I for one have always been excited about gadgets and gizmo’s. I remember even in school being the geek among all my friends, walking around with mashed up electronic gadgets or parts there of! a musical keychain with a torch cell, (more battery power bigger sound!) or the electric motor from my toy attached to the wheel of my cycle, and a bulb, (technically the AC motor and DC dynomo have the same construction!, or was that vise-versa!) Only thing went wrong was i took commerce in class XI! Well… Now I’m a Geek with the keyboard!

The mobile industry ticks me every time i read anything new about it. I always wanted to make a mobile site. I even purchased few dot mobi domains in the sunrise period at premium rates! but never had the time or the inclination to build on them!

Thanks to phpLD I actually got the platform to build… well a mobile alternate of my site.Boy is the mobile industry huge! with so many manufacturers for handsets and browsers, the complexity increases leaps and bounds!

History

The sudden advent of mobile internet in the middle of 1990’s and no central standards organization, manufacturers like Nokia [Narrow Band Sockets (NBS) and Tagged Text Markup Language (TTML)] and Erricson [Intelligent Terminal Transfer Protocol (ITTP)] came out with their own formats to browse the net; others formats like Handheld Device Markup Language (HDML) by Unwired Planet also came into the scene. But due to hardware dependencies none of the above could be seen as a long term solution.

In 1997 the WAP forum was founded. The forum�s main aim was to bring together the various technologies by a standardized protocol. Here what is technically known as WAP1.0 was delivered. Its main features, WML Language for content presentation, WMLScript for content scripting in content, WBMP for graphics, Stack of Protocols different to TCP/IP. It was welcomed by the mobile community and manufacturers at large. But its stay was short lived as it dell short the expectation of the users and developers at large.

In June 2002 the OMA [Open Mobile Allaince] was launched to get various organizations/ forums under a single umbrella to set common standards in the mobile content industry at large. Its members being the WAP Forum (focused on browsing and device provisioning protocols), the Wireless Village (focused on instant messaging and presence), the The SyncML Initiative (focused on data synchronization), the Location Interoperability Forum, the Mobile Games Interoperability Forum and the Mobile Wireless Internet Forum.

In 2004, WAP2.0 [xHTML-MP] was delivered as a standard for mobile devices. xHTML-MP or xHTML Mobile Profile was a cut-down version of xHTML with end-to-end HTTP. It is a subset of xHTML and a superset of xHTML Basic. It was here that the gateway and other protocols were dropped and hence delivering a markup which is more similar to the browser markup, viz HTML.

It is worth noting here that the Japanese market went leaps ahead in content development and they developed their own markup, the cHTML [Compact-HTML]. cHTML was developed by ACCESS and major Japanese handset manufacturers in 1998 and is an alternative to WML and XHTML Basic. cHTML is a subset of HTML and thus has more power in comparison to WML and XHTML Basic.

In 2006, the .mobi (also known as DotMobi) is a top-level domain approved by ICANN and managed by the mTLD global registry, dedicated to delivering the Internet to mobile devices via the Mobile Web. This received a major welcome from the mobile industry and investors alike.

New Tools

There are various new content tools in the market, and the mobile web has grown by leaps and bounds. Some of them being Flash lite by macromedia and J2ME by Sun, which bring out custom softwares for individual handsets.

Current scenario

The Mobile market is vast and growing in a rapid pace. All Major companies have a Mobile version of their site. With the number of acquisitions rising seems everyone wants a piece of it, and is a great indication that the demand is rising. Namely Google’s recent fancy with mobile industry is worth mentioning, with its recent acquisitions starting with Zingku in September, and then Jaiku in October this year, is more than enough to show Googles rising interest in Mobile content.

May it be micro blogging or social networking, the mobiles has got it all, its no more about the ringtone sites anymore. And here is where we Dir.vc, the Smart SEO directory have come out with a mobile version of our site, It can be found here.

If anyone is interested in getting their sites mobile, feel free to get in touch.

M.

Tags: dir.vc, mobile, Mobile content, Mobile content history, phpLD, phpld mobile mod, WAP

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 11:39 pm and is filed under General, phpLD Mods. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.