Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Andrea has a post about mobile device testing up on the dotMobi blog. If I understand correctly he’s talking in this case about an Acid2 style set of tests for mobile browsers in particular. Would certainly be nice to have a baseline set of compatibility metrics for different features across the various browser types and handsets. I’ve fooled around with testing Javascript capabilities myself.

Like he mentions however, the problem isn’t just support of the browser for certain capabilities but also the environment it goes into. Network differences, different gateway behavior, different default configuration settings or build options on different carriers, etc. Look to support for cookies as one example, as described in the wireless faq. Most modern mobile browsers support cookies, definitely. But some carriers ship with the option to accept cookies turned off, most likely to be true if their own internal portal doesn’t require the feature. And others have gateways that strip out cookies completely, or if the content site isn’t on a whitelist of trusted partners.

It seems like it would be very difficult to try to collect, organize, and present the info based on all the different dimensions it can have. Of course, I hope they can figure it out, it would be a killer resource to have! Very interested to see how this develops.

There’s a DealMaker Strategy Series event on Mobile Advertising in Palo Alto on August 15th. I’m all registered and planning to head out. Having seen AdMob grow over the last year from the inside it’s always nice to step back and bit and see what other folks are thinking about the industry as a whole. There’s all sorts of niches that we don’t touch on at all (incentive and loyalty programs, video pre-roll and post-roll placements, SMS marketing, near field communication, in-game and idle screen advertising, etc.) Different segments of potential marketers have skews toward different mechanisms, and frequently once they start thinking about one they stop thinking about the others.

This session seems like it could lean toward the big brand advertisers, many of whom are looking in the video direction. Cool stuff, but last I checked there were lots of issues with metrics and reporting in that medium. How are “impressions” reported, or is audience bought via a different grouping? How can a potential advertiser reuse create across multiple networks? Everyone has their own format and own report structure, it’s very hard to aggregate multiple network buys into a single campaign and measure results symmetrically. And most of the individual networks don’t have the scale yet to provide a very compelling alternative to existing video distribution methods. Multimedium campaigns could shift the needle there, but has the same set of issues with standardization and reporting structure. The brands are hesitant to move without strong success stories. But the medium is really best suited to folks who have video content they can repurpose and the production capability to create a compelling video ad, so it’s tilted somewhat away from the experimental smaller buyer. The evolution should be interesting to watch. It’s got a big hump to make it over, but I think the potential is huge once it does.

Many of the people in the same office as me have been hacking the iPhone. I went to New York and I saw some guy walking down the street with an iPhoneDevCamp shirt. The discussion is happening all over the internets about it. Call it pandering if you must, but the August 2007 edition of the Silicon Valley MoMo meeting is going to be focused on the iPhone. Got a hankerin’ to hack some sexy touchscreen goodness? Stop by and rub elbows with some of the folks doing the heavy lifting.