The Skweezer Blog

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

I was just reading an article by Dave McClure entitled “Yahoo just needs to fix one thing: Monetization“. He outlines three ideas for helping Yahoo skweeze squeeze more profit out of each search: finish a new advertising platform, do Cost-Per-Action (CPA) advertising, and acquire more startups.

Skweezer could really help out Yahoo on points 2 and 3. We’ve been experimenting for the past few years with how to best monetize browsing traffic: contextual ads, teeny-tiny CPM banners, even charging for pro service outright. As a mobilizing web proxy, Skweezer is uniquely situated to complete CPA transactions because while users are shopping and bidding and searching, they never actually leave skweezer.net. Verifying completed mobile CPA transactions through Skweezer would not be difficult at all, were we to somehow start showing CPA ads. Significantly, we would not require any change to the advertiser’s existing site and there would be no tracking “leakage” (blocking or failing to download a tracking beacon). The only other type of company that has this visibility would be the user’s carrier/ISP themselves, and how many advertisers are going to do separate deals with every carrier in the world?

I wonder how general web CPA solutions such as newly announced Turn.com handle this uncertainty. Interestingly (to me anyway), it seems like they have some former AltaVista alums at the helm, but I doubt they remember or ever crossed paths with me or Kevin from back in the day when we worked at Shopping.com. Small world, and I wish them well.

Posted by Barnabas Kendall