Telia stoppar annonser i Surf Open efter möte idag

[C. Enrique Ortiz]

Prime example of lack of vision, and lack of network neutrality; only the partners get preference. Shame on both, the network provider, and Novarra for promoting closeness, and shame on Novarra for failing to take advantage of their position to educate their customer.

Prime example of group of people, in this case Novarra and the network carrier, thinking they know better that the rest... Novarra and the network provider should be smart, and should listen to the collective intelligence (vs. being defensive); collective intelligence that surpasses the intelligence of any single company out there.

Come one, the Manifesto can't be more clear than what it is! Embrace it!

And be considerate about the content owner's original intentions! Off-deck web-sites do generate traffic, content, revenue to others in the ecosystem.

C. Enrique Ortiz, CTO @ eZee
-- Signer of http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/manifesto

[james]

As a user of mobile sites I want m.facebook.com not some transcoded version of facebook. Ultimately this can only result in one outcome - good beats evil, open beats closed.

[Tarek Abu-Esber]

Isn't it great to see how active the Mobile Web Developer community has become with so many intelligent and passionate voices?

Most of the comments below have already highlighted the main flaws in what Jayanthi Rangarajan has said in this interview but one thing that keeps catching my eye is this line:

"So developers of content will have no need to create mobile sites."

James has already picked up on this wonderful nugget of disinformation, that transcoders will someday remove the need for anyone to develop Mobile Content. Now I do recognise that there is a place in today's mobile market for transcoding solutions, Volantis (who I work for) have one and so do a number of other Mobile Web players like Openwave. The Mobile Web is still growing and there is a lot of useful Web Content that users will want access to that they won't be able to view otherwise.

However transcoding is only ever going to be a stop-gap solution for the Mobile Web: the experience is just not that compelling. Services which cater specifically for mobile devices are always going to be more user-friendly and in most cases will be a lot more useful and functional. As browsers and devices become more advanced the types of next generation Mobile Web services the community can create are getting more and more technical. From Widgets to LBS to Mobile Banking these services are just not going to work through a transcoder.

It's also worth mentioning that we're also starting to see more devices like the iPhone which enable users to view regular web sites. Nobody would consider transcoding pages for the iPhone but lots of companies *do* decide to create iPhone specific pages which enhance the user-experience of the site (e.g. Facebook, Taptu etc.)

What it comes down to is that we're constantly being reminded that a one-size fits-all solution is never going to be the answer for the Mobile Web. Device fragmentation is not going to die out anytime soon and the context for users accessing websites from a mobile is different than from a PC. Transcoding will never become the Mobile Web standard, no matter how badly Novarra want it to be.

[MobileMaggie]

Unfortunately, it sounds like her reputation did not emerge entirely entact from her previous job at Motorola either: http://tinyurl.com/5lhh3h & http://tinyurl.com/6ey45z(you'll have to scroll down a bit)

[Dave]

Seems we live in a different world to vodafone

Just 5 minutes ago I tested a site of mine that is dot mobi 5/5

The header has no-transform , the meta tag has the link release to tell vodafone its a mobile site , the domain is .mobi yet they still transcoded it !

Unless your site is whitelisted with vodafone they do not know how to handle it

Small problems being transcoded ?
No major problems if you are selling mobile content , how do we charge the customer when vodafone have stripped the header ?

[Alex Kerr]

This interview seriously discredits both the mobilemarketingmagazine website and of course Novarra. It really is nonsense. The concern is that such blatant lies, misinformation, and fantasy are spouted by the COO & President of Novarra! If it were a reputable organisation and the interview were with a lesser employee, they would hopefully have been sacked immediately.

At least it further reveals the nature of the beast. Well, the good news is that the community has a few further tricks up its sleeve that will force to Novarra to comply if it doesn't see light and sanity soon.

[Eric Donovan]

Come on mobilemarketingmagazine do your homework before the interview, this is just plain sloppy journalism.

The responses are utter nonsense, you've not bothered to get to the truth at all. You basically just gave Novarra a question form to fill in and then printed it didn't you?

[Julio Rabadán González]

I don't think Jayanthi Rangarajan is misinformed. This seems to be an old strategy: Repeating a lie until it becomes a truth.
This time I think it will not work. This time the truth is signed by a lot of people in http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/manifesto/, and not only developers.

[paulmz]

Dear Ms. Jayanthi Rangarajan.

We started beta testing our cross-platform personal wiki in June 2007. Mobile users are the primary focus of our business model and we had gone to huge lengths to ensure an excellent user experience regardless of phone type. As any web technician would expect, we use the browser's user-agent to decide how to format each user session's pages for optimal viewing on whatever device type is involved. That, according to the W3C's HTTP specification, is what the user-agent field is there for.

Fast-forward to July 2007 when we suddenly find ourselves inundated with support calls from users complaining they are suddenly getting keyhole views of our desktop website on their mobile phone screens. We were lucky. We had built our own adaptation engine and could rapidly diagnose the problem as a malfunction somewhere out there "in the cloud". Within hours the forums were buzzing and the horrifying realization dawned that some idiot had made a fundamental (albeit, local) change to the way the web has always worked, and that consequently, our service, our business model and our revenue stream were all compromised.

That's our tale of woe, and our introduction to Novarra's product.

On some of the specifics in your interview:

You said: "The criticism is aged out. The problems were in the first few weeks, and while there is a community that continues to complain, the facts are that the operators are very happy and the mobile content partners are very happy."
We say: Kindly regard this as non-aged-out criticism.

You said: "The problem only arose on mobile sites that were not .wap or .mobi. We don’t touch those sites, we never did. But there were a lot of people who didn’t address their mobile sites as .wap or .mobi. They addressed them as .com, because in the world they were used to, it wasn’t possible for their regular website to be rendered on a phone."
We say: Because our service is for consumers, we deliberately set out to use one easy to remember URL, specifically the .COM one. We purposefully steered away from using non-standard conventions such as prefixing our address with m. and did not want to restrict consumers to .MOBI because most haven't heard of the .MOBI TLD (by the way, since when was .WAP a TLD?). We are not stupid and used .COM for sound commercial reasons, as far as I know, no standards body has mandated .MOBI (or .WAP for that matter) as a differentiator for mobile services.

You said: "What we launched within the first week was a solution in which the mobile user agent was not being passed for some sites because they were not partners of Vodafone UK. There were some specific sites where they were selling wallpapers and they had embedded pricing information into an image, and this is not standard. It was something we had not come across and did not support."
We say: This is misleading the reader by implying that the impact only affected "trivial" applications. This is not the case, it hit *every* off-portal website that took the trouble to adapt content for mobile users, i.e. the ones that indirectly generate money for your customer, not only through data traffic, but also through the generous percentages they earn from the subscriptions and other purchases made by users of mobile services (and not desktop ones!). Also, what has the embedding of pricing information into an image got to do with changing the user-agent in an HTTP request?

You said: "The reason for this was because they were not following the standard conventions, so we could not detect that it was a mobile site."
We say: Again, this is, at best, "misleading" the reader by implying that the sites were at fault for "not following standard conventions". Our site delivers the correct markup (XHTML-MP) to mobile devices and declares the content correctly via HTTP headers, yet the Novarra transcoder still munged our site (the second "M" in XHTML-MP does stand for Mobile after all - the clue's in the name). I would also like humbly to suggest that changing the user-agent on the fly is "not following the standard conventions".

You said: "Well there’s one guy still going on about it. Now he sells a database of handset profiles and he’s frustrated because we don’t use his database, because we don’t need one. So he continued to rant because he believed we threatened his business."
We say: I'm really disappointed that the CEO (as I think you now are) of a major US player would make such a thinly-veiled and scurrilous attack on someone who has worked above and beyond the call of duty to contribute an invaluable technical asset in this field to the community via non-commercial license terms. This is beneath you and your company.

Enough said.

[James Pearce]

On a slightly different tack:

> So developers of content will have no need to create mobile sites

How is this a good thing?

If humans are in a different context (out and about - mobile - instead of sitting at their desktops), surely the chances are fairly high that they will also want different services and content.

e.g. "The nearest ATM to me";

NOT: "the nearest ATM to a ZIP code"

Novarra (and other transcoding platforms) aim to adjust markup and format the content for mobile *devices*.

But this is not the whole story if you are trying to thrill mobile *users*.

(One day there will be transcoding platforms to turn mobile sites back into desktop ones - for the few people still chained to their keyboards. Ha ha.)

[Ray Anderson]

Transcoding the truth?

Ms Rangarajan, as COO of Novarra is at best badly mis-informed or at worst blatantly transcoding the truth in this interview with the Magazine.

I have posted a longer commentary on this item in my blog at:
http://mobilesoapbox.wordpress.com/2008/05/04/transcoding-the-truth/

Mobile friendly sites identify the phone or browser and provide content best suited to that device. For example, video content, music, games and screen layouts are different on different devices. Smart sites adapt to the device capabilities. If you are providing images to a phone you might want to fit them to the size of the phone screen for example.

When Tim Berners Lee designed the Web, he foresaw the explosion in variety of browsers, so he enabled the browser to provide information to the website. The W3C mobile web initiative is the home of this activity: http://www.w3.org/Mobile/

It is this information that Novarra hides or corrupts, and which is why Novarra is regarded with such disgust by those closely involved in Web activity and standards as well as among web site builders.

When Vodafone UK launched the Novarra transcoder on the now infamous 7/7/07 , to enable desktop optimised websites to render better on mobile, the result was outcry from thousands of content providers large and small that their sites could no longer be seen, were corrupted, or were destroyed.

http://uk.techcrunch.com/2007/09/21/vodafone-in-mobile-web-storm/

Advertisers on mobile sites found their ads were no longer viewed. People selling mobile content had a surge in customer complaints - content that was sold did not work (the phone type was unknown) or simply not delivered.

Vodafone UK had not forseen the problem, but reacted very quickly to create a “whitelist” of sites that would bypass the transcoder - and this patch is still in place. Organizations like the BBC, CNN, SKY, Facebook, Flickr and others had service restored within a few days. The problem remains however that sites are “adapted” or corrupted unless the website owner knows how to get themselves added to the whitelist. Estimates of the financial losses to website owners in the UK range from hundreds of thousands of pounds upwards.

Novarra seems to expect that (a) website owners should be aware of Novarra transcoding stepping in and (b) know how to contact Turkcell and Vodafone UK among others to ask not to be transcoded. Crazy!

This is all unnecessary. Novarra’s main competitor, Openwave, can be configured to pass through the browser information to the website unmodified, only stepping in if it detects that the website is not returning correctly formatted web pages to that browser - a much better approach with less “fallout”.

More in my blog entry

[Juan Nin]

Like Chris already said, Novarra's argument is not credible at all.
WURFL is open source, Luca Passani is not selling it, so this has nothing to be with any inexistent business.

OpenWave and InfoGin, 2 big vendors of Reformatting Proxies have adhered to the Manifesto for Responsible Reformatting, and have very quickly modified whatever needed to be modified on their software for behaving accordingly to these good practices, mainly, not mangling the User-Agent string.

Novarra has not adhered, nor fixed it's behavior, and the few times they comment on the topic, they say things like the ones Chris quoted, which are not true. Seems they are trying to convince people they are doing the right thing. But they aren't!!!

Just check the Manifesto, see if there's anything wrong or which makes no sense with it... other vendors have adhered to it, and lots of mobile developers and companies have signed it. Novarra hasn't... they only want to earn money, and don't care about disrupting the ecosystem.

Don't fall on a lie.

Juan Nin
Mobile Developer

[David Knell]

Launch an ad-hominem attack on a respected critic and then bad-mouth a competitor. Not quite what one would have expected.

[David Harper]

Jayanthi Rangarajan comments appear to express both blithe and calculated ignorance of the situation.

Rather then merely "...one guy still going on about it.", there is a consortium of independent developers and established companies representing tens of thousands of off-portal mobile content owners and publishers adversely affected by Novarra's disrespect for the mobile ecosystem.

Novarra's approach continues to promote en masse hijacking of mobile sites and without permission the creation of derivative, bastardized versions of these mobile sites for delivery via operator portals -- violating the copyright of the original publishers.

Alternatively, Novarra competitors -- Openwave and InfoGin -- have behaved responsibly by choosing to deploy their services in a way that respects mobile publishers.

David Harper
Founder, Winksite
Co-founder, MobileMonday NY

Note: I represent over 25K mobile publishers.

[Tom Thurston (one of the many people who is proud to be represented by that Not-So-Lone-Ranger... Lu]

I'm not calling this lady a liar, since she must genuinely believe the drivel which she is spouting in this interview, as I'm sure she wouldn't knowingly put out facts which can be proved to be so wrong within only seconds on google. (To save anyone the bother, wurfl.sourceforge.net states "If you find the WURFL useful, feel free to use it".

Indeed I should imagine that the job of whichever Novarra employee incorrectly informed her that WURFL was a commercial enterprise, and thus made her look like a total idiot infront of an entire community which has been built on the WURFL, will be up for grabs pretty soon.

Likewise she'll probably be annoyed at whoever told her that there are so few purpose built internet sites out there that Novarra did a really good job by managing to *not* break "hundreds" of them.

Or maybe she'll be annoyed that someone didn't tell her that Bango are the #1 wap billing company in the world - which might have saved her the embarassement of cheerfully admitting to not bothering to test "bango sites", by grouping them with the rest of "all of the 1 billion websites" they didn't bother checking. Fair enough to not check the 1 billion websites, but all they had to do was to test 1 *single* wapsite which incoporated the billing that almost everyone in the UK uses, in order to ascertain that their technology would cripple the mobile internet, when viewed via vodafone uk.

However, I *am* impressed by Jayanthi's bold claim, that with Novarra, "developers of content will have no need to create mobile sites." No longer will we have to worry about having content delivery platforms which select the correct game to give to a device, or deliver a wallpaper of the correct size, or offer billing via a mobile operator rather than a credit card... and why? because the same company which single handedly managed to break more mobile internet sites than any other company in history*, the same company which can't even be bothered to test the effects of their system on specifically made-for-mobile internet sites, the same company which is run by someone who isn't even personally aware of 'novice level' industry knowledge in the uk, has created some wonderful, magical system which just makes everything work, for everyone. Now that's impressive!

Tom

* probably

[Nexx]

Taking further the ideas that Chris Abbott wrote above, i would like to further question the credibility of Ms. Rangarajan.

We are using from the absolute beginning WURFL as 90% of our device detection base. I am not trying to take Luca's side, but WURFL is indeed a industry standard, and maybe most importantly, is free and supported / created by developers who have maybe thousands of mobile projects in their hands. In my opinion, for somebody who comes from an executive area to say about the WURFL owner and maintainer, which is in fact the exponent of a really big community of established developers, that "he’s frustrated because we don’t use his database, because we don’t need one", is at least dissapointing. Because, Novarra, WURFL does not need to be included into your projects. WURFL is creating mobile standards for mobile developers. At least for that reason you should give the credit WURFL and his representative deserves. WURFL further develops the industry. WURFL is used globally. Novarra is not used globally (i wonder why...), and you bring standards that hold back the industry.

No matter how long this "rant" of the WURFL guy is gonna last...i'll be there right next to him, because i am a web developer. I comply to the standards. Like everybody else. Which you also should. And as a final note in reply to the first sentence, criticism really brings the best out of an idea and takes it on the correct path. It's not aged out. Unless you really don't want to progress.

A good day,
A mobile web developer.

[Pål Bråtelund]

It seems like Jayanthi Rangarajan is comfortable about being the Comical Ali of the mobile world. Novarra is still totally lacking respect for the mobile ecosystem. By short circuiting standards built up through many years, they are trying to gain business on operators with the similar disrespect of all those millions of hours spent by a development community since the Geneva conference in 1997.

This is not a "one guy" being threatened by Novarra. This is de facto the entire ethics around Internet being threatened by some gready bastards in Novarra.

[Richard Spence]

You only have to look at who has signed the http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/manifesto/ doc to realise that this is not all *one* guy.

How much credibility does this woman really have, when she says this?

"Well there’s one guy still going on about it. Now he sells a database of handset profiles and he’s frustrated because we don’t use his database, because we don’t need one. So he continued to rant because he believed we threatened his business."

The guy she's talking about is Luca Passani who runs WURFL, and this is a bare-faced libel.

First point: he's not selling a database of handset profiles: he's giving them away as Open Source, sponsored currently by Admob. WURFL is a de-facto industry standard, provided to the community as a public service. He couldn't care less whether Novarra uses it or not.

Second: his objections are principled and on behalf of mobile developers. To paint that as objection based purely on selfish commercial reasons (when in fact, there are none: WURFL is not commercial) is a vicious slur aimed at undermining his credibility.

Third: Two other Transcoder manufacturers and a slew of developers have seen fit to sign a document initiated by Mr Passani but now adopted by the community in which they commit to responsible transcoding without removing the mobile user agent. The argument here that transcoding is impossible without lying to a website is self-serving pernicious nonsense, covered in detail in the manifesto.

http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/manifesto/ is signed by many developers and companies who just want companies like Novarra to behave responsibly.

Much as Novarra would like this to be "one angry rejected guy shouting in the darkness", in reality an ecosystem has joined together to confront transcoder vendors who have a business plan which involves unilaterally rewriting standards for their own commercial gain.

Chris Abbott
DetectRight.com

[Ed Moore]

Just to clarify comments on the deployment of Openwave's content adaptation solution at Sprint; OpenWeb was chosen for the depth of functionality, user experience and scalability. Openwave was trusted to deliver the largest adaptation project yet deployed anywhere in the world and Sprint, users and the content community are very happy with the results.