Blogs

The weather outside may be a typically damp British April - but here at 51Degrees.mobi there's not a cloud in the sky. We've developed a mobile device detection solution that doesn't rely on a ‘cloud' connection every time there's a new visitor to your mobile web site.

As far as we're concerned, cloud services are very well-suited to location-based services and other applications that require vast quantities of data. They're also often a practical solution when information needs to be shared but needs to be controlled or monitored as well.

However, mobile device detection is a completely different type of situation.

If you don't have a web site designed for mobile phones, you don't just risk frustrating your customers when they visit you online. You're also likely to drain their smartphone batteries. That's the message from a research team based at California's Stanford University.

The researchers published a paper entitled “Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption” at the World Wide Web 2012 conference last week. They used an Android handset to browse a variety of popular web sites, measuring the phone's energy consumption as it loaded and rendered web pages. As well as analysing each page, the team also measured the energy needed to render individual web elements such as images, JavaScript, and CSS.

Enabling your website for mobile visitors doesn't just improve the consumer experience. It also makes commercial sense.

The latest organisation to produce figures that prove what we've known for a long time is UK-based search marketing agency Mediarun. It's found that ‘bounce rates' from mobile devices are around 40%, which is about 10% higher than on desktop browsers. The company says this means 5.6% of all mobile traffic is being lost by online retailers... and that's a significant amount of lost sales.

This ground-breaking move makes it easier for developers to create mobile web sites that are tailored to the precise needs of online visitors.

Ringmark is the mobile browser test process introduced at Mobile World Congress 2012 by Facebook. It's designed to help developers learn more about each mobile web visitor without requiring visitors to provide any personal details. Coremob, the Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is eventually expected to be handed control of the project.

51Degrees.mobi, the leading provider of device detection and web optimisation solutions, has announced a breakthrough in mobile device detection.

By using the built-in accelerometers on modern smartphones, together with the CPU temperature monitoring that's standard on most mobile devices, 51Degrees.mobi can now determine whether a mobile phone is being held in a user's left hand or right hand.

With 51Degrees.mobi fully integrated within Ingeniux CMS and Cartella, Ingeniux customers can easily target web content to mobile devices, preview content display on a wide range of devices, and accelerate development of advanced mobile features.

New figures from smartphone owners in the USA show that retail websites are still more popular than stand-alone apps.

Nielsen's detailed analysis of smartphone usage reveals that retailers' mobile websites are more popular than their mobile apps, with Amazon having the most popular retail mobile website of all. The top five retail apps and websites combined - Amazon, Best Buy, eBay, Target and Walmart - reached nearly 60% of US smartphone owners.

The research also revealed that shoppers preferred retailers' mobile websites over mobile apps, although consumers who used retailers' mobile apps tended to spend more time on them.

This blog briefs on the steps involved in configuring the 51D Framework - .Net Mobile Toolkit with an existing ASP.Net application. These steps are common to ASP.Net web applications based on .Net 2.0 and .Net 4.0.

Integrating the 51D Framework with an existing ASP.Net web application involves configuring the licence key, defining required custom configurations and referring to appropriate version of Framework assemblies.

Let's look at each step in brief assuming you have already installed the 51D Framework - .Net Mobile Toolkit.

We've enjoyed a busy month and, with our sights set on the new mobile devices launching next week at Mobile World Congress 2012, we'd like to share some of the highlights.

51Degrees.mobi strongly believes that one size doesn't fit all. It's the reason we created our own mobile device description repository, which enables web designers to create a site that'll adapt automatically for visitors using mobile phones.

However, it's important to realise that a choice of just two sizes can also be less than ideal. With consumers now using portable internet-connected devices that range from feature phones to iPads, simply deciding whether or not a handset is ‘mobile' isn't always enough.