A moment of frustration at Disneyland brought Providence software developer David Berube the idea that would quickly make him the winner of the 2008 Rhode Island Innovation Awards Rising Star designation.
On a trip last summer to the Magic Kingdom with his girlfriend, Berube brought his Blackberry along. He was on vacation, but didn’t want to miss out on a handful of blogs he likes to read. But on the Blackberry’s compact screen, the usual orderly march of new headlines became an illegible jumble.
“It was a mess. I couldn’t read anything,” he said.
So, he created MoFuse. The mobile Internet application takes a client’s Web site and translates it into a format that users can easily read from any mobile phone. MoFuse also allows clients to monetize their newfound Internet mobility by displaying ads on the mobile version of the site. Ad revenue is split 50/50 between MoFuse and each client. The company does not charge clients a fee.
The process started when he got back from Disneyland. Like any good software engineer, Berube designed his own portal for reading Web sites from his mobile phone. At first, he tailored it to fit his own handful of favorite sites. But he had to take it further when his friends saw what he had done. They wanted the same thing. So he made a few more.
Soon, Berube realized that making a portal tailored to each individual user’s blog roll was not the most efficient way to solve this problem. He decided to work from the other end, and develop a piece of software that would automatically translate a site into a format that anyone could read on any mobile device.
That was in August 2007. By the next month, Berube had a product that he was shopping out to bloggers and other sites by invitation only. In November, MoFuse became publicly available to download at the company’s site, mofuse.com. As of August 2008, he had 12,000 clients.
“I put my head down and just worked. I just wanted to see if it had any traction, if it had legs,” Berube said. “It turns out nobody was doing this for a mid-tier-level site.”
Large companies like Bank of America and Google have always been able to design their own sites tailor-made for different mobile devices, but small businesses and bloggers were left without a way to reach out via the mobile Web, he said.
More and more people want to read blogs on their cell phones, said Marshall Kirkpatrick, lead blogger at the technology site ReadWriteWeb. His company recently began using MoFuse to put out a mobile version of their site.
“When I come across [a blog] that doesn’t have a mobile version, in search results or in an aggregator, that blog may as well not exist to me,” Kirkpatrick said in an e-mail. “When I find one with a nicely formed mobile version though, I really appreciate it and I come back to it again and again.”
Berube now estimates the service has a potential for upwards of 200-million clients like ReadWriteWeb.
Josh Pigford, editor of the Apple Blog, joined two weeks ago.
“Being an Apple blog, we had a lot of people accessing the site from their iPhone,” he said. “Formatting the content for them to make it easier – that was a big draw.” The entire process only took 1 or 2 minutes, Pigford said.
Located in Providence, MoFuse consists of only two employees full-time: CEO Annette Tonte and Berube himself, the founder and chief architect. Much of the engineering legwork is done by contractors, Berube said.
The MoFuse application works by polling sites for new content and arranges it in chronological order in a way that users can read on a mobile phone. Clients have control over things like color, formatting and where ads appear on the mobile screen. Ads that appear at the top of the page may be a nuisance and interfere with formatting, but they will get more click-throughs and generate more money for the client, Berube explained.
There are two versions of the MoFuse application: one for iPhones, and one for other Web-enabled mobile devices. Berube plans to introduce a third version for the launch of Android, a software platform for mobile devices now under development by Google and expected out this fall.
Right now, the application is set up to resize photos and video for any mobile device – in addition to displaying text content in a readable way.
“We can tell how wide your screen is,” Berube said. “We can tell how many colors the screen is capable of. We can make sure the video is in a format your phone can play.”
Blogs aren’t the only type of site using MoFuse, Berube said – but they now constitute most of the company’s clients. “That was who flocked to us,” he said. “Blogs are easily consumed on a mobile device. They’re tidbits of information that people want to get on the go.”
Those clients range from blogs rated among the highest for Internet traffic to small-time blogs started by individuals. That’s fine with Berube. “If you’re Joe Blogger with 10 visitors a month, you’re not really costing us much,” he said. “We want the big guys, but we take everybody.” •
