The Skweezer Blog

Skweezer is nominated in the Mobile Web Content Utility category.

IRVINE, Calif., August 28, 2006—Skweezer has been nominated in the Personal Software: Mobile Web Content Provider category of the 2006 Mobile Star Awards hosted by MobileVillage. Skweezer was awarded the highest honor, a Gold Star, in last year’s Mobile Star Awards.

The fifth annual Mobile Star Awards honor and promote the best companies, products, enterprise implementations, and leaders in mobile and wireless technology. Award winners are chosen by subscribers to Go Mobile, MobileVillage’s free online newsletter sent to technology executives, buyers, IT managers, developers, and top technology journalists. Voting will continue until September 20 and winners will be announced on September 25, 2006.

“Every year I see dozens of new mobile companies,” says Gary Thayer, Go Mobile editor and Mobile Star Awards coordinator. “Mobile users and enterprises face a huge task in finding the best products, partner companies, or success stories. This is where the Mobile Star Awards can help. This program enables experienced product users to vote for their choices. Like effective word-of-mouth recommendations, these votes for awards nominees and winners influence the market.”

Skweezer is a free service that optimizes Web pages, searches, and e-mail for use on PDA’s and cell phones. Mobile Internet users access Skweezer by visiting http://www.skweezer.net/, then use the portal as a “wireless gateway” to browse and search the Web. Skweezer compresses and reformats content being downloaded, so that it loads faster, looks better, and is easier to navigate. Skweezer includes an e-mail client, RSS reader, address book, site directory, and other useful features designed specifically for the mobile environment. Skweezer is also completely platform independent and can be accessed from Pocket PC, Palm, MS Smartphone, Blackberry, Symbian, PSP2, and WAP 2.0 compliant devices.

About MobileVillage / PDA Inc.:
A pioneer in developing the enterprise mobile technology market since 1993, MobileVillage / PDA Inc. is a market and solution development company dedicated to advancing mobile and wireless enterprise computing within select vertical and horizontal market segments. The company fosters technical and professional alliances through conferences, news, education, and “Best of Breed” solution identification, creation, management and delivery.

On the Net: MobileVillage site: http://www.mobilevillage.com/

About Greenlight Wireless:
Greenlight Wireless is a leading innovator of wireless technologies, providing mobile solutions for enterprise-level businesses, Web portals, and wireless carriers. Greenlight Wireless’ consumer-oriented Skweezer service optimizes Web content for handheld devices, providing a richer browsing experience and adding value to wireless data offerings. Greenlight’s Advertizer product is a cutting-edge advertising program for operators, search engines, and publishers who want to monetize their content in the mobile and desktop environments.

On the Net: Greenlight Wireless site: http://www.greenlightwireless.net/
Advertizer site: http://www.advertizer.net/
Skweezer site: http://www.skweezer.net/

Posted by Monica Sato

Social networking sites like MySpace are now among the most frequently visited by Skweezer users.

IRVINE, Calif., August 21, 2006—Skweezer users are visiting social networking sites with increasing frequency, displacing traditional Web portals and search engines among the list of most visited sites.

According to Greenlight Wireless, MySpace is the first social networking site to appear among the top five most highly visited sites by Skweezer’s mobile users, which was determined by a weekly traffic report generated for the first week of August. Similar sites that allow users to share information and meet online, such as Flickr, del.icio.us, and Friendster, have also experienced rapid uptake by Skweezer users in recent months. As a result of the growing popularity of link sharing services, Skweezer has a new feature that allows users to save browsing favorites to del.icio.us, Furl, Simpy or BlinkList from their cell phone or PDA.

“In the last quarter, we’ve partnered with a number of search, bookmarking, RSS, and shared media sites to mobile-enable their content,” says Kevin Perkins, CEO of Greenlight Wireless. “When combined with Advertizer, our mobile advertising solution, these social networks can now effectively monetize their free content onto the third screen.”

Skweezer is a free service that optimizes Web pages, searches, and e-mail for use on PDAs and cell phones. Mobile Internet users access Skweezer by visiting www.skweezer.net, then use the portal as a “wireless gateway” to browse and search the Web. Skweezer compresses and reformats content being downloaded, so that it loads faster, looks better, and is easier to navigate. Skweezer includes an e-mail client, RSS reader, address book, site directory, and other useful features designed specifically for the mobile environment. Skweezer is also completely platform independent and can be accessed from Pocket PC, Palm, MS Smartphone, Blackberry, Symbian, PSP2, and WAP 2.0 compliant devices.

About Greenlight Wireless:
Greenlight Wireless is a leading innovator of wireless technologies, providing mobile solutions for enterprise-level businesses, Web portals, and wireless carriers. Greenlight Wireless’ consumer-oriented Skweezer service optimizes Web content for handheld devices, providing a richer browsing experience and adding value to wireless data offerings. Greenlight’s Advertizer product is a cutting-edge advertising program for operators, search engines, and publishers who want to monetize their content in the mobile and desktop environments.

On the Net: Greenlight Wireless site: http://www.greenlightwireless.net/
Advertizer site: http://www.advertizer.net/
Skweezer site: http://www.skweezer.net/

Posted by Monica Sato

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of MySpace by now, and how popular it has become. Personally, I fall in the “out demographic”, so yeah—it was hard for me to “get it.” At first.

Last week, my nephew Steve came out from Pennsylvania to visit. He’s going to be a sophomore at Penn State next year, and is clearly in the “in demographic” with his MySpace/Facebook accounts, his huge texting bills (that his parents pay! ), and his non-stop obsession on the opposite sex. Combine that with an old friend who I heard was trying to link up with me again via MySpace… I thought it might be time to check it out, and see what it’s all about.

What’s interesting is MySpace is so outwardly lame in terms of its usability, the barrage of blinking adverts, and the auto-play music on garish member pages. I remember the first time I ever stumbled across one of these pages, I was looking up referring links to Skweezer that someone had put on their MySpace page. Upon trying to find the link on the page, we were one of this guy’s “interests” in his bio next to a section of “friend comments” posted in recent order.

At the time, none of it made sense to me. Why would you put all your info out there, in many cases sensitive/private info, to have a series of strangers comment and contact you about being a “friend”!? I have friends! I like my privacy! Whatever!

But then after hanging with Steve, I get it now. We are in the midst of a significant cultural shift in how we meet people, communicate, and interact socially. Seana Mulcahy from MediaPost made mention of this when she went on holiday to Nantucket. Her comment about boys asking out girls via text message—that were literally 50 yards away—says it all.

So, in order to link back up with my friend, and to see what MySpace was all about, I created my own MySpace page. As I alluded to earlier, this was a royal pain in the ass. The UI to do this was not as easy to use as Yahoo! or Flickr. Their search to find people, was okay. It was extremely frustrating that I had to hop through as many pages to upload my photo… but it’s all part of the Grand-Master Plan of showing you adverts.

Once I figured out how to set up my profile, I now had to decide what content I was going to put on there. I’m happily married, I’m not trolling for youngins, and I certainly want to use the profile to create more spider-driven relevancy with the Search Engines. But you’re not cool on MySpace if you’re creating just a purely business profile.

So, I uploaded my picture, filled in my profile with the basics… and *bleep* “What was that? ‘Derka-derka wants to be your friend. Click here to visit their page.’” I hadn’t even finished my profile when I started to get people wanting to cross link profiles with me.

Buzzzzzzz! “What was that? Someone just sent me an SMS. From whom, I wonder? ‘Amber wants to be your friend. Logon to MySpace and visit their page.’” Whoa. Wait a minute. I’ve been on MySpace for, oh, 15 minutes, and I’ve got two people—whom I’ve never met—wanting to be my friend. Interesting. I’ll play.

So, in viewing their pages… these people were just normal, non-whacko’s just reaching out to people with things their interested in. Or proximity to where they live. Or because I know someone they know. Or whatever.

And now that I’m getting contacted—again, with no agenda whatsoever—I can see why people get hooked! One immediately feels part of a community that is, arguably, the trendiest thing going right now. Since I already have a couple of professional blogging outlets, I think I might start using MySpace for more of my personal stuff. I used to be a comedian during the 90’s and I always liked making humorous, Photoshopped pics. There is quite a thriving community of musicians, comedians, and so forth. So maybe it’ll become my “creative outlet”?! To boot it’s not all just a hook-up scene. There are a number of  married and “older” folks (it’s relative) looking to connect platonically with friends. So I’m sure that it’s not all just about Steve’s demographic, entirely!

Anyway, I get it now. And I’ve changed my original “Whatever!” position to whatever in terms of the connectedness and possibility that sites like MySpace bring.

Posted by Kevin Perkins

On my personal blog today I contrasted the “apology” from AOL this week about accidentally publicizing thousands of their user’s private searches with a proactive apology I received from Peter Blum over a mistake with some trial software I downloaded from his company. There are right and wrong ways to apologize, certainly. I read a comment somewhere recently that AOL just can’t seem to generate good PR no matter what they do nowadays.

It’s helpful to remember that the whole fiasco started when Google made it known that they were not complying with the DOJ’s request for search logs, which they wanted to use to defend a child-protection law. Every other search engine rolled over and complied, and if Google hadn’t complained in court, the DOJ’s request wouldn’t have made the news. Yesterday Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, claimed that Google will probably never make the same mistake as AOL, before adding, “Never say never.” To that, the question has been raised: why keep logs at all? Isn’t that begging for trouble? This interests us because Skweezer logs a great deal of information about the devices our customers are using, what they’re searching on, and where they’re navigating. The question could be asked of us as well: why keep that data?

Earlier this week, Kevin Perkins and I had a business lunch with a technologically adept software company president and large AdWords customer, and he told us a story that I think sums up why Google will never give up logging. He noticed that when he logged into his AdWords account and did a Google search on keywords that he bought, his own company showed up at the top. However, when he did the same searches from a computer that had never logged into AdWords, his company’s website wasn’t in the top ten (which are the only results that matter, as we all know.) He angrily dialed up Google and demanded to know what was going on, because it looked like some elaborate fraud. They explained that when you do a Google search and you have a cookie that identifies you, Google will use not only your keyword but also your search history. A search results page for “baseball” may therefore look one way to a Cubs fan and another to an Angels fan, depending on their individual search history. How do they accomplish this? They keep your search history. Do you think they’re going to throw out all that excellent data that makes all of their services more useful? Not a chance.

Skweezer and Advertizer log data is incredibly useful. We can figure out what sites our users like and what phones are getting popular. Even now, we’re punching up our reporting capabilities significantly to give us a birds-eye-view on trends that will only make our services more compelling and useful. Since we realize this has major privacy implications, of course we’ve been keeping that data under lock and key and we’ll never share it publicly except in aggregate, like some other companies already do.

Posted by Barnabas Kendall

Today (okay, this was “today” when I started this post several days ago) I saw a link from del.icio.us popular to a Computerworld article: “Can’t Find a Job? Here’s Why…” Since we’re in the middle of hiring we just made an offer to a programmer to help out at Greenlight Wireless, I found this article interesting since it is written for the unlucky job seeker.

The first point of that article I can agree on. That is, “you’re not as marketable as you think.” Relevant and recent experience with the technologies in the job description are very important. For example, we’re looking for an ASP.NET developer. If you have classic ASP experience only, I don’t care. If you read a book last night to brush up on the questions I might ask you, I’ll find out about it. You need to stay current to stay relevant and marketable.

Some of the other points I found dubious. For example, “you place too much faith in the Internet.” It went on to explain that you should try other things in your job search besides the job boards, such as “contacting members of your professional network for leads and advice, sharing your search with those you meet at industry events and professional association meetings,” and gee, I don’t know, maybe “signing on with a staffing firm.” What amazing advice from Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of Robert Half Technology, a huge IT staffing firm. I thought putting “staffing firm” towards the end of the list was classy. Yes, you should try multiple avenues of finding a job, of course. However, the utility of body shops is declining. Professional recruiters are going the way of the travel agent, in my opinion. There are many companies who refuse to work with recruiters, and I’m beginning to think that our company might adopt such a policy. Given two equally qualified applicants, one who was introduced through a staffing firm and another whom we found through Monster.com, I’d pick the Monster.com one and avoid paying the fee, which can be a large part of your salary. It is entirely possible, at least for applying for a job at my company, that placement agencies are counterproductive.

Flame on, dinosaurs.

Posted by Barnabas Kendall