The Skweezer Blog

For the last year or so, I’ve been wondering how much of bubble the mobile content industry (apps, web, ads, etc) has been living in. I started my computing career in the early 90s, so I’ve lived through the original dot com bubble. I remember the days when doing simple HTML sites was considered "complex". And companies like Shopping.com were paying US Web amounts like $100,000 just to do a 10 page HTML work-up of a site idea.

Of course, later in the bubble when web applications began to take hold, ecommerce became the "big thing"… and the emergence of a reinvented EDI model redirected the industry’s focus bit. It went from content and browser/server applications to platforms where servers could talk to other servers using web protocols. And leverage not only the dedicated function of uniform services, but take advantage of a common business model as well–reducing costs for everyone. Ultimately, when a new and disruptive concept comes at the end of a bubbly cycle, I believe it causes the bubble to burst. Of course 9-11 and a down-market cycle didn’t help either. But you get the idea.

So, today I was reading about Glu Mobile announcing lower-than-expected earnings for Q308. Unlike the Web 1.0 burst, there are a lot fewer public companies–thanks to Sarbox and other regulatory policies. (How ironic, given the talk lately about not enough regulation). However, a down-market combined with the credit crisis is creating a similar effect as it did in 2001. What does this mean for mobile content companies? Well, we’ve seen a similar content push in the genesis of this industry (making stuff), followed by a "buying of apps and ringtones" cycle (ecommerce), and now we’re seeing a platform-ish phase where mobile ad companies are inserting themselves into the mix to help these companies monetize on a standard set of ads and formats.

Sound familiar at all? If you agree with my premise and listen to what Glu had to say, then one can easily deduce the mobile content industry bubble is about to burst. The question now becomes, how many business will be fail because of this burst? Do you believe the analysts’ predictions when they say, "The Mobile Advertising Industry will be worth _____ billion dollars in 20__"? If there are no content companies around to serve ads… and less ad platforms to provide ads… and less consumer spending to buy things… and less businesses advertising to get consumers to buy things… then this burst seems inevitable.

By Kevin Perkins

Skweezer wins in the Pocket PC: Web Compression Service category of this year’s Best Software Awards.

IRVINE, Calif., September 15, 2008—Skweezer, Inc. today announced that Skweezer was chosen as the winner in the “Pocket PC: Web Compression Service” category and was also a finalist in the “Smartphone: Web Browsing category” of this year’s Best Software Awards hosted by Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine.

The annual Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine Best Software Awards helps users select software that best suits their Windows Mobile Pocket PC and Smartphone needs by honoring companies that produce outstanding software. Pocket PC and Smartphone experts from around the world help select the nominations and determine the award winners. The panel of over 100 judges included prominent Microsoft MVPs, support forum moderators, and Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine contributors.

“We have been doing this for 8 years, and the nominee’s list is the most comprehensive and accurate list yet,” said Smartphone & Pocket PC Executive Editor and Publisher, Hal Goldstein. “Congratulations to the winners and finalists, who are mostly from small independent companies who have worked so hard to deliver great software to Windows Mobile users.”

Skweezer is a free service that optimizes Web pages and searches for use on PDAs and cell phones. Mobile Internet users access Skweezer by visiting www.skweezer.com, 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 has introduced many mobile browsing innovations, including the first: pagination system that splits large Web pages up for viewing on cell phones, mobile Web page translation feature, “find in page” search, and portal-based mobile RSS reader. Skweezer is completely platform-independent and can be accessed from Pocket PC, iPhone, Palm, MS Smartphone, Blackberry, Symbian, PSP2, and WAP 2.0 compliant devices. Skweezer is also available as a “private label” solution for wireless carriers, search engines, and content providers.

About Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine:
Bi-monthly Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine is a print publication also available in Zinio Digital format, written for users of Windows Mobile PDA’s and Smartphone devices. Each issue includes hardware and software reviews, user profiles, practical tips, plus an “Enterprise Solutions” supplement. Its companion Web site, www.smartphonemag.com, is updated each day with news, hot downloads, Web sites, reviews, and tips; and also contains archives, a directory of the best Windows Mobile Web sites, and an Encyclopedia of over 5000 third-party software and accessories products. Subscriptions include the annual Buyers Guide and The Ultimate Smartphone and Pocket PC How-to Guide, plus free access to the subscriber VIP web site.

On the Net: Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine site: http://www.smartphonemag.com 

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.

On the Net: Skweezer site: www.skweezer.com
Skweezer company site: company.skweezer.com
Skweezer blog: blog.skweezer.com
Skweezer RSS Feed: rss.skweezer.com

Posted by Monica Sato

Mobile search traffic on Skweezer has increased by half over the last five-month period.

IRVINE, Calif., September 9, 2008—Skweezer, Inc. today announced that Web searches on its Skweezer portal (www.skweezer.com), which optimizes Web content for mobile devices, has increased 52% since the beginning of Q2 2008.

The Skweezer portal allows visitors to enter either a Web address or search terms into the Skweezer Home page and then loads either the search results or the target Web page, which is reformatted for the mobile environment. While Web browsing traffic has grown consistently over the same period, users accessing Skweezer’s search platform has climbed dramatically since mid-April.

Skweezer’s search traffic comes from a diverse group of carriers, most of which are based in the United States. Customers from AT&T and Verizon generated the most mobile search requests from Q2 2008 to the present. Alltel and T-Mobile customers provided less search traffic than the top two referrers, however their search traffic on Skweezer grew that fastest over the same time period, up 45% and 39% respectively.

“Many carriers don’t offer a Web search feature that meets their customers’ needs, which creates a huge opportunity for companies like Skweezer,” said Skweezer, Inc. president Mark Sieve. “Skweezer monetizes its mobile search with sponsored listings and CPC ads, so we see this as a double-win in terms of increasing both revenue and customer base.”

A recent poll of Skweezer users focusing on mobile search found the following:

• 84% of users surveyed claimed to use mobile search on a daily basis
• 79% of the participants believed that being able to search the Web on a mobile device as “Very Important”
• 72% of users preferred to use Skweezer as their primary mobile search service because of the integrated content mobilization technology
• 69% of users surveyed complained that their “wireless carrier does not offer an adequate search platform”

Over 1,100 Skweezer users participated in the Mobile Search Survey, which was run between July 7th and July 31st, 2008.

Skweezer is a free service that optimizes Web pages and searches for use on PDAs and cell phones. Mobile Internet users access Skweezer by visiting www.skweezer.com, 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 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. Skweezer is also available as a “private label” solution for wireless carriers, search engines, and content providers.

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.

On the Net: Skweezer site: www.skweezer.com
Skweezer company site: company.skweezer.com
Skweezer blog: blog.skweezer.com
Skweezer RSS Feed: rss.skweezer.com

Posted by Monica Sato

Our sincere thanks to all the Skweezer users who participated in the Mobile Search Survey we conducted last month. 1,112 Skweezer users in 26 countries answered our questions about how they use mobile search, what new search features they’d find useful, and the importance of mobile search in their day-to-day lives. The findings of the survey are going to be the subject of an upcoming press release, so visit our press room at company.skweezer.com/press in a couple of days to see what we learned.The five survey participants who won Skweezer T-shirts in our prize drawing are:

• Yuson Shin - Milpitas CA, USA
• Blake Jeffries - Estancia NM, USA
• Chitraksh Sherawat - Bhopal, India
• Graham McCalmon - Gosport, England
• Eileen Eckerhardt - Ashland OR, USA

Many thanks, once again, to all who took the time to answer our questions and help us make Skweezer better than ever.

Posted by Mark Sieve

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.

By 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

Skweezer Ads gets a major upgrade including technological innovations that are online advertising firsts.

IRVINE, Calif., May 29, 2008—Skweezer, Inc. today announced a major upgrade to its Skweezer Ads service, which allows customers to serve ads to a wide variety of mobile, desktop, and other Web-enabled consoles through a single ad feed.

This latest release of Skweezer Ads includes innovations that are firsts for the online advertising community. One such innovation is a patent-pending algorithm that dynamically converts conventional text-based cost-per-click (CPC) ads into mobile-friendly ads complaint with standards set by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA). Another key innovation is Skweezer Ads’ cut-and-paste code that detects a visitor’s device type, retrieves appropriate mobile or desktop ads accordingly, and optionally reformats and compresses the Web content for mobile viewing.

Skweezer Ads is now available to publishers through ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, or JavaScript code. This latest version of Skweezer Ads uses “short URL” for easier inclusion into Web sites, RSS feeds, mobile applications, and SMS messages.

The Skweezer Ads back office, located at http://reports.skweezer.com, has also been updated and includes a new ad formatting wizard allows publishers to use a “What You See is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) interface to customize the way their ads look. Customers also now have the ability to create multiple ads feeds, or channels, for a single account. The signup process has also been greatly streamlined and is accessible at http://reports.skweezer.com/open/signup.aspx.

“We’ve finally created a viable AdSense alternative to help publishers monetize every square inch of their Web sites and RSS feeds,” said Skweezer CEO Kevin Perkins. “Our ad technology truly fulfills the Web 2.0 promise: we not only help publishers instantaneously create mobile content from their desktop pages, but our patent-pending algorithm also knows the right ad to show for the right modality.”

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.

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.

On the Net: Skweezer company site: company.skweezer.com
Skweezer Reports & Analytics site: reports.skweezer.com
Skweezer Ads page: ads.skweezer.com

Posted by Monica Sato

Skweezer Ads is launching a new mobile banner feed through partnership with Smaato Inc.

IRVINE, Calif., May 19, 2008—Skweezer, Inc. today announced it will begin distributing a new mobile banner advertising feed through partnership with Smaato, Inc.

“Smaato’s open architecture platform allows us to dramatically expand our mobile advertising capabilities,” said Skweezer, Inc. CEO Kevin Perkins. “By combining the breadth of multiple banner ad networks via Smaato, our premium publishers will have more opportunity to monetize their offerings world-wide with their Skweezer Ads feed.”

Skweezer Ads is an online advertising service that provides text-based cost-per-click (CPC) ads to both mobile and desktop environments through a single ad feed. The new partnership with Smaato will allow Skweezer to start offering banner-based cost-per-impression (CPM) ads created specifically for display on mobile platforms. This mobile banner feed is available for international distribution, which supports Skweezer’s presence in over 175 countries.

Initial traffic for the new mobile banner feed will be confined to 200 million requests per month and will be served to Skweezer Ads’ India market. Once the new feed has been thoroughly appraised and validated, it will be distributed throughout Skweezer Ads’ global network of publishers, carriers and ad providers.

About Smaato Inc.:
Smaato Inc. is a leading mobile advertising technology company that provides the open mobile advertising platform called SOMA™ (Smaato Open Mobile Advertising) for developers, publishers, ad sales networks and operators. The SOMA platform enables the delivery of targeted display advertising to mobile phones within applications and on mobile sites. SOMA’s unique feature is the SOMA client, which is a mobile ad server on the handset that optimizes the process of ad-enabling applications for mobile software developers. SOMA can be easily integrated with 3rd party ad sales networks, ad inventory owners (developers, publishers, operators) and ad technology providers.

On the Net: Smaato site: www.smaato.com

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.

On the Net: Skweezer site: www.skweezer.com
Skweezer company site: company.skweezer.com
Skweezer RSS Feed: rss.skweezer.com

Posted by Monica Sato

Greenlight Wireless has been rebranded using its widely-known Skweezer trademark.

IRVINE, Calif., May 5, 2008—Greenlight Wireless Corporation today announced that the company will now be doing business as Skweezer, Inc.

Skweezer has become an increasingly strong brand and is now frequently used as a generic term of art for mobilizing Web content. Uniting Greenlight Wireless and its products under the Skweezer brand will take advantage of this name recognition and serve to create a more streamlined marketing profile.

“It had become increasing clear that our marketing message lacked focus due to the diverse company and product names we were using,” said Greenlight Wireless president Mark Sieve. “We see this branding initiative as an important step towards developing a clear and concise message that will appeal to both our users in the public as well as our institutional customers.”

The following products, Web sites, and contact information has changed as a result of the recent rebranding initiative:

Web addresses:
– The Skweezer, Inc. company site is located at company.skweezer.com
– The Skweezer Reports & Analytics site is located at reports.skweezer.com
– The Skweezer Blog is located at blog.skweezer.com
– The Skweezer Ads page is located at ads.skweezer.com
– The Skweezer Press Release RSS feed is rss.skweezer.com

Products:
– Advertizer® is now Skweezer Ads®

E-mail addresses:
– All company e-mail addresses have been changed to “@skweezer.com” (e.g. employee_name@skweezer.com“)

About Skweezer, Inc.:
Skweezer 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.

On the Net: Skweezer site: www.skweezer.com

Posted by Monica Sato