Fitting Web sites into the palm of your hand

Web browsing on mobile phones can still be awkward. Most sites aren’t designed to be viewed on two-inch screens, and most users keep their browsing to a minimum.
But the iPhone and other Web-friendly devices are changing consumer expectations. Users want to go online on their phones and have Web sites look and work right. Businesses with mobile-friendly sites are snatching up this growing market.
Enter MoFuse – Mobile Fusion – the latest creation of Pawtucket-based Web developer Swift Blue. Launched as a private beta last September, and as a public beta in November, the application has already created mobile versions of more than 4,000 Web sites.
The basic, free service includes conversion of up to three sites, an automatic browser detector that redirects mobile users to the .mobi site, free site hosting, an SMS widget on your site so you can text-message the link to mobile users, and 50-50 ad-revenue sharing, if desired. For $6 a month, “professional” users can get enhanced features, including the domain name of their choice.
Providence Business News spoke with Swift Blue founder David Berube about the new technology and its commercial potential.

PBN: What’s your background, and how did you come to create MoFuse?
BERUBE: I’m a tech entrepreneur. I’ve been doing this since I was about 20 years old. I’m 25 now. I’ve been building Web sites and selling them for a low price point, quick flips. … [Then] I went on vacation in early August, and I was trying to access the Internet on my BlackBerry for about a week. I was growing very frustrated with it. Nothing was rendering correctly, and I thought, there really has to be something better. So when I came home I created a system that I could use personally. I showed it to some friends, and they wanted me to create mobile versions of their Web sites. So I created a small application.

PBN: What kind of sites were you working with? Were they primarily text-based?
BERUBE: When I first started, I was stripping all of the HTML and the image tags and just displaying text. … Then I started playing nice with the HTML, making it mobile-friendly. We worked our way up to almost full HTML capabilities.

PBN: What does that entail from a technical perspective? There are so many ways in which Web sites are constructed these days, and a lot of stuff is entirely Flash-based.
BERUBE: I’m not doing much with Flash sites because there is no mobile browser for the most part for Flash, so it’s kind of fruitless. We’re constrained by the limits of mobile phones – we can do what they can do, nothing else. So we’re resizing images. … We allow Javascript on the iPhone because the iPhone has Javascript on it, but most others don’t.

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PBN: What’s the goal? Do people browsing sites on their mobile phones have different needs and priorities?
BERUBE: If somebody’s accessing the mobile Web on their handset, they probably know what they’re looking for, and they want it fast. They want to get it clean. I think that’s where we’re at right now. That’s going to change, obviously, as handsets become more capable of doing things. But right now, it’s slow network speed. People want to get their information quick and they want to get it easily.

PBN: What kinds of sites have you adapted so far? I noticed you’ve done a lot of blogs.
BERUBE: I would say that’s our biggest user base, bloggers, because bloggers are always looking to expand their readership … and usually they’re early adopters.

PBN: You’ve converted just over 4,000 sites since Nov. 1, when you launched the public beta. How did you reach that many users?
BERUBE: Well, we didn’t spend a dollar on marketing or advertising. It’s mostly been word of mouth. People like it, they tell their friends, they write about it. It’s snowballed that way. … It’s pretty easy to use. Everything I create I try to do with the user in mind … and you can create a mobile version of your site in under five seconds. And you don’t have to know any programming, how to code, or anything like that. It’s very intuitive and easy.

PBN: So it’s something I go and use myself, not something I hire you to do.
BERUBE: Yes, it’s completely self-service. Anyone should be able to pick it up in a few seconds. We just launched MoFuse Grow where you just enter your Web site, you don’t even have to create a user account, and we just do the rest for you, automatically. You enter the URL, hit “go,” and you’ve got a brand-new mobile site ready to go.

PBN: How many paying – “professional” – users do you have?
BERUBE: All our core features are totally free. It’s the little bit extra that the amateur blogger won’t need, but the professional blogger, or the professional Web site, might, that’s when it becomes a paid service. … I can’t tell you exactly how many [paying users] there are, but it’s under 100. That feature is only about two months old.

PBN: Do you have competition?
BERUBE: One that comes to mind is WINKsite, run by David Hopper. They’ve been doing it for a while now. They launched in 2006 and they’ve got about 20,000 sites. So we’re obviously on pace to catch up with them and surpass them. They don’t really have all the features and the customizing options that we have. We really want your mobile site to look and feel like your site, so you keep your brand across the different spectrums. •

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