Just about every company today has a Web site, but very few of them have been optimized for mobile computing devices. The reason for this is that most businesses don’t really have the cash on hand to fund a major overhaul of their Web sites. But surprisingly enough, it turns out that most Web sites […]
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Just about every company today has a Web site, but very few of them have been optimized for mobile computing devices. The reason for this is that most businesses don’t really have the cash on hand to fund a major overhaul of their Web sites. But surprisingly enough, it turns out that most Web sites can be made mobile computing friendly using a low cost set of tools from bMobilized that automates the entire process
Instead of asking customers to fund a major rewrite of their entire site, bMobilzed CEO Ben Seslija says solution providers can take advantage of more than 300 proprietary algorithms in the company’s Automatic Content Identification (ACI) technology captures content assets and converts them in under 30 seconds to fully functional and graphically identical elements that can be easily accessed by any device that support HTML5.
Seslija says bMobilized is mainly after the small business market, which is why the toolset only costs $5 to 9 per month depending on the level of support required. The Web site that bMobilized creates using all that content can be hosted on cloud computing platforms from Force.com, a unit of Salesforce.com or Amazon. That means that as new assets get added to the site, the mobile version of the site can dynamically scale alongside.
Today mobile devices account for about 30 percent of the traffic on the Web. Seslija says that number will increase to 50 percent by 2014, and by 2015 mobile devices will become the dominant use case. Seslija says what post people don’t really appreciate yet, however, is how targeted the use of mobile devices is, and how important that behavior is in terms of sales conversion. Unlike people using a PC to surf the Web, people using mobile devices are generally searching for some specific. That’s why a much higher percentage of those visitors wind up actually buying something.
As business owners come to understand that difference in behavior, Seslija says it won’t be long before every site is optimized for mobile computing devices.
The bMobilized toolset is relatively inexpensive because Seslija says the company expects to make more money later on by keeping tracking of how advertising campaigns actually perform on mobile computing devices. But in order to increase the base of Web sites that can make use of that service there will need to be a lot more Web sites that have been optimized for mobile computing devices.
There’s no doubt at this point that the Web is heading mobile. What solution providers decide to charge customers to make that transition on their Web sites is up to the individual solution provider. Right now, most business owners have no idea how quickly it can be done.
As with most things related to mobile computing, there’s very little money to be made from selling the actual devices. But there are massive opportunities associated with helping companies transform their internal and external facing applications in way that supports mobile computing devices. That may not always require massive investments in mobile application development skills, especially when you consider the fact that many businesses simply want the fastest, easiest way possible to start supporting those devices starting tomorrow.
Michael Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist, with nearly 30 years of experience writing and editing about enterprise IT issues. He is a writer for publications including Programmableweb, IT Business Edge, CIOinsight, Channel Insider and UBM Tech. He formerly was editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he launched the company’s custom content division, and has also served as editor in chief for CRN and InfoWorld. He also has held editorial positions at PC Week, Computerworld and Digital Review.
