The Skweezer Blog

Recently, dotMobi released a study that suggests end-users desire more practical mobile content rather than consumable (entertainment) content. Frankly, our company has known this for awhile as we’ve been analyzing the behaviors of general web use since 2004. Since then, one thing we quickly learned—which has helped shape our product over the years—is end-users want to access content transactionally. That is, users want to get to the part of a Web page that feeds their interest or activity. People, generally, don’t sit around browsing on their phones for the sake of browsing. Therefore, we’ve adopted the position that people are finding more on mobile Web than they are browsing.

This has helped us shape innovation “firsts” like our Find-in-Page™ feature, that jumps the user to the keywords they are looking for that are carried over from a search query. Hit highlighting is another “helper” to let people identify what they are looking for.  This also seems to be validated by the much higher-than-normal click-through rates from our mobile ads with search partners.

One of those transactional pieces that’s mentioned in the dotMobi survey is online banking. Unless the banking site has a mobile interface with SSL, most phone users would need a transcoding proxy to access the site in order to gain access. (This would be nearly 90% of the phones in the world, BTW.) As far as mobilizing 3rd-party Web sites go, Skweezer is the only transcoder that I know of (also since 2004, by the way) that keeps a fully SSL-encoded transaction from beginning-to-end on behalf of a user. Since Skweezer isn’t a gateway service hosted directly in an operator’s datacenter like Sprint, Skweezer can talk to any Web site—through SSL—and encode it from start to finish where it’s available.

For users using dotMobi’s recently acquired Mowser—or even the big guys like Google or Yahoo!… none of these services do that. Which is curious to me why dotMobi would bring up the notion of accessing anything securely. For example, if you wanted to check your Union Bank of California account online in Mowser, you would not have an end-to-end SSL connection. Notice that when you go to a secure page in Mowser, the Mowser protocol is “http” wrapped around Union Bank’s “https”…

Mowser Mobile Web Transcoder (Phonifier-adapted)

That’s scary. So, you enter all your personally identifiable info for the bank and it goes to Mowser as clear text before they securely send it to UBOC! Or in the case of Google, they just punt…

Google Mobile Web Transcoder

Google doesn’t even allow SSL connections on their transcoder. Whether they can’t surmount the 80/20 “wall” of transcoding state—or if their legal department feels that it’s somehow a liability—they just have a user go directly to the site, leaving the end-user hung out to dry. Yahoo! is similar, but they don’t even allow you to connect to them in the first place via SSL. Whether it’s Novarra (their partner) not being able to support it, or again, a business reason, users are left with no access to 3rd-party SSL sites…

Yahoo! Mobile Web Transcoder (Novarra)

If this isn’t quite clear, another way you can look at this is there are three parts to any given transaction: the end-user, the transcoding proxy, and the content site. The aforementioned proxies don’t have a secure connection between them and the end-user when the proxy is fetching secure information:

But Skweezer, on the other hand, does. And it does so with up to 256-bit encryption (depending on what your browser supports) to create an end-to-end SSL transaction of 3rd-party websites:

So, if you’re going to access content transactionally, i.e. your bank balance, etc, through a transcoder, be sure the information you’re providing isn’t being sent with just regular HTTP regardless of whether the intended URL is in SSL.

Posted byy Kevin Perkins

Tip: Go straight to your frequently-used mobile web pages from your Skweezer Homepage!

Greenlight Wireless continues to remove usability barriers by making your favorite web pages front-and-center to your mobile web browsing experience! Simply browse to the page you frequently view and add it to your collection of bookmarks stored in Skweezer!

Reminder: In order to store Favorites, please create an account first.

When you store Favorites in Skweezer, they show directly below the Skweeze box on the homepage…
To save a Favorite, simply tap in the URL you wish to visit, and Skweeze it.
Upon arrival, simply view your page. After you’ve scrolled down to the bottom, you’ll see a toolbar. Click “Add To Favorites”.	� …. scrolling to bottom … �
You’ll then be presented a screen to modify the link info prior to saving it to Skweezer. Select the Skweezer radio button and click “Save Changes”. You’ll then be redirected back to the page you just saved.
When you go back to the homepage, click the “Favorites” link (or tap the “1″ on your keypad).
You’ll then be presented a list of your Favorites. By either searching or browsing the list, you can Skweeze any of the WWW content previously saved. To modify a Favorite, click “Edit” at the bottom of the list.
Upon locating your Favorite, click the link to edit it.
Make whatever changes you desire in this edit screen, including displaying it on your homepage. TIP: You can also pre-select whether or not Images show/hide when you view the page. Click the “Save Changes” button to commit.
Upon going back to the Skweezer homepage, your Favorite will show up in the list. (Refresh the page, if it’s cached.)

MORE TIPS:

1. You can add as many Favorites to your Skweezer homepage as you like. However, the more links you put on the homepage… the longer it might take to retrieve. My recommendation would be to find the right balance between access and usability
2. Use your PC to set up your mobile Favorites. Simply go to http://www.skweezer.net/ in your desktop browser, and start viewing/adding pages to your Favorites as if you were using your phone. Once you’ve stored your assortment, then do all of your “Save on home page” edits with your desktop browser for quicker responses
3. Shorten the “Page Name” of your Favorite for better use of real estate on the Skweezer homepage. By default, Skweezer carries over the value that is stored in the “<title>” attribute of the page being saved

Happy Skweezing!

Posted by Kevin Perkins

TIP: Machine Translate Any Mobile Webpage With Skweezer!

Skweezer is easily one of the most international mobile applications available with users in over 170 countries. Through our partnership with WorldLingo, Greenlight Wireless has pioneered the method of mixing machine translation services with a page mobilizer like Skweezer. With 13 language pairs available, users can very easily consume foreign content in the language of their preference. Here’s how….

Pull up any content of your liking…
In the footer toolbar, click the Translate button…
Next, you’ll come to an interstitial page that prompts you to choose your “before” and “after” language pairs…
The page reloads in your target language…
As you keep browsing—ON THAT DOMAIN—you will remain in “translation” mode for the language pair of your preference!

For this example, I started with English and went to Spanish—both languages I know very well. And, considering a “machine” translated this article, it was pretty good! Of course you could do this example with a different start language… just so long as one of the languages in the list is the language of the original webpage (Spanish to English, Portuguese to Italian, etc).

Bonus Tip: Create an account and set your Skweezer language UI to be: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, or Portuguese!

Posted by Kevin Perkins

This will be the first in a series features, tips, and tricks that are in the Skweezer software that make the mobile experience better.

Tip: Read the Feed To Increase The Speed!

A lot of times when you’re browsing the net using Skweezer, you go to a page, and you’re like “Hmmm, where’s that part of the page I’m looking for?” This will happen particularly on a low- or mid-range mobile phone that has a limited memory size, and Skweezer has to break up the content into multiple page sections for the user.

Nonetheless, a really great way to see what’s going on in a website is to browse the site’s RSS feed(s) inside of Skweezer.

To demonstrate this, I’ll go to the People Magazine website via Skweezer:
Upon loading the People.com homepage, you’ll see the page “skweezed”. Notice at the top… you’ll also see a link that’s followed by “[RSS]”:
This is People’s designated feed for their content. Skweezer will interpret it—just like normal XHTML content—and display the feed as a “list” in a great format. This is good for someone just “looking” before they commit to viewing:

As you see above, People.com lists all their articles in a very nice “list” formatted by Skweezer. A user can conveniently go down the list—”boom-boom-boom”—and decide what to view!

Bonus Tip: Create an account, and save all your skweezed RSS links to your Favorites for even faster access to site content!

Posted by Kevin Perkins

As you may (or may not) know, Greenlight Wireless is a mobile web services company where we provide private-label solutions for “the big guys” who want to include mobilization or advertising functionality with their mobile/converged applications. Essentially, our private-label partners pay us transaction fees or simply rev share, depending on the situation. This is also known as Software as a Service, for any of you insiders.

Over the last 4 weeks, we’ve had two key private-label Skweezer deals underway: one for a very well-established online media company… the other with a key operator in a fast-growing region of the world. (Sorry, I can’t be more specific.)  With the former, we competed against 3 other companies in an RFP format. With the latter, the operator sought us out and desired our solution exclusively.

In both cases, each needed to have a transcoding solution in place by January 2007. So, time was obviously the key piece here.

With the media company, we essentially lost the bid because, culturally, they must control the process. In talking with them, they admitted that they will not be able to host the applications any more efficiently or cheaply than us. They will spend millions of dollars, lose a great deal of time, and not have the benefits of a truly integrated web services partner.

The operator, on the other hand, had a strong sense of  what its core competencies were… and going through a multi-month deployment easily demonstrated its lost opportunity cost. Therefore, outsourcing mobile browsing and search was the obvious solution given the circumstances.

So how hard is integrating Skweezer, anyway? Well, take a look below and see what you think. Copy/paste the form into your web/wap sites, and you’ll see how easy it is to get going with a powerful mobile SaaS.

This document will help you to link to Skweezer from a website in order to mobilize your outgoing links or provide a search capability from within your web page. By using straightforward HTML, your user will pass from your site to Skweezer seamlessly without the need for any additional software or hardware integration between us.

Linking to Skweezer

You may want to link to Skweezer in order to mobilize outgoing links, usually search results. The entry page to link to is skweeze.aspx, as in this example: http://www.skweezer.net/skweeze.aspx. There are several parameters that must be appended to the base URL, all properly URL encoded if necessary:

Link Example

The following example shows a complete link (broken to multiple lines for readability) to the site http://www.destination.com through Skweezer, specifying http://www.searchresults.com as the referring link, and making sure that images are turned on.

Posting to Skweezer

In case you want to replicate the Skweeze form functionality found on the front page of Skweezer, creating the HTML form is similarly straightforward. In this case the input may be a search term or a URL; Skweezer will determine the user’s intention and display either search results or the requested page. While Skweezer can accept GET or POST requests, we recommend using GET.

The following is a sample form to illustrate posting to Skweezer. Note the use of the parameter “q” instead of “url” which allows Skweezer to handle user-supplied text input and interpret a search or browse request:

Please use the skweeze.aspx entry page specified in this document instead of reverse engineering the internal links that Skweezer uses, currently something like this: http://www.skweezer.net/2/s.aspx/www.destination.com. There is no guarantee that future versions of Skweezer will use this same internal URL encoding scheme. However, every effort will be made to ensure backwards compatibility with the link and form scheme described in this document.

Posted by Kevin Perkins