I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, but I think it’s fresh and interesting enough to do it now.

Mad 4 Mobile Phones, put together this list of the top 50 - although it’s now grown to 64 - mobile related websites. Great job, Patrick!

Now before we look at the list, it is based on Alexa rankings which most people consider to be inaccurate, for various reasons. Alexa bases its rankings on the visits people make to the sites that have installed the Alexa tool bar in their browsers. Not included (as far as I know) are weightings taking into account RSS feeds. MobHappy, therefore recorded by Alexa at 157,028th and thus should be included in this list actually, should probably be much higher as most of our loyal readers follow us via a blog reader.

Having said that, in my opinion, Alexa ranking are a good indication of site popularity and it’s probably a good assumption that the number 1 on the list is bigger than number 2 and so on.

Have a look:

1. www.chinamobile.com 205
2. www.cingular.com  576
3. www.nokia.com  593
4. www.orange.co.uk  653
5. www.verizonwireless.com  684
6. www.sonyericsson.com  702
7. www.direct.motorola.com  948
8. www.gsmarena.com 1399
9. www.o2.co.uk  2444
10. www.mobile-review.com 2834
11. www.samsungmobile.com  2864
12. www.phonescoop.com  3156
13. www.carphonewarehouse.com  3299
14. www.vodafone.co.uk  3730
15. www.bell.ca 4187
16. www.nokiausa.com  4770
17. www.rogers.com 5037
18. www.t-mobile.co.uk  5141
19. www.mobiledia.com  6319
20. www.allaboutsymbian.com 6435
21. www.nokia.co.uk  6491
22. www.mobileburn.com  9427
23. www.engadgetmobile.com  9525
24. www.infosyncworld.com 10285
25. www.fido.ca 10624
26. www.e2save.com  11947
27. www.mobilewhack.com  12163
28. www.telusmobility.com 13000
29. www.phonearena.com 15325
30. www.three.co.uk  15631
31. www.3g.co.uk  17706
32. www.vodafone.com 18469
33. www.mobileshop.com  20575
34. www.mobile-phones-uk.org.uk  21861
35. www.dialaphone.co.uk  22522
36. www.onestopphoneshop.co.uk  22723
37. www.phones4u.co.uk  24198
38. www.slashphone.com 24966
39. www.clubsonyericsson.com  25835
40. www.mobiletracker.net  27650
41. www.thelink.com  29392
42. www.phoneyworld.com 31806
43. www.mobiles.co.uk  33364
44. www.celularis.com 34266
45. www.mobilegazette.com  40587
46. www.cellular-news.com  45537
47. www.coolsmartphone.com  46105
48. www.thephonespot.com  47294
49. www.cellphones.ca  54210
50. www.mphone.co.uk  56958
51. www.onecompare.com  71524
52. www.mobilerainbow.co.uk  81620
53. www.imobile.com.au 85356
54. www.ukphoneshop.com  93683
55. www.msmobilenews.com 123215
56. www.younevercall.com  140269
57. www.zyb.com 160180
58. www.mobilementalism.com  164271
59. www.mobiles.org.uk 165541
60. www.comparecellular.com 250190
61. www.mad4mobilephones.com 263133
62. www.66mobile.com 329587
63. www.3mobileshop.co.uk  380286
64. www.mobile-phone-directory.org  424921

What would interest me very much is if someone could come up with a ranking for mobile web sites ie sites that are viewed from a mobile phone and not on a desktop. I’m pretty sure that China Mobile would still be number 1 by some considerable margin - China has a lower penetration of PCs and such a huge mobile population that this must be so.

But based on our figures at AdMob, the top 20 would look completely different. In fact, I don’t think that the US carriers would even make the Top 50 worldwide sites, though we have far from complete information too.

AdMob came out of stealth mode yestreday, you might have noticed (though I’ve been keeping Mobhappy readers fairly up to speed over the last few months). We went public that we’re the world’s largest mobile network, with over 250 million page impressions available per month. So the stats we do have for the mobile web are probably more accurate than anything in the world.

Here’s a choice snippet for you. We can tell which handsets people are viewing the mobile web with (and serve ads accordingly). 8 out of the 10 most popular handsets to surf the mobile web with are made by one brand. Anyone care to guess which one?

This information is actually pretty powerful if you think like a handset marketer. How would you like to serve ads on your competitor’s phones?

Anyway, well done to Patrick for putting the list together. If anyone has any ideas how to compile a simialr one for the mobile web, I’d love to hear all about it. And stand by for more good news about AdMob.

For the latest in this recurring series, we visit Practicalist, which has a tale of a stolen phone that kept uploading its cameraphone shots via ShoZu to Flickr. This isn’t quite as juicy as previous similar stories since the alleged thieves haven’t been caught, but it’s pretty entertaining nonetheless. Certainly worth a chuckle is ShoZu CTO Andy Tiller’s comment on the site that ShoZu’s contact backup feature could be of some additional help to the guy! Now, if only they supported geotagging…

Now, back to the stories where the idiots get caught because of a phone, Textually brings word of a genius who set up a drug deal with a cop via SMS. 18-year-old Elizabeth Burchfield of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, sent a text about buying some marijuana to police officer Phillip Short by mistake. Short didn’t recognize the number, so he ignored the message. However, Burchfield continued to send messages, so Short finally responded to set up a meeting where she got arrested for possession. Must have been about the easiest bust he’s ever made.

[tags]mobile, shozu, stupid criminals, stoners[/tags]

Cheeky Irish upstart Ryanair (actually corporate behemoth) is the first airline in Europe to allow passengers mobile and Crackberry access on its flights. The deal, via OnAir, will enable mobile devices from next Summer to be used via the airline’s own network at rates that mirror the pillaging roaming charges set by operators ie very expensive and you’ll only use them in extremis or if your company pays the phone bill.

So now will you be able to fly cheaply (I flew London-Dublin on the first anniversary of 9/11 for £1) and spend all your savings on calls. Hmmm.

The trouble with this idea though, is it might be a good idea to allow me to make calls in-flight if I want to…..but that other people can too. So now you have to worry about not sitting next to the huge sweaty bloke, but anyone who starts a conversation with the words “Hello..can you hear me? I’m on the plane.”

Speaking of which, amusing and vaguely related video here.

Universal Music has announced it will work with a startup called SpiralFrog to make its catalog available for free, via an ad-supported service. This is the kind of radical change the recording industry’s business model needs, so kudos to Universal for being the first to try something different. That said, I’m pretty skeptical of this plan’s success.

Obviously a concern is if it will work commercially. In general, I’m a fairly big supporter of the idea of ad-supported content, but I’m not sure it’s going to work here. It’s really something best suited to goods and services with low marginal costs, something I’m not sure applies to commercial music, with publishing and artist royalties. While a record label can adjust its acceptable level of profit margin, royalty rates don’t exactly change like that, so every additional download carries a level of marginal cost beyond bandwidth. And with the low CPMs and clickthroughs sites like MySpace are reported to command, it’s not clear just how well-suited the ad-supported model is to this content. SpiralFrog and its advertisers will have to work particularly hard to target the ads and make them relevant and compelling to users (just to emphasize: “compelling” does not mean “intrusive and unavoidable”).

However, I think a bigger issue is that this service doesn’t sound like it’s going to be particularly appealing, least of all to users already getting their music from file-sharing networks — the users it’s supposed to lure over to the lawful side of things. And is it at all surprising that much of this will stem from the use of DRM? A SpiralFrog exec says it will work by using a desktop-based downloader for Windows Media files — so no iPods, and more crucially (for MH readers, anyway), few mobile phones. By cutting out the iPod, it’s eliminating its appeal to a huge chunk of today’s portable music market. By limiting its interaction with phones, it’s ensuring it won’t take a piece of the portable music market of the future.

Here’s the thing that the labels don’t seem to understand: this music is already available for free, and if people don’t want to pay for it, they’re going to get it from wherever it’s easiest, and whoever delivers the best user experience. For now, that’s P2P networks and other illegal means (or means of dubious legality like AllofMP3). Getting them to switch isn’t going to happen just because there’s now a legal alternative — it’s got to be better than the P2P services. The promise of malware-free files is a start, but really not much of one. Having to log in to the service once a month to renew the license so the files will continue working (and so you have to watch some more ads) doesn’t help, and makes me wonder what happens should the site shut down, or the company go out of business (guess I really know the answer to that one).

Ditching DRM would make this service significantly more attractive. Part of the reason this is so forward-thinking, for a record label anyway, is that it shows some understanding that it can’t simply wish the file-sharing services away, it’s got to out-compete them. Granted, it sounds like the first iteration of that attempt to compete is fairly flawed, but they’ve got to start somewhere. But make the service more attractive by making it available to as many users as possible: at the very least, get rid of the DRM, and at best, support a wide range of formats, or at least give users tools to convert them. At the end of the day, this content is still going to be available from P2P networks, not to mention the label is giving it away, so adding in the copy-protection is rather pointless. Also, keep in mind that DRM is never uncrackable, and it doesn’t stop piracy, it just frustrates legitimate users.

Now, before you start calling me Cory Doctorow, keep this in mind, too: the use of DRM raises the cost of each song the label gives away (Microsoft don’t license that PlaysForSure goodness for free, you know). When margins are already going to be tight, why commit the double-whammy of increasing costs and limiting your revenues by cutting off a large chunk of the potential audience? Not using DRM means cheaper giveaways, to a bigger audience — including all those mobile users.

[tags]mobile, music, mobile music, vivendi, universal, spiralfrog, p2p, filesharing, legal downloads[/tags]

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is up at Mobile Active, an interesting site in its own right, specialising in the mobile’s role in civic action and engagement.

A great selection of posts, as usual, so check it out while you remember.

Caroline Lewko (perhaps better known to MobHappy readers as the tireless organiser of our West Coast Mobilist Gatherings) has just launched the Wireless Industry Partnership, which promises to be a great addition to the mobile networking world. Plus, MobHappy readers can get $100 of the first year of membership, so it’ll only cost you $200.

The idea behind WIP is to give companies working in wireless a series of online tools and resources to help them be more effective and reduce the time it takes to get products to market and enter into partnerships with suppliers, clients or collaborators.

The key tool is WIPConnector, which offers some classic networking tools within a directory format and some new ones too. Early results show some interesting and high profile companies are joining, so check it out.

Sign up (and make sure you connect with me) by going to:

http://www.wipconnector.com/membership_signup.php

And enter “mobhappy” in the Promo Code field to claim your discount.

Back in July, I wrote a post that was widely commented on and struck an industry nerve about the high wastage that WAP Push was generating for some companies. Tom Hume, has an excellent follow up on this and shares some great advice.

I also wrote earlier this week about Friendster needing to go mobile if they are to get out of the rut they now find themselves in. Katie Fehrenbacher, writing over at GigaOm points to some recent comments by Friendster President, Kent Lindstrom, who says that the Philippines experiment has been a success and they’re looking to go mobile in the US too.

But then he kinds ruins it by saying “Mobile isn’t exactly our forte” and he’s looking to partner with a mobile expert to roll something out in the US. Is it me, or does that sound a little dismissive? Anyway, Kent, it better become your forte pretty damned quick, or you’re doomed, doomed, I tell ye.

With great change comes great opportunity (as Superman surely meant to say) and one of those opportunities is in tools to help people create mobile websites. One one level, these might be free or low cost offerings aimed at ordinary people who want to get a home page up quickly and easily - a kind of Geocities for the web, if you can remember how that originally exploded.

At the other end, there’s corporate offerings for a more flexible and sophisticated approach, if you have access to your own designers, more time and a little more budget.

I’ll be exploring a couple of these corporate solutions in the next few weeks, but let’s start off with Pocket Portal from Amplefuture, which has just won the NMA Effectiveness Awards in the travel category for their campaign for BA.

Pocket Portal’s approach is to go down the Java portal route, which users download to their phone - or an “interactive mini-website” on their mobile, as they call it. The great thing about this, is that it results in a far more sophisticated user experience than can be delivered over WAP or XHTML. Any necessary live interactivity, is over the web, but much of the navigation is instant, as it’s already sitting on your phone.

The downside of Java portals is the whole porting issue of the app once it’s written and the optimisation for all makes and models of phones. This normally makes it a very time consuming, expensive and frustrating exercise for one company to implement. However, Pocket Portal does all of this within the tool, making it pretty simple to use. And at £299 ($564) a month, it’s a very cost-effective corporate solution.

According to the NMA Awards, the BA campaign, which was a download around the theme of “hidden London” and which was constantly updated with new content, achieved some impressive results:

The mobile application generated 4,000 downloads over a three-month period and the London is Closer site had over 200,000 visits from the online campaign. To date the campaign has generated £2.26m of revenue for BA. Results tracked by DoubleClick showed over 35m impressions delivered and 650,000 clicks recorded.

Originally planned for five markets, the success of the campaign saw it stretched across nine with an average cost per sale of £31 and average sale value of £204. The campaign generated an ROI of £5.46 for every media £1 invested, according to DoubleClick.Clearly

Clearly, not many brands can afford £31 cost per sale, but this would fall dramatically if the supporting media was scaled back and as people get more used to downloading this type of content to phones.

I’m intrigued as to why none of the big content players haven’t used Java portals to merchandise and sell their constantly updated products. It seems to me that once you have got the user to download the app to their phone, it stands a good chance of being able to switch the user into a loyalty pattern that the industry misses, outside the subscription models that many users are quite suspicous of these days.

So, Pocket Portal is a very nice alternative to your standard WAP portal and if you’re considering building a wapsite, this should be on your short list of possible executions.

At MobHappy, we teamed with with the the guys behind Free News a while back to offer a mobile phone RSS reader. This allows you to follow our favourite blogs from your mobile.

So we thought we’d extend this popular service to include all our Mobilist friends too and offer a Mobilist Mobile RSS reader, consisting of the 14 most popular and active Mobilist contributors, who are (in strict alphabetical order):
 
C Enrique Ortiz

Darla Mack 

Golden Swamp 

M-Trends 

MobHappy 

Mobile Enterprise Blog 

Mobile Marketing & Spam  

MoPocket  

Open Gardens  

Smart Mobs  

Textually 

The Pondering Primate 

WAP Review 

Xellular Identity

Plus this blog as a bonus, so you can keep up to date with all the latest Mobilist news.

Many thanks to Carlo for co-ordinating this and working up the rather arcane scoring system he developed to determine who was included. This basically works by giving points for hosting a Carnival and also for writing for it, with hosting scoring more points. So if you’d like to be included when we next update this, volunteer for hosting duty or contribute more - pretty simple really. I would add that’s it’s hard to make the cut just from writing alone.

To host, write to Russell AT mobhappy DOT com, and say if there’s any weeks you aren’t available - check the schedule above for available dates.

Finally, before telling you how to download this marvel of modern technology….thank you again to the guys at Free News for making their very nifty product available to everyone. 

How to Download Your Free Mobilist Browser

It’s pretty simple actually. 

It’s pretty simple actually. Just point your phone’s browser to http://cv.mwap.at and download the application. Or if you’re a download-and-sych-to-your-phone kind of person, point your computer’s browser here, and if you need the Palm version, get it here. 

Most phones are supported, but it doesn’t work on Verizon and if you have a Treo, you’ll need to download Java . For a more complete guide to compatibility, click here. 

That’s it. We hope you enjoy your RSS Reader. Tell your friends! 

[tags] free rss reader [/tags]

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of .mobi. I haven’t had much to add since I posted on it back in May, so I’ve avoided writing about it here. But the mobile-specific domain’s administrators have done a couple things recently I want to draw attention to.

Last week, over at Techdirt, I posted on .mobi’s plans to distribute “premium” domains in what they call an “equitable” manner intended to ensure the little guy has a shot at securing some of them: through beauty contests and something completely geared towards “the little guy” — auctions. We’re not talking about a dozen, a few dozen, or even a few hundred, but 5,000 domain names. While I appreciate mTLD’s CEO, Neil Edwards responding to my post, I find his response pretty unsatisfying. This auction system, according to him, isn’t a money-grab for two reasons: first, .mobi could have held back 100,000 names instead of 5,000; and second, because if mTLD didn’t do this, the names would just have ended up in the hands of domain speculators, who would resell them for inflated prices later on. Basically, it sounds like he’s saying mTLD isn’t as greedy as they could be, and that instead of letting the domain speculators pocket that cash, it’s going to maximize its own revenues through an auction.

But, after that, they’ve still outdone themselves in announcing the “.mobi mobile emulator”. The emulator is on the .mobi site, surrounded with some, ahem, interesting copy:

If you’re not happy with what you see, - if you see anything at all – it’s time to join the dotMobi Community by getting your .mobi domain name and optimizing your site for the mobile Internet.

.mobi sites solve the biggest barriers to mobile Internet use:

* Poorly formatted pages
* Inappropriate or excessive content
* Slow access and long load times , leading to costly mobile bills
* Difficult logins
* Difficult navigation

If there’s anything flakier and more inconsistent than the browsers in mobile handsets, it’s the emulators of those browsers. So slapping an emulator on a web page, then acting as if it not rendering a site correctly is proof somebody needs to buy a .mobi domain a little off base in concept. In reality, it’s actually even worse, since the .mobi emulator doesn’t call up the proper content on some sites that automatically serve correctly formatted content to mobile devices. This, of course, behooves .mobi by making the supposed problem it’s trying to solve appear more glaring — creating a view of the mobile internet that isn’t accurate, but better suits its marketing.

The .mobi emulator is made to look like a Nokia N70. I happen to have a Nokia N70 sitting here on my desk, so let’s do some comparisons.

When I go to “bbcnews.com” in the N70’s browser, I get redirected to http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile, and end up with the image below on the left — just what I’d want, really. In the emulator, instead of getting the mobile content, I get an error message you see on the right. So there’s one mobile site, available in the same place it is on the desktop, .mobi pretends doesn’t exist.

Ok, now let’s try our own site. On the left, you get the humble, basic mobile-formatted content on the real mobile browser; the right, another error.

One more — the .mobi folks often point to weather.mobi as an example of a .mobi site. But what if I’m an average Joe that’s never heard any of this .mobi stuff, and I want to go to weather.com instead? Works just fine on the phone (below left), whereas, somewhat embarrassingly, it doesn’t in the emulator. So here’s a site that’s got a good mobile site, has bought into the .mobi hype, and still they can’t get it right, apparently.

It’s not newsworthy, or surprising, that this emulator doesn’t work well. But the fact that it craps out on perfectly good mobile sites, available at their standard addresses — for whatever reason — then says .mobi is the solution, does not sit well at all. These sites have followed an ideal solution: making their content available to mobile users in a relevant format at a familiar address. But since that solution doesn’t involve buying a .mobi domain, it is apparently inferior or undesirable. The fact is, overcoming “the barriers to mobile internet use” .mobi cites on this page have nothing to do with .mobi. It doesn’t solve any of them, it’s just a domain (and an expensive one at that) which doesn’t intrinsically or automatically accomplish anything for site owners. Making a site mobile-friendly has nothing to do with whether it’s available at a .mobi address, and simply buying a .mobi domain won’t solve site owners’ problems — which is hardly the impression this page attempts to deliver.

I’m not going to accuse the .mobi folks of acting maliciously in this instance, but they’re toeing the line by providing an inaccurate representation of the state of the mobile internet, then holding themselves up as the solution.

[tags]mobile, mobile web, mobile internet, .mobi, mtld, xhtml, wap[/tags]