Free Mobile Sites And Mobile Video Feeds From Mippin | AccuraCast Search Daily News.
February 28th, 2008
Publishers will soon be able to convert their content to mobile quickly, easily and for free, thanks to Mippin, the latest service from UK-based mobile developers Refresh Mobile.
“This is the first time that publishers have a meaningful way to take their content, be it in video, audio or image format, and put it on mobile”, says Scott Beaumont of Refresh Mobile.
The company, which has won Nokia’s Developer of the Year award for their Mobizines product, have developed an exciting range of new services designed to revolutionise mobile content publication. The new service launched this week brings video, audio and images embedded in RSS feeds to mobile devices.
Bringing Video To Mobile RSS Feeds
The Mippin service takes images embedded in RSS feeds, processes them separately and feeds them back in a format suitable to the mobile device. Videos embedded within RSS feeds get transcoded into 3gp format on the fly. High end devices can then stream that video content. Users with less sophisticated handsets would need to download videos to view them.
Videos are not actually transcoded by Mippin. The system identifies the user parameters and the video information. It then passes this on to BlueApple, who transcode and host the transcoded video. End users, however, do not see this process, and instead view the videos as if they were on the Mippin site itself.
Mippin has trumped the likes of Google, whose service FeedBurner does not currently deliver images, audio and video appropriately to mobile devices. Without Mippin the images and videos contained in an RSS feed will not work properly, and could cause problems loading the feed or even cause the mobile browser to crash if a user attempted to play the video in the feed, unless publishers created special mobile versions of every image, audio file and video stream.
Free Mobile Website Development
The next and even more exciting service from Refresh Mobile will be launched in the second week of March. This new service will provide publishers the tools needed to create a free-standing mobile website without the Mippin branding on it.
Mippin Maker, the new tool will allow a wide variety of publishers to take content from their current site, put it in an RSS feed and convert it into a mobile format in just 3 easy steps. According to Scott Beaumont of Refresh Mobile, “there are 120 million blogs with RSS feeds out there. Through the simple syndication all of these blogs are immediately open to all mobile devices. With the Mippin Maker publishers don’t need an incremental investment in mobile in order to get their content out there.”
While the Mippin Maker will not be suitable for mobile commerce sites, it could prove to be an invaluable tool for the scores of information sites currently online. A tool such as this one could bring us closer to wide-scale adoption of the mobile Internet, as more and more publishers will be able to easily bring their content to mobile, providing users the same wealth of information they are used to seeing on their PCs.
