Mobilising the Web

Sitting in the Soho Hotel in London where Refresh Mobile Co-founder Scott Beaumont has just given me a most impressive demo of the company’s Mippin web browsing tool for mobiles.
Refresh Mobile is the company behind Mobizines, magazines you can download to your mobile and refresh every day or week depending on the magazine. But as Beaumont explained just now:
“We identified late spring that we were struggling to cross the chasm with Mobizines, so we commissioned some market research and got 20 users to tell us about their experiences using Mobizines, what was good, what the obstacles were. We found that the list of obstacles we couldn’t budge was too long, so we started working on a browser-based version.”
The result is Mippin, which Beaumont describes as: “spectacularly better than Mobizines.” 
In effect, it’s a mobile portal that takes you off to an optimised-for-mobile version of any website you want to look at, so long as the site has an RSS feed. Mippin and its beta users have included around 2,000 websites within the Mippin directory initially, but each time a user enters a new URL that’s not included, it's added organically to the directory.
Mippin also includes a discovery tool to let you see what sites and stories other users are looking at, as well as a search function, and a Category list to help you find the content you’re interested in. Users can share stories via SMS or email, and integration with Facebook and Bebo is also on the cards.
Another feature is Mipplets. These are small applets that users can put on their front page for things like the weather, news and horoscopes. There’s also a Twitter Mipplet. Refresh Mobile says it will develop around a dozen Mipplets, and invite third parties to develop their own.
Like Mobizines, Mippin will be monetized by advertising inserted into the Mippin feed, with revenue shared between Refresh Mobile and the site owner. Targeted positioning around user behaviour and content categories is also possible. Ad services will be provided by AdMob and Screentonic. The company will continue to run Mobizines, Beaumont says, for “as long as there is a meaningful sum of users.”
All in all, this looks like a very neat tool for users to discover content on the mobile Internet. It also looks like a fantastic way for anyone with a website who would not know where to start building a mobile version to get a presence on the mobile Internet.

David Murphy
Editor