Thursday, May 29, 2008

Show of with Mobispine on your iPhone


We are big fans of the iPhone at Mobispine. Although it isn't available in Sweden yet (apple has just signed a deal to bring the iPhone to the Nordic countries) we have one at the office we keep fighting over. The experience is really different and in a country where it isn't released it's great to show of!

For the past weeks our iPhone has been grounded at the office because we have been adapting our WAP page to it. You can now read your favorite news on your iPhone, and doesn't it look great!

The first version will be available later today as will all the new features mentioned in the two previous posts. Expect some improvements to be made so take part in them by sending us your feedback and ideas.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Thursday = Upgrade day (2)

We implemented the feedback function a few weeks ago and noticed you liked to talk. Well you will have a new way of expressing yourself from Thursday by giving some thumbs up or down to articles and news sources. You will be able to see how the Mobispine community has reacted to all the articles. Doing this will also help us identify spam feeds and improve the experience for everyone so get your thumbs ready for some clicking and start looking for the thumbs on thursday!

Some of you might be using our new WAP page which was released a few weeks ago. We have been improving it so you can get more of the application's features and enjoy a nicer experience. Yet to get all features we still recommend the application. Anyhow if you are a WAP fan we will be expecting your feedback as the feedback feature will be one of the adds on.

More to come later this week, stay tuned in!

Monday, May 26, 2008

Thursday = Upgrade day

After weeks of sweat and hard work we still have a few days to go to make it to Thursday and release a new upgrade that will improve your mobile news reading experience. Here is a first taste of what you can expect.

A big improvement has been made on the search. We have to admit our search results weren't really good... Thanks for your feedback on this, it helped us go through all our bugs and fix them. The search should make it much easier to find the sources of news you are looking for and bookmark them.

Another bug that some users have reported is that they had articles in double (or more) in the categories. This is happens with big news sources like the BBC which has the same articles in different feeds. For example BBC World and BBC UK can both have an article about the terrible events in Burma. Fortunately this will be fixed by Thursday.

That's not all... but I have to get back to work ;-). I'll tell you more later this week.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Mobispine bought General Wireless

General Wireless? You probably have never heard of them but use their products regularly. If you use a PC to mobile messaging service it is most likely powered by General Wireless as they have partnerships with many operators.

We are all very excited about this deal at Mobispine. I can already imagine how we can integrate these services in Mobispine to offer new features but I'd like to know what you would like. Do you have any suggestions?

Unlimited Data Plans Drive More Mobile Web Usage

US Smartphone users spend more tha 4,5 hours per month browsing the mobile web whereas  their British counterparts spend 2,5 hours per month surfing the mobile web. The discrepancy in the duration is due to the relative popularity of flat-rate data plans in the US, 10,9 % of users have an unlimited data plan in the US versus only 2,3 % in Britain.
Another factor might be that full QWERTY keyboards are more popular in US than in UK.

It is also interesting to see that US users are increasing their year-to-year numbers of browsing the mobile web and number of pageviews have increased with 89 % and 127 %. All the above numbers come from a recently released report from M:Metrics.

In Mobispine we also like when users have flat-rate data plans and nice phones with big screens ad keyboards, but never forget that the goal with mobispine is to create a really good user experience for average phones without nice data plans.

/ Joakim, Mobispine team