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Novarra, the company providing the technology that inserts Vodafone's branding into Vodafone Live sessions and which has just relaunched US Cellular's mobile internet service, is expanding its capabilities into laptop browsing.
Novarra Vision is a software package that optimises content on its way to a mobile browser, requiring no special software on the device it intercepts requests at the network level and mutates the content as it passes through. Novarra can now offer the service to operators punting 3G dongles for laptop users as well as those browsing the web on a tiny screen.
To users Novarra grabs content and compresses it for mobile browsing - reducing colour depth, removing unsupported plug-in data and that kind of thing, based on the device being used and resulting in faster mobile browsing. To network operators Novarra allows them to stick a branded "navigation" bar on every page, and show adverts while pages are being loaded, as well as reducing the bandwidth used.
This isn't quite like Phorm's user profiling, though Novarra does offer: "Clear understanding of consumer behaviour, traffic and service metrics via analytics dashboard and reporting" as well as being able to insert "personalisation, usability aids, navigation toolbars and interstitial content and advertising". So it's not a million miles off either.
As Randy Cavaiani, vice president for marketing, puts it: "Operators can enhance performance, enable new services, extend branding, and create new advertising opportunities."
No operator has signed up to using the latest features of Vision yet, but it will be interesting to see who is first, and if they can tread carefully enough to avoid upsetting users.®
COMMENTS
Re: WTF, faster browsing ???? O_o
BBC - 97 pictures in one load. Dilbert - 173. Reduce to 16 colours and make each 4-8 times smaller and here you go... Way faster even if you stick an advert or two.
Actually, the picture part is something Vodafone has been running all along on their 3G service. If it was not for it, the utter tripe that is 3G would not have been tolerable. This way it can be just about tolerated for the 30-40 minutes of work or browsing one has to do on a train. Pictures look horrid, but it actually loads in reasonable amount of time. None the less, after 50 mins you start dreaming of WiFi.
Thanks
For reminding me not to use anything related to Vodafone.
@AC
"Especially those creating mobile sites"
Nobody then. Lets face it, if people had actually created mobile versions of their sites, the service wouldn't actually exist, let alone be required by the majority of mobile web users.
And when I say "Mobile" I don't mean the recent trend of creating verions of sites tailored to the iPhone. (Way to go, BTW. wait for a browser capable of displaying regular pages flawlessly, then redesign your site.)
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