Motorola buys into low resource Web browsing start-up

Motorola has bought a minority stake in Online Anywhere, a San Jose start-up developing software to make it easier for low-resource devices with variable-sized screens and limited bandwidth to browse the Web. The company, founded last year by a group of former students from Bombay, is building systems that dynamically reformat Web pages for different types of display, and which will help enable voice-driven access to the Web (this has been a Big Thing for mobile phone manufacturer Motorola for some time). The most important thing about Online Anywhere's technology is that it doesn't need Web sites to physically reformat their pages for non-PC devices, and instead uses remapping server technology, so that the page is remapped on the fly for the particular connected device. "Online Anywhere's technology enables people to access the Internet from a PDA, TV or phone, even though each of these devices have different displays," said Ronjon Nag, vice president and general manager at Motorola's Lexicus Division, part of Motorola's newly formed Internet & Networking Group. Online Anywhere also proposes to offer an ultra-thin client for non-PC devices (expect to see this in future Motorola handsets). This pushes the complexity of accessing the Web onto the remapping server, and presumably devices using this client will be faster and more effective than ones that don't. According to Online Anywhere, however, the thin client is optional. ® Click for more stories