We’ve just put up a new page on the Skweezer, Inc. company site that describes the technologies behind our products as well as a list of our intellectual properties. The new page can be found at http://company.skweezer.com/technologies.
Posted by Monica Sato
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
Web site publishers and bloggers can now create and manage Skweezer Ads feeds through the new Skweezer Reports & Analytics Web site.
IRVINE, Calif., June 4, 2008—Skweezer, Inc. today announced the launch of the Skweezer Reports & Analytics Web site, located at http://reports.skweezer.com, which provides online reporting for the company’s Skweezer Ads and Skweezer Private Label customers.
“Skweezer is in the unique position of having collected very detailed mobile advertising and mobile browsing data for several years,” said Skweezer, Inc. president Mark Sieve. “This initial release of the Skweezer Reports and Analytics site provides a wealth of information to our customers and, with a host of new reports and features planned for release this summer, promises to become a powerful and comprehensive mobile analytics solution.”
The new Skweezer Reports & Analytics site provides Skweezer Ads customers with detailed reports on their ad campaigns, including match rate, cost-per-click, and click-through data. The site also provides publishers with the ability to create multiple feeds, design custom ad layouts, and monitor their payment history. Skweezer Ads currently captures a wide range of additional data for each ad that is requested and displayed, such as geographic location of user, device type, and keyword and category information of the requesting page; this information will also be made available to Skweezer Ads customers in upcoming months.
The Skweezer Reports & Analytics site also tracks data for Skweezer Private Label implementations. Wireless operators, search engines, and other enterprise level customers using Skweezer Private Label to mobilize desktop Web content can use the site to track traffic levels and manage subscribers. Detailed aggregate data regarding geographic location, browsing history, device type, and other useful information will be made available in forthcoming updates to the site.
Skweezer Ads is an online advertising service that supplies both desktop and mobile ads in a single ad feed, automatically displaying the correct type of ad to each visitor. Skweezer Ads customers have the added benefit of being able to use Skweezer’s mobilization technology to automatically create a mobile version of their Web site, which is dynamically created whenever a mobile visitor is detected.
Skweezer Ads is the world’s first internationally-consumed mobile advertising service, having served mobile ads in over 175 countries since its release in 2004, and was voted Best Mobile Marketing Product in the 2007 Mobile Star Awards.
Skweezer’s award-winning content mobilization technology can be seamlessly integrated into any wireless data offering, search engine, or other large-scale portal or Web property through a Skweezer Private Label implementation. Skweezer Private Label allows wireless carriers and other service providers allow access to the “whole Internet”, including the vast majority of online content that was not designed to accommodate mobile browsers. Skweezer Private Label works seamlessly with any mobile device regardless of platform and is available as either a hosted or installed solution.
About Skweezer, Inc.:
Skweezer, Inc. has been a key innovator of mobile content optimization technologies since 2001, creating award-winning solutions that have accelerated mobile Web adoption and consistently raised the bar in terms of users’ expectations and feature development. Skweezer Ads, launched in 2004, provides publishers and ad networks with desktop and mobile ads through a single ad feed and includes Skweezer’s optimization technology that automatically mobilizes site content for mobile visitors. Skweezer’s scalable, time-tested “carrier grade” content optimization and converged advertising products are relied upon by some of the largest wireless operators, search engines, ad networks, and enterprises in the world.
Skweezer company site: company.skweezer.com
Skweezer Reports & Analytics site: reports.skweezer.com
Skweezer Ads page: ads.skweezer.com
Posted by Monica Sato
