It seems inevitable that users will some day access and search the Web over their mobile phones. But a whole raft of technological hurdles remain to be overcome before customers will start surfing—and presumably shopping—the mobile Web.
Earlier this month, AOL began offering a solution to one stumbling block for both mobile Web users and Web site operators: namely, how to put a whole Web page onto a cell phone screen in a way that seems both complete and useful?
It’s a problem that isn’t exactly on the radar screen for a great number of Web sites, with the exception of the URLs most heavily focused on providing content. But if results of a recent survey from AOL, the Associated Press and the Pew Research Center are accurate, some 30% of current mobile users say they would like to be able to surf the Web on their handsets.
“Most Webmasters just figure they’ll dump the Web site on the small screen,” says Raine Bergstrom, AOL Wireless’s director of emerging technologies. “In the past, if you tired to surf to a Web page on your phone, you would most likely either get a ‘Cannot Display Page’ message, or it will be a mess because they’re trying to force-feed a huge Web page into a tiny mobile screen.”
AOL began offering aid with this problem in August 2005 with AOL Mobile Search, which displayed search results pages using a special rendering technology from InfoGin Ltd. With this new Web browsing service, AOL is expanding its relationship with InfoGin and applying its platform to full-fledged Web pages in a “Surf the Web” feature that users can reach via their phones at the www.mobile.aol.com portal.
The platform goes beyond simply re-sizing graphics; it “transcodes” the Web page a user is looking for—a fancy way to say that it looks at the page, makes sense of its component parts, and then reorganizes those in a way that will be most useful over a small screen.
“Most Web pages have some key similarities, such as navigation on the top or the upper left,” Bergstrom says. “We recognize that structure and create a new page on the fly automatically.” For example, the CNN home page has some 30 navigational elements at the top of the page. AOL Wireless removes those, packages them into a new page and adds a “Quick Links” bar to the mobile page so visitors can still access those tools but don’t have to scroll past them to get to the day’s main story, which is what they really want. The browsing service also optimizes delivery by pushing content in 15k to 20k increments, allowing the phone to render the first screenful before trying to send the next one. The result is a faster mobile Web browsing experience.
The “Surf the Web” platform won’t always get a page right on its own, Bergstrom admits. Sometimes the software will pick up and highlight the wrong page elements. In those instances, AOL says it will apply human editing to create templates for those pages that will allow them to display properly in the future.
Better yet, Bergstrom adds, Web operators can get proactive about the way their Web sites look and act on mobile screens. They might opt to build a specific site for mobile visitors using the new “.mobi” top-level domain that’s set to launch on May22. Or they can learn enough about the transcoding technology to work with AOL Wireless. He believes this will be a more likely solution for small to mid-size Web operators, who may not have the time or resources to build and maintain two parallel Web sites.
“Because it’s such a quick win for people, I do think we’ll see more Web operators doing that. They’ll start learning about the transcoding technology and how they can make better Web sites based on that. Having their Web design teams start to think about the mobile Web is just a natural next step.”
Right now, AOL Wireless is primarily concerned with giving users a valuable experience on the mobile Web—or at least sparing them from a frustrating one. “We were pleased that 30% of Americans say they want to do mobile Web browsing, considering that the experience until now has been so poor,” Bergstrom says. “At the same time, that means 70% of Americans don’t want to do it, and I think that’s largely because of what they’ve seen to date. It’s important to us to get out there and show people that the technology does work, and we’re putting a lot of effort behind that.”
And AOL Wireless may be just the way to help first-timers get on and get using the mobile Web. AOL was knocked as “the Internet on training wheels” back in the early days of Web adoption, but it undoubtedly served as many users’ first point of entry into cyberspace. And while the company is still making big course corrections to some of the initiatives it took in those Internet 1.0 years (replacing subscriber fees with ad revenue, opening up content to non-AOL members), it must be said that it knows how to get newbies using a new technology, as Bergstrom points out.
And a future that produces bigger usage of the mobile Web will also bring more interesting and interactive options for mobile marketers. Bergstrom sees three unique qualities to the mobile experience that could be put to use in advertising campaigns, once the user base reaches some kind of critical mass:
* Location-based messaging, built on the fact that your phone can be used to detect where you are. “It’s so compelling and a unique advantage to mobile marketing,” he says. “It will happen.”
* Contextual advertising on mobile Web pages with a click-to-call function. “Advertising can get much smarter on the mobile phone. If I’m looking at a Web page about pizza or a listing of local pizzerias, I can see an ad that offers me a dollar off at Romeo’s Pizza if I click here to make the call.”
* Advertising based on the dayparts and rhythms of real life, such as ads for a McMuffin at breakfast time or a reminder message from your local mechanic that it’s time to bring your car in for a tune-up or oil change. This hasn’t happened much on the Internet because people don’t carry their PCs with them 24/7, so offers rely on someone reading a message or ad and then acting on it later. But that AOL/AP/Pew survey revealed that 52% of adults keep their cell phones turned on all day everyday. The lag time between seeing an offer and taking action could be reduced almost to zero.
“The key’s in the phone,” Bergstrom says. “those three types of marketing approaches will make mobile advertising compelling to consumers. They’ll also make the market harder for businesses to figure out, but the results will be worth it.