Mowser Weblog

The launch of Sprint's buggy new OpenWeb transcoding service prompted another backlash in the blogosphere, and I wanted to make sure once again that it was very clear why Mowser is different. I've seen this stuff coming for a few years now, and in fact a year ago at the launch of Mowser, I lead off with a presentation that gave an overview of the transcoding market which included a sarcastic step-by-step guide in how to make a transcoder, which I'll repeat again here:

How To Make a Transcoder:

• Step 1 - Use proxy server to anonymously grab content from the web
• Step 2 - Remove all JavaScript and embedded objects (i.e. advertising)
• Step 3 - Remove all colors, formatting and layout (i.e. branding)
• Step 4 - Cut up into unusably sized pieces (small or large) and deliver to user
• Bonus Point - Don't reduce images or remove them all together
• Bonus Point - Add your own logo and/or copyright notice on page

Having recognized these issues, Mowser was created to explicitly make sure it was the most fair and transparent mobile content adaption service available. Publishers have complete control over their content and how or if their content is adapted for the mobile web, and leaves those websites that already mobile alone. Mowser isn't a transcoder, it's a Mobile Content Adaption Engine, which does it's best to help connect every internet enabled mobile phone on the planet with every website, while respecting the ownership and wishes of the original web publishers.

Here's the ways which we do that:

1) Mowser includes information about the original user in the X-Headers to the publisher's website, including the X-Forwarded-For standard proxy header (which has the IP address of the user), the X-Mobile-UA header for passing the original user-agent, as well as the url of the HTTP_REFERER.

2) Mowser respects alternate mobile content type HTML headers, so that sites marked explicitly as having a mobile version will not be encoded.

3) Mowser respects the "Cache-Control: no-transform" header value on sites that have it.

4) Mowser respects the xhtml-mobile doctype, and will not adapt those pages that have it.

5) Mowser assumes that domains starting with m., wap., mobile., iphone. or ending with .mobi are already mobile oriented, and does not adapt those sites.

6) Mowser has a manually updated white-list of sites as well for those publishers who can't or don't want to include any of the above flags automatically. Just email us info@mowser.com - it's even easier than filling out a form.

Additionally, Mowser is the only adaption engine on the web that does the following:

7) Mowser will include mobile advertising automatically if it sees an AdMob meta tag in the header, and will automatically convert Google AdSense text ads into their mobile equivalent - enabling publishers to monetize their converted content, keeping 100% of their ad revenue.

8) Mowser passes through any handheld stylesheets included on the site, giving publishers control over the look of their site.

9) Mowser converts the HTML markup in a clear, documented manner. The way HTML is converted should not be a mysterious or proprietary process. This way publishers can understand exactly what's happening to their pages.

10) Mowser delivers as much data as the requesting device can reasonably handle. If the phone is a Motorola RAZR it receives pages less than 5k in size, if the phone is a Nokia N95, it gets much more.

11) Mowser is directly accessible from mowser.com for testing and openly available for any publisher to use, with clean, unambiguous URLs.

So in short, Mowser allows mobile users to access tons of content on the web using their existing mobile phone, while still giving publishers knowledge of who is accessing their content, control over the look of the adapted pages, ability to monetize those pages, and the option to opt out of the process all together. Again, this is the most open and transparent process of any service on the web, and if it's not open enough for you, just email us and tell us what more we can do to improve the service and we will.

Thanks!

-Russ