The Skweezer Blog

We’ll be launching the new company branding next Monday, May 5th. To let the cat out of the bag, we’re re-branding Greenlight Wireless Corp. as Skweezer, Inc. It had become increasing clear that our marketing message lacked focus due to the diverse company and product names we were using. We see this branding initiative as an important step in developing a clear and concise message that will appeal to both our users in the public as well as our institutional customers. Here’s a sneak peek at the new site that will go live on Monday.

I have to say, I really like the new look…

Posted by Mark Sieve

You may have noticed the new look on our blog.  This is actually a small step toward launching our new branding initiative, which will be going live soon. Stay tuned for details…

Posted by Monica Sato

Today I was reading Doug Mohney’s editorial about online video needing to be “good enough”. He commented very nicely on a new product called The Flip that makes it extremely easy to take short video clips, and quickly post them to YouTube, or wherever. Even though the product doesn’t capture at the best resolution… and isn’t going to produce video that you could marvel at on a HD large-screen… it certainly satisfies. Interesting notion. It made me think up The “Good Enough Principle” (GEP), and how it applies to what Greenlight Wireless does.

Here is the typical product cycle for consumer electronics:

• In early markets, where the knowledgeable know what they want, they are the “prosumers”—professional consumers—who are picky, and buy professional products at professional prices
• Usually, these professional products are unfriendly to the mainstreet user. And, prosumers are usually the gear-heads who can make sense of professional products, or who are willing to put the time into learning
• After professional product prices drop far enough, mainstreet users no longer have a barrier to entry to spend the time learning something complicated without feeling like they wasted their money. Example: a mainstreet user can’t figure out how to reset the blinking “12:00″ on the $49 VCR they just bought. But they’re over it because they acquired the thing that allows them to play videos regardless if it’s not working at its optimum

The Good Enough Principle (GEP)

In terms of guidance, I’ve usually deferred to Geoffrey Moore’s Chasm model in describing market acceptance for consumer electronics and software. However, the GEP is likely more about the Power Law in terms of  “head and tail”—a concept made popular recently to describe the effectiveness of Google’s AdSense product—rather than a Bell Curve the way Moore has it. I think GEP starts with a “head” where a number of companies are competing for the wealthiest 10%-20% of
a market. (Many people colloquially refer to this principle as the “80/20 rule” where a majority of the resources come from a vital few.)

However, the challenge with 80/20 in terms of the “technology” business is that price alone doesn’t allow for a predictable product acceptance with mainstreet. It has to be easy AND “good enough” in order for the masses to accept it. Therefore, few companies generally actually attack the other 80% of the market because it costs too much in education and awareness of all the product features. (Again, think of the blinking “12:00″.) That’s where KISS comes in. Those that can combine “easy” and “good enough” obtain GEP… and more importantly… access to the broad—and lucrative—market that nobody wants. (Why was there even a clock on the VCR in the first place?)

This is where it makes sense for The Flip. As Mohney writes:

“It’s not the best solution, but it is good enough. And that’s the way a lot of people need to start thinking about online video. Ultimately, you’d like to have HD and a lot of other features, but right now it is good enough to start using and making money.”

So examine the reasoning why GEP proves out for The Flip. Take a look at the model:

As a user, my daughter’s friend brought a Flip to a sleep-over, and I was struck at how simple—and cool—that thing was. Maybe a step or two above Fisher-Price… but this thing was easily 9-year old-friendly. And thus The Flip’s simplicity inherently expands the market further: the youth are the ones doing the most online video! Next step for Pure Digital? Introduce more sophisticated products as this segment grows up meanwhile eating up marketshare.

GEP in Mobile Web

This sort of thing strikes me as very typical in the mobile phone space as well, particularly with data apps other than SMS. Now that the price points of “all-you-can-eat” mobile internet are coming down, people can “bother” to explore more functionality on their phones—namely, Mobile Web. Every time I speak to someone about what we do, they’re like “wow, your technology can do that?! Cool!”

The challenge is, are there other companies that have more features and coolness than what Greenlight does? It’s all relative, I guess—but sure. But let me suggest to you that those kinds of companies are addressing an even smaller market share of those willing to pay professional prices for a professional Mobile Web experience. One of Skweezer’s key strengths is helping people find Web information and providing transactional access to it in a very simple way. The other strength is providing mobile ads that don’t require publishers to do anything but copy/paste code that mobilizes AND monetizes their pages!

So while the debates rage on about whether Mobile Web is dead, or if the iPhone makes Mobile Web unnecessary, or whatever… while everyone’s trying to make the Mobile Web perfect, we’ll be taking a cue from The Flip.

By Kevin Perkins

I’ve been asked by several people to provide feedback about Russell Beattie and Mike Rowehl shuttering Mowser. So, I’m just going to post something on our blog rather than respond to everyone individually.

Let me first say that it’s too easy to jump on the pile without first acknowledging those guys’ bravery. It takes a lot of guts to put it all on the line. I really hope they land on their feet.

That said, the Mobile Web is not dead. Are those who are claiming it serious? That’s a preposterous and naive position; it’s just getting started. Contrary to what Russ has put out there about this space, Skweezer has had many successes. And our company continues to innovate and execute in a very steady, patient manner. This is a nascent market, not a dead one.

There are some other invalid assumptions being raised as well–that some people think transcoding is: unnecessary, without a business model, or just plain “easy” to do. Russell represents this in one of his posts on how a transcoder works. Just add Mowser to the other Skweezer clones who thought along those lines (baresite, IYHY, et al) as well.

There’s a fundamental problem with the implementation strategy of leveraging open-source: to do a proper transcoder—and to do it well—these projects only get you about 80% of the way there. Then, that last 20%… is extremely difficult. All of a sudden issues of security, scalability, localization, private-labeling, new feature implementation, personalization, liability, etc. rear their ugly head. And this is what separates the men from the boys. As an example, Yahoo (Novarra), AOL (InfoGin), Mowser and Google can’t even support SSL in their mobile transcoding (Skweezer does). I’m telling you, this isn’t as easy as it looks, folks!

Aside from the Google’s and the Yahoo’s of the world, new entrants like Mowser will always be at a disadvantage because we’ve put in the time, energy, and money LONG AGO. Here are some of the milestones:

• Skweezer firsts…
  • Skweezer invented; patent filed (2001)
  • Portal-based transcoding engine: Skweezer (2003)
  • Globally distributed mobile ad platform: Skweezer Ads (2004)
  • Pagination system that splits large Web pages up for viewing on cell phones (2005)
  • Mobile Web page translation feature (2005)
  • Portal-based mobile RSS reader (2005)
  • “Find in page” search that carries Web search keywords into search result pages (2007)
• Awards and Honors…
  • 2007 Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine’s Best Software Awards: Winner - Pocket PC Internet: Web Compression Service
  • 2007 MobileVillage Mobile Star Awards: Gold Star - Consumer Software: Mobile Web Content Aggregator / Portal
  • 2007 MobileVillage Mobile Star Awards: Gold Star - Enterprise Software: Mobile Marketing
  • 2007 MobileVillage Mobile Star Awards: Gold Star - Visionary: Wireless Services (Skweezer founders Kevin Perkins and Mark Sieve)
  • 2007 PDA Friendly Website Awards: Winner - PDA Home Page
  • 2006 MobileVillage Mobile Star Awards: Gold Star - Personal Software: Mobile Web Content Provider
  • 2005 MobileVillage Mobile Star Awards: Gold Star - Personal Software: Mobile Web Content Provider

Forgive the commercial, but I bring it up only to illustrate that—even with all the goodness—it still only represents 50% of the game. The other half is the execution of the innovation, delivered in a simple and clear way, that enables business partners to monetize mobile traffic. Unfortunately, Mowser failed to deliver on that statement. Running interstitials between pages killed the user experience despite the glowing praises of bloggers, who were undoubtedly motivated by commissions from Mowser’s Affiliate Linking Program. (”Find Mowser through me, and I get a rev share of whatever ads get clicked!”)

So, is Mowser’s death also the death of the Mobile Web? Hardly. Matthew Miller raises a number of key points why the Mobile Web will continue on. One thing that I’d like to add to Matthew’s “environment-optimized, one Web” notion… is that there’s a bigger picture here than just “desktop” and “mobile”. As “Web” content finds its way outside of these environments more and more (handheld games, cars, SMS, etc), users and publishers will need a solution that will continue to provide semantic access to content while providing publishers with tools to monetize this activity.

Such is Skweezer.

Posted by Kevin Perkins

Greenlight Wireless Corporation’s CEO Kevin Perkins will be on hand at the upcoming ad:tec conference being held April 15th to April 17th in San Francisco. Mr. Perkins will be available for business development meetings throughout the event. To schedule a meeting please contact Monica Sato at the Greenlight Wireless Media Relations department via e-mail at msato (at) gwcorp (dot) net, or call the Business Development Department at +1-949-421-1550 x561.

About ad:tec San Francisco:
Are you engaged in conversations with your customers? Are you leveraging those results to learn more about your customers? Are you optimizing your message and delivery in order to drive brand preference? These topics, along with other brand-building methods and digital media technologies and platforms will be discussed at ad:tech San Francisco. From the high level overview keynotes to the performance focused workshops to the technologies showcased on the show floor – it’s all here, under one roof. ad:tech… the business of modern marketing.

Posted by Monica Sato

I was just reading about Nokia’s newest smart phone that is intended to displace Apple’s juggernaut iPhone. Frankly, no matter how “cool” of a phone anybody else comes out with… in my opinion… there will be no displacing Apple for the foreseeable future. At least not on features alone.

Just a to give some clarity… I myself am partial to my BlackBerry Curve. However, I know that Apple makes HUGE fans of its wares. And that “loyalty coolness” supersedes any new features any of the other OEMs can think of.

Why is this?

My thought is at the end of the day, if it costs the same and looks the same… but nobody knows it… there’s no impetus to change. A super-low price point might make a dent. Open access to the internet with killer services around the device makes sense. But to go head-to-head against Apple on shear “coolness” factor or improved features? Never gonna happen.

By Kevin Perkins

Recently, someone at a conference was telling me how much he liked using the Google Mobile Transcoder.

Having not used it in ages, I decided to check it out and see how their product has developed over the last few years.

Here was my experience:

• I loaded up Firefox and emulated as an Ericsson T616. It has a 10k deck size.
• I went to Google.com, and the user interface was their mobile interface.
• I typed in the search term Chile.
• So, going in sequential order of their search results, I clicked the first Related News link. It went to a dead page. I clicked the second Related News link, and it went to another dead page.
• Next, I went back to the search results, and clicked the More Related News link. It took me to another search result page—just about News. About half of all of the links there went to dead pages as well. Of the remaining, 30% were WAP 1.0/WML pages, and the last 20% were mobilized versions of content.
• In going back to the original Chile search result page, I clicked the first Web pages search result. It took me to a Wikipedia page about Chile. Per the profile of my device, Google cut up the Wikipedia page into 78 pieces with links to Google Reader, and the Wikipedia TOC at the top. (See picture at right.)
• Back on the Chile search result page again, I clicked the second link in the result set, and went to a geography-encyclopedia–like page about Chile. Google cut it into 4 pages. I clicked on Google’s Show Section button (the little “+” sign), and went to the portion of the web page that contained its link navigation. At that point, Google said I was on page 2/8. I clicked the Hide Section button, and it took me back to the homepage… or so I thought. It  apparently cut off the top graphic that was there just a few seconds ago. In addition, Google said I was
  on page 2/5.
• The third link that I tested in the Chile search result list took me to The CIA World Factbook about Chile. Upon clicking that link, the Google Mobile Transcoder took me to a page that said “Google will not reformat for your phone“, and gave me a link to access the page directly. Upon clicking that link, I went to the CIA site directly without the Google Mobile Transcoder. But, in doing so, I noticed why Google can’t (won’t?) transcode this page: it’s because the CIA site is in Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). So, apparently the Google Mobile Transcoder does not support SSL transactions.

If I have my test methodology wrong, or if someone has a different—or similar experience—please comment so that I can adjust my test. It’s possible this term was the exception, and not the rule.

By Kevin Perkins

Skweezer technology can now be easily integrated into Web application “mashups”.

IRVINE, Calif., April 2, 2008—Greenlight Wireless today announced the release of the Skweezer Application Programming Interface (API), found online at www.greenlightwireless.net/developers, which assists developers with integrating Skweezer’s content mobilization technology into new applications.

Skweezer, a Web-based service that compresses desktop Web content for use on cell phones, has been integrated into a wide range of applications since its release in 2003. Installed mobile browsers, mobile Web site directories, and even Apple widgets are just a few ways that Skweezer has been integrated into the latest wave of Web application mashups.

“In the past, enterprising programmers needed to experiment with Skweezer parameters through trial and error,” said Greenlight Wireless president Mark Sieve. “The Skweezer API makes integrating Skweezer technology very easy and, once our advertising component is in place, profitable as well.”

The Skweezer API will shortly be integrated with Greenlight Wireless’ converged online advertising solution, which provides ads to both desktop and mobile traffic. This combination will allow programmers to add Skweezer technology to their application and at the same time monetize their mobile Web traffic with high-yielding cost-per-click ads.

Skweezer technology compresses and reformats content being downloaded, so that it loads faster, looks better, and is easier to navigate. Skweezer has introduced many mobile browsing innovations and has won several awards in 2007, including a Gold Star in the Mobile Star Awards and Best Web Compression Service in the Smartphone and Pocket PC Magazine Best Software Awards. Skweezer is completely platform-independent and can be accessed from Pocket PC, Palm, MS Smartphone, Blackberry, iPhone, 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 environment.

On the Net: Greenlight Wireless site: www.greenlightwireless.net
Skweezer Public API page: www.greenlightwireless.net/developers

Posted by Monica Sato