Thursday, September 27, 2012

Mobilizing the Web


 Gives a Lots Of Opportunities

Mobile web is the accessing of the internet via wireless devices such as smart phones and tablet computers.
According to the International Telecommunications Union, the mobile access to the internet exceeded desktop computer based access for the first time in 2008. This phenomenal success of the mobile web is in part due to the smart phone revolution and the advent of the tablet computers.


Smart phones are equipped with multicore processors and come with various input options such as touch screens, accelerometers, GPS receivers etc. These coupled with modern mobile operating systems make a solid platform for accessing the internet.
In the beginning, mobile web comprised lightweight web pages which were optimised for smaller screens and lower resolutions and written in Extensible Hypertext Mark-up Language (XHTML) or Wireless Markup Language (WML). Because of this this, the mobile browsing experience was never even close to that on a computer. But with the progress in technology which enabled for faster mobile processors and better mobile browsers, modern mobile devices are moving beyond these limitations by supporting a wider range of Web formats, including variants of HTML commonly found on the desktop Web.

Advertisers have realized the potential of mobile web and are increasingly using it as a platform to reach consumers. In 2007 the total value of mobile advertising was estimated to be in excess of 2 billion dollars. This fact in itself speaks volumes about the growing size and weight of the mobile web.
The major problems with the mobile web faces is the fragmentation of platforms and the resulting lack of standards. The development of standards is one approach being implemented to improve the interoperability, usability, and accessibility issues surrounding mobile web usage.

The Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) is a new initiative set up by the W3C to develop best practices and technologies relevant to the Mobile Web. The goal of the initiative is to make browsing the Web from mobile devices more reliable and accessible. The main aim is to evolve standards of data formats from Internet providers that are tailored to the specifications of particular mobile devices. The W3C has published guidelines for mobile content, and is actively addressing the problem of device diversity by establishing a technology to support a repository of device descriptions.
Many of the technologies which were once considered to be a part of the computers have literally moved "out of the box". The way digital music has almost totally moved from computers to iPods, internet seems to be moving towards the mobile devices. After all its much more convenient to have all the web in the palm of your hands than to have it sitting on the top of your table! This is opening new frontiers and is nothing less than a complete revolution in its own.


Google Books Search are now Mobile

The Google Books Blog announced they have now created a mobile version of Google Books. If you have an iPhone or Android phone just navigate your mobile browser to http://books.google.com/m to start using Google Book search on your mobile device.
There are many differences between the mobile version and the regular version. The most obvious is the look and feel, but the biggest technological difference, as Google explains, is the use of OCR technology. Google Book Search typically shows scans of the page, but if you view the book on a mobile device, they will try to extract the text using OCR and show you plain text, not scanned text.