MOBIFY

Mobify Studio Update – CSS3 Icons and Brightcove Support!

john — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:14:09 +0000

Hot on the heels of our last release, we have a another batch of updates to keep you up late working on your next mobile masterpiece!

REDESIGNED DASHBOARD
The most visible change is the revamped Dashboard screen. Besides clearing things up and making it lightning fast, we’ve also added cool CSS3 effects to your site icons. The CSS used to create the effect uses border-radius, box-shadow, and radial gradients and multiple backgrounds:

For a stunning result:

FASTER MANAGE
Though you won’t see a difference to the Manage page, we’re sure you’ll feel it as we heavily refractored the backend code to make it much faster for sites with a large number of templates.

IMPROVED BRIGHTCOVE AND VIDEO TAG SUPPORT
We have enabled Brightcove support by default for all paid accounts. This means you’ll be able to see your Brightcove videos on mobile by selecting them in the Choose screen and following the Brightcove mobile setup instructions. Let us know if you need any help!

Also, our video tag support has been tweaked, so that video tags used as fallbacks inside object or embed tags (like the Vzaar embed tag), will be correctly shown to support devices.

NEW CASE STUDIES
Finally, we’ve updated our Case Studies page with showcases for Wired, Spin, A List Apart, Discover and MetroLyrics – take a look and see how these premium publishers have gone mobile with Mobify!

Cheers,

John & the Mobify Engineering Team

Mobify Webinar – Tuesday August 31 1:00PM (PDT)

kirill — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:00:54 +0000

It’s that time again! Our next webcast takes place on Tuesday, August 31 at 1:00PM PDT / 4:00PM EDT.

Join us next week to hear Nick, Mobify’s creative director, talk about typography on the mobile screen and look at some examples of well designed mobile websites with lots of traffic. We’ll start off with a brief rundown of Mobify Studio for those of you who weren’t with us last week. At the end we will hold a QA period.

We are very excited and looking forward to seeing all of you again!

Can’t attend this coming Tuesday? No problem! Starting next week you’ll be able to watch all our webcasts at www.mobify.me

——————————————————-

Topic: Mobify Webcast
Date: Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Time: 1:00 pm, Pacific Daylight Time (San Francisco, GMT-07:00)
Meeting Number: 807 278 600
Meeting Password: mobile

——————————————————-
To join the online meeting (Now from the Apple iPhone (R) too!)
——————————————————-
1. Go to https://mobify.webex.com/mobify/j.php?ED=139542432&UID=1136390642&PW=NNWY4ZGQ3MTM1&RT=MiM0
2. If requested, enter your name and email address.
3. If a password is required, enter the meeting password: mobile
4. Click “Join”.

To view in other time zones or languages, please click the link:
https://mobify.webex.com/mobify/j.php?ED=139542432&UID=1136390642&PW=NNWY4ZGQ3MTM1&ORT=MiM0

——————————————————-
To join the audio conference only
——————————————————-
Call-in toll number (US/Canada): +1-408-600-3600

Access code:807 278 600

——————————————————-
For assistance
——————————————————-
1. Go to https://mobify.webex.com/mobify/mc
2. On the left navigation bar, click “Support”.

To add this meeting to your calendar program (for example Microsoft Outlook), click this link:
https://mobify.webex.com/mobify/j.php?ED=139542432&UID=1136390642&ICS=MI&LD=1&RD=2&ST=1&SHA2=EJ4yllU3hCz1BZ9g2L6WoeAFfYjAFuF0PwZA2lIGfv0=&RT=MiM0

MOBIFY WEEKLY – SPECIAL MOBILE METRICS ISSUE

kirill — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:00:56 +0000

Hello everyone and welcome to a special issue off Mobify Weekly! This week we look at some articles that feature mobile web stats, starting off with one of our own!

Mobile Web Visitor Behaviour by Device Number of clicks, pageviews and duration of stay are interdependent with the type of device the user is on and, of course, the website. We look at these and some other cool metrics in our report.

Android Mobile Web Use Up 400% in Q2, Outpacing Apple & BlackBerry Android’s rate of traffic growth is staggering. As the overall market continues to grow, both web and app use are continuing to climb. Traffic stats courtesy of UK mobile analytics firm Bango.

Mobile Web traffic grows, not slows, during summer What only seems logical (people don’t spend as much time at home and, therefore, have to be surfing the web on their mobile devices) would seem common sense if only the numbers didn’t reflect a much larger curve: one where there is exponential growth in mobile website visitors. People are browsing the web more everyday!

Smartphones Propel Mobile Net Use. Stats confirm what everyone’s thinking. A good portion of us can’t go a day without browsing the mobile web. eMarketer thinks that rougly 28 percent of the U.S. population accesses the web on their phone everyday. Metrics by AdWeek.

Have a great weekend and see you all next week!

Mobile web visitor behaviour by device, –part 1–

peter — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 23:36:07 +0000

There’s been a lot of buzz on the internet about the growth of Android web traffic(http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/admob-android-passes-iphone-web-traffic-in-u-s/), but to date we haven’t seen a lot of discussion about the different browsing behaviours of users with these handsets. We’ve selected some graphs showing relative browsing behaviours on five sites off the Mobify network, each of which get at least a million mobile page views per month.

In each of the graphs, we’ve sorted by the number of page views per visit of the mobile operating system. To the right we also show the breakdown of the operating system as a percentage of site traffic. Note — we have filtered out all other browsers than the ones listed above so this percentage is relative only between the browsers shown.

Sites A, B and C are blogs with a technology or geek appeal. Sites D and E focus on celebrities and celebrity news. We can clearly see the impact of site content on the types of devices used to view content. The difference in the audiences is notable in the percentage of the visits — the technology sites are dominated by iPhone and Android, with Blackberry accounting for an average of around 5% of traffic. BlackBerry is a big player on the celeb sites though, coming in around 30% of total visits, slightly higher than Android. The celeb sites also feature the lowest percentage of iPhone users, although iPhone users remain the most common type of web visitor.

More interesting is what behaviours are preserved even though the audiences are quite different. Android handset owners tend to dominate page views, averaging about 1.25 page views for every page viewed by an iPhone visitor across these sites. Almost across the board, iPhone users are the least likely to stick around. We’re still slicing and dicing data to see if we can find an answer as to why, but it’s definitely a pattern we see, and across a diverse number of sites.

Takeaways

Designing a great mobile site requires may require making some tradeoffs for your audience. For sites with less technology oriented visitors, there is still a strong payoff in spending the time to optimize the site for non-touch devices that may have limited support for javascript and CSS. This landscape is clearly changing, with RIM’s latest BlackBerry Torch offering an powerful browser that stacks up well against other smartphones on the market, but it will take at least a year for these devices to significantly displace existing devices.

Furthermore, despite AdMob’s announcement that Android is king for mobile web traffic, on our network we’re still seeing iPhone as the dominant player on the mobile web, though Android has posted solid gains in the past 6 months. However, if Android users continue to show such strong site loyalty, they may be the most attractive visitors for advertising dollars in the months ahead.

There’s been a lot of buzz about the growth of Android web traffic, but to date we haven’t seen a lot of discussion about the different browsing behaviours of mobile web visitors with these handsets. In this first post we’ll start the process of exploring how the type of mobile handset used affects mobile web behaviour.

We’ve selected some sites to show relative browsing behaviours on five sites off our network. The sites have been randomly selected, however each of them receive a minimum of one million mobile page views per month. In each of the graphs below, we’ve sorted by the number of page views per visit of the mobile operating system. To the right we also show the breakdown of the operating system as a percentage of site traffic. Note — we have filtered out all other browsers than the ones listed above so this percentage is relative only between the browsers shown.

Site A - Technology blog

Site B - Technology Blog

Site C - Technology Blog

Site D - Celeb news

Site E - Celeb news

Sites A, B and C are blogs with a technology appeal. Sites D and E focus on celebrities and celebrity news. We can clearly see the impact of site content on the types of devices used to view content. The technology sites are dominated by iPhone and Android, with Blackberry accounting for an average of only about 5% of traffic. BlackBerry is a big player on the celeb sites though, coming in around 30% of total visits, slightly higher than Android. The celeb sites also feature the lowest percentage of iPhone users, although iPhone users remain the most common type of web visitor.

Takeaways

Furthermore, despite AdMob’s announcement that Android is king for mobile web traffic, on our network we’re still seeing iPhone as the dominant player on the mobile web, though Android has posted solid gains in the past 6 months. If Android usage continues to grow as a percentage of mobile web (and we expect it will!) and Android visitors continue to show such strong site loyalty, they may be the most attractive visitors for mobile web advertising spending in the months ahead.

Mobify Studio Update

peter — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 23:16:41 +0000

We’re excited to announce some new updates to Mobify this week!

Features

The ‘Add to home’ bubble – we’ve created a simple way for you to insert a floating ‘Add to home screen’ bubble into your mobile site. This will help you tell your iPhone visitors how to add your site to their home screen as though it was an app! Furthermore, apple touch icons will now work when a visitor bookmarks your mobile site to their home screen using an Android device.

http://img.skitch.com/20100820-kq9fa179bfe6bsey8p2i59njaq.png

The Choose screen now shows selector information about the block underneath your cursor. This will help you pick stronger selectors for your mobile view. Ideally you should pick blocks that have either classes or ids that you intend to keep even when you make updates to your site style. For example, picking a div with class ‘article’ would be a strong selector if you plan on always having articles contained in a div with that class name.

We have significantly reduced the byte size of pages using unicode. Unicode is used for many non-English languages, and this improvement will make these pages load even faster.

Our block choosing system has always supported both CSS selectors (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/selector.html) as well as XPATH (http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/ ). Previously our selection algorithms preferred the XPATH over CSS selectors when both were available. Our testing has shown that the CSS selector is more likely to be correct, and our system now prefers CSS selectors if they are present. This should reduce the chance of breakage of the source website HTML is modified as CSS classes and ids are generally preserved through incremental changes.

Performance monitoring – we’ve added some new features that will help us track performance bottlenecks in our system, and should help us create an even faster mobile experience in the weeks to come.

We’re excited to announce some new updates to Mobify this week!

We’ve created a simple way for you to insert a floating ‘Add to home screen’ bubble into your mobile site. This will help you tell your iPhone visitors how to add your site to their home screen as though it was an app! Furthermore, apple touch icons will now work when a visitor bookmarks your mobile site to their home screen using an Android device. Look for a followup post on the blog in the next few days on how to integrate this new feature into your Mobify site!

Add to Home Screen Bubble

The Choose screen now shows selector information about the block underneath your cursor. This will help you pick stronger selectors for your mobile view. Ideally you should pick blocks that have either classes or ids that you intend to keep even when you make updates to your site style. For example, picking a div with class ‘article’ would be a strong selector if you plan on always having articles contained in a div with that class name.

We have significantly reduced the byte size of pages using unicode. Unicode is used for many non-English languages, and this improvement will make these pages load even faster.

We’ve made improvements to our content selection routines! Our block choosing system has always supported both CSS selectors as well as XPATH. Previously our selection algorithms preferred the XPATH over CSS selectors when both were available. Our testing has shown that the CSS selector is more likely to be correct, and our system now prefers CSS selectors if they are present. This should reduce the chance of breakage of the source website HTML is modified as CSS classes and ids are generally preserved through incremental changes.

Performance monitoring – we’ve added some new features that will help us track performance bottlenecks in our system, and should help us create an even faster mobile experience in the weeks to come.

Mobify Weekly – The Latest Threads in the Mobile Web

kirill — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:00:54 +0000

Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s edition of Mobify Weekly! Just a couple of cool stories that we’ve come across during the week.

DoubleClick Advertiser Blog: Introducing Mobile Ad Serving in DoubleClick for Advertisers. DoubleClick has rolled out some cool new mobile features in their latest release of DFA (DoubleClick for Advertisers). Mobile and desktop ad performance reports are now integrated together and and in-depth mobile performance review is available. They are trying to make it easier for campaign managers to monitor and deploy mobile ads and to get them to start thinking of handhelds as just another medium.

A List Apart: Articles: Apps vs. the Web Craig Hockenberry (author of “iPhone App Development“) compares web apps to native apps. The design process, according to him, starts off in the same place: designing the product. Then the product can be implemented using web standards before native app application can begin. He acknowledges that Safari had a lot of effort invested into it by Apple and that when it comes to WebKit, Apple equally pushes native apps and web apps on it’s development channels.

Twitter Goes Mobile on the Weekend. SocialFlow, a social network marketing startup, did a study on one of its clients with 500,000 Twitter followers and found some interesting things. Apparently mobile Twitter traffic jumps on the weekends and a big chunk (41%) of that comes from mobile devies. SocialFlow derived this data by analyzing Bit.ly stats.

Apple Shutting Down Quatro Wireless Ad Service Apple bought Quatro at the start of the year and is now shutting down the service for good intending on focusing its energy exclusively on iAd. Quatro Wireless homepage greets visitors with a “farewell” message.

Have you got any thoughts on the latest buzz? Please feel free to leave a comment below and let us know what you think!

See you all next week!

Mobify Webinar – Tuesday August 17 1:00PM PST

kirill — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 19:41:48 +0000

Mark your calendar! Mobify Studio Webcast is coming on Tuesday, August 17th at 1:00PM PST.

Nick, our creative director here at Mobify will be discussing best practices of using Mobify Studio, as well as answering any questions you might have.

Looking forward to seeing you all on Tuesday!

Topic: Mobify Webinar
Date: Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Time: 1:00 pm, Pacific Daylight Time (San Francisco, GMT-07:00)
Meeting Number: 854 367 750
Meeting Password: mobile

——————————————————-
To join the online meeting (Now from the Apple iPhone (R) too!)
——————————————————-
1. Go to https://mobify.webex.com/mobify/j.php?ED=7659068&UID=0&PW=NMDBhZTM2NWZm&RT=MiM0
2. If requested, enter your name and email address.
3. If a password is required, enter the meeting password: mobile
4. Click “Join”.

To view in other time zones or languages, please click the link:
https://mobify.webex.com/mobify/j.php?ED=7659068&UID=0&PW=NMDBhZTM2NWZm&ORT=MiM0

——————————————————-
To join the audio conference only
——————————————————-
Call-in toll number (US/Canada): +1-408-600-3600

Access code:854 367 750

To add this meeting to your calendar program (for example Microsoft Outlook), click this link:
https://mobify.webex.com/mobify/j.php?ED=7659068&UID=0&ICS=MI&LD=1&RD=2&ST=1&SHA2=YxxsCD7fzosOR2F7NWEg64d-JrOvkkA2oJSEQ0eUbo8=&RT=MiM0

The playback of UCF (Universal Communications Format) rich media files requires appropriate players. To view this type of rich media files in the meeting, please check whether you have the players installed on your computer by going to https://mobify.webex.com/mobify/systemdiagnosis.php

Mobify Studio Update

Igor Faletski — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 18:25:09 +0000

Hello everyone! A routine update to Mobify Studio on Thursday introduced the following features & improvements:

Version Delete – the most requested feature of the last few weeks. Get rid of the older revisions that are no longer necessary.
Site Delete works again.
Brightcove Video support for your mobile site.
Updated Dashboard/Network Page that makes managing your mobile sites easier.
Site Transfer is now much faster.

As usual, feel free to request features or updates over email, community forums or the @mobify twitter account!