Mobile Content World 2006 was held in London on 21st September. The event was meant to showcase mobile content providers. The conference theme was “Where Hollywood + content + technology come together”. However, the single most important lesson gleaned from the conference was the fact that before the mobile search market can fully take off, a wider variety of website owners, outside the entertainment industry, need to make their websitesaccessible to mobile devices.
The three-day conference covered a range of topics from creating compelling mobile content tomobile search and marketing. The most interesting session was held by Google’s Sean Owen. The most interesting exhibitor was Mobile 365.
Google Mobile Web Search – Building An Interoperable Mobile Web Site
Sean Owen, Senior Software Engineer for Google Mobile Web Search presented an interesting seminar on the need for developing an interoperable mobile website and some technical details about actually developing such a site. Interesting points to note from the seminar included:
- Ensure that mobile sites validate to W3C accessibility standards
- UTF-8 encoding is preferred
- Submit a Google Mobile Sitemap
- .mobi domain names are not needed for inclusion in Google’s mobile index.
Mobile 365 Case Studies
One of the most interesting handouts provided this summer has to be the Case Studies book by Mobile 365. While the concepts might be old and the technology used was mostly SMS, the examples show the potential of mobile marketing is unlimited. The 28 case studies highlight a variety of successful mobile marketing initiatives undertaken with large enterprise corporations such as:
- MSN Hotmail by SMS
- SMS sports alerts by Sportnews
- Mobile voting for CNN and London 2012
The limited range of companies that have actually ventured into the recently advanced mobile Internet marketing space, coupled with the limited range of content currently made available to mobile Internet users indicate quite clearly the need for a wider range of content that users can browse to from their handsets.
The first, natural step toward tapping into this fast growing and, at present, relatively uncompetitive market is by optimising websites, online stores and portals for accessibility from any platform and any device.
In the UK, AccuraCast is one of the only companies offering mobile website design, development, optimisation and advertising services.
AccuraCast mobile website optimisation
