Wirenode blog

Running the mobile website on your own domain

2011-07-13T11:06:00.000+02:00

Because of the increasing number of questions about running created mobile website on your own domain, I will try to summary this topic.

Yes, its possible to run created mobile website on your own domain. You need to have premium version of any level for that.

You own the domain mybusiness.com and want to run mobile website on m.mybusiness.com

1. login to your DNS configuration system (usually the place where you bought the domain)
2. set an CNAME record for your domain m.mybusiness.com pointing to server: mpartners.wirenode.com
3. login to your Wirenode account, click on web settings and custom domain and add there your m.mybusiness.com domain

If you own the domain mybusiness.mobi (or want to run the website on 2nd level domain), in step 2, just set it as an A record pointing to IP address 81.0.217.189 (instead of CNAME)

If you want tu run more websites under one domain with us, you can configure your CNAME as *.mybusiness.com pointing to our server and all subdomains will work.

In any case, if you have any question, please let me know.

Twitter Reducing Noise side project

2011-05-30T00:27:00.000+02:00

We have just released new version of our side project TweetPort.

It allows you to get the best content from your Twitter feed sorted by importance into your mailbox. Also on a simple trend page, you can check what is hot on the whole Twitter.
If you have any feedback or if you want invitation code to test it, please let us know.
If this project will help to reduce also your own noise, we will be happy, send is email.

Server upgrade

2011-02-18T13:03:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow morning European time we will be upgrading our servers.

We will try to minimize this upgrade time so all services will be functional as soon as possible.

More pricing options

2011-02-11T11:38:00.000+01:00

Hi all,

new features of the platform are under development, but some of them we have released this week.
The biggest change is new premium packages. There is now an option to have more mobile websites than 10. For you who have old premium package, the pricing is unchanged.

In next release, we will upgrade our Anypage mobile detection engine, so all potential bugs with new HTC & Windows 7 high resolution phones will be fixed.

We will inform you about news here on blog and I will also try to write more often here. We are working on some small side projects too which we will introduce shortly.

Tomas

Mobiode - new feature

2010-04-07T17:21:00.001+02:00

We have implemented cloning feature into our mobile polling platform Mobiode. If you create the same poll often with only small changes, you can clone the existing one under the new name instead of recreating the poll from the beginning and get crazy from copy & paste.
We hope this new feature will save you some time. In Wirenode platform, this feature was implemented already some time ago.

Please let us know if you have any other ideas.

Different text sizes feature

2010-03-27T18:00:00.000+01:00

We have implemented the ability to have different font sizes on the mobile website, because the number of requests for this feature increased.

In the mobile editor, you are now able to select the text and than change its size. Four different sizes of text are available.

Medium is the standard size used. Small font size is useful for footer texts and large fonts are good for headlines.

This feature is available for both free and premium accounts.

Short URLs in mobile marketing

2010-01-28T12:29:00.004+01:00

Projects like bit.ly or su.pr or tinyurl.com are more and more popular there days. Big companies like Google (goo.gl), Facebook or Microsoft are creating their own.

Today, people use them on the internet, because its a easy way how to share links between people. They also provide some statistics, who clicked on those links.

I predict they will be hugely used in mobile marketing. Because SMS can be only 160 characters long, here is really a scarcity on characters.
SMS are one of the best ways how to get mobile website to target consumer, these short URLs will be placed in those messages.
In additional, there are really some cool stuff you can do with them in SMS from analytic perspective.

Great Article to read

2009-11-02T00:34:00.001+01:00

for people with a startup in EU.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/avoiding-the-cargo-cult-and-getting-the-trans-atlantic-startup-model-right/

By Roman Stanek from GoodData

Be our Facebook fan

2009-10-30T16:55:00.001+01:00

We need you :-)
Connect with us on facebook please to get the latest updates.

Thanks
Wirendoe team

Premium version of Wirenode

2009-09-15T23:10:00.003+02:00

Finally! We have released premium version of Wirenode platform. The premium version offers to run the website on your own domain and your own ads on the mobile website and run SMS campaigns. We are preparing other features for the premium version like more sophisticated polls/surveys, Google mobile adsense, detailed statistics...

The price is Euro 15 per month.

There is also an individual package for marketing agencies.
In this release, there are some additional new features as well - you can now save the form widget results into Google docs.

We are also finishing testing of an affiliate program. If you want to know more about it, let us know.

What is with Blyk?

2009-08-08T22:52:00.002+02:00

I have just read some news about Blyk UK closing down this month. Some other posts (but with strange date) suggest that it is not closing down.

Does anyone knows whats going on? Was Blyk a success or now? Were they profitable? Will they continue somewhere else? Are they just merging with Orange?

In the Czech Republic, we have a service called Kvido, which allows you to speak free if you listen to ads. Its powered by Telefonica O2. The service looks like not to be very popular, because it has many restrictions.

If you know whats with Blyk, please let me know.

Europe stops innovating in mobile

2009-07-28T15:48:00.002+02:00

Robert Scoble writes about Europe no longer matters to lead position in mobile.

It's sad but its true. Mobile web and mobile Internet connection is started to be used by more and more people as mobile operators start to offer cheap flat fee tariffs ($8 per month flat fee from Vodafone for example).

But companies are adopting mobile web just too slowly.

I was just today talking to Skoda Auto about a mobile website. They have very nice normal website, but its not mobile friendly. Manager at Skoda get me telephone number to their marketing agency MediaCom. Manager in MediaCom, told me basically this:
Skoda Auto doesn't need mobile web because they have normal web and normal web is used by a lot of people and having it "twice" would be to complicated. I got a strong feeling she doesn't know what she is talking about, but she just tried to defend money they got from Skoda for running their normal website. I think that's her day job.

On other hand, there are some companies which understand that mobile friendly website version is a must for the future. Its a pleasure to work with those.

Ostrich egg (update)

2009-07-22T21:48:00.005+02:00

(update): Here it is (8hours old).

My father got an ostrich egg from one of his patients at the hospital. He was supposed to eat the egg, but he did not. He put the egg into the thermostat for 4 weeks and than into an old incubator. So now, small ostrich is getting out.
Prague Zoo told him, that if the ostrich gets out of the egg by himself, they will take it to the Zoo.

(photos from Treo 680)

New version is out

2009-07-14T11:56:00.003+02:00

New version of Wirenode platform is out.
We have completed the new design, so now even the part "after" the login is in the new design. We have also implemented some new functions :

QR code support, under Promotion tab, each website has its own QR code which you can download or print.
Better form & polls support under widgets, you can create any combination of form you like.
Custom colors (will blog about it later), but you can experiment with it under Change design menu in the editor.
Improved Features page.

More games languages

2009-07-11T14:06:00.003+02:00

We have released new language mutations of the Free Mobile Game site:
Handy Spiele for German language.

And some other languages:
http://ar.free-mobile-games.net for Arabic language
http://ru.free-mobile-games.net for Russian language
http://es.free-mobile-games.net for Spanish language
http://jp.free-mobile-games.net for Japan language
http://kr.free-mobile-games.net for Korea language

So the experiment continues ;-)

Java games in the Czech language

2009-05-20T15:58:00.002+02:00

Finally we have Czech version of Greystripe games thanks to Google translator
Java hry zdarma.

We are testing Google translator in some other projects as well.

Mobile Marketing Conference Bucharest

2009-05-17T21:05:00.002+02:00

I was presenting at Mobile Marketing Conference at Bucharest last week.

Brand Mobilization

View more presentations from ertra.

Wirenode sponsors Prague Techcrunch meetup

2009-04-09T12:41:00.002+02:00

Hi all,

this Saturday, there will be a Techcrunch party at Hergetova Cihelna in Prague. We starts at 2pm.
All people from the Czech IT startup community will be there.

Free Mobile Games

2009-03-18T16:05:00.002+01:00

Together with Greystripe, we have launched portal for Free Mobile Games. You can download them into your phone for free, only you will see a short advertisement after you start the game. This project is for us mostly a fun/test project, where we are testing various internet parameters ;-)
We were lucky to get this premium domain for this project. It looks like it was abandoned two years ago, but it was used by Virgin entertainment before that.

We welcome your comments on this game project.

3GSM

2009-02-10T20:20:00.002+01:00

I'll be at 3GSM Barcelona next week. If you like to meet me there, please send me sms to +420 723 552 787

Looking forward to see you there.

Here you can read about some events there. If you know about some interesting event in the evening after the congress programme, please let me know.

New Design

2009-02-08T22:32:00.002+01:00

We have a new design for the public part of our web!

We are now finishing the texts and will be launching some new features. We are also working on a new branded version of our site for an UK customer.

If you have any comments or ideas about what we should improve, please let us know.

Paradox of mobile CTR

2008-11-09T21:10:00.002+01:00

I am reading the book about Mobile Advertising, the chapter about mobile and Internet Click Through Rate (CTR).

The author of the book writes, that CTR on mobile phones is higher than on the Internet and he is right. On the Internet, the CTR is about 1%, but on mobile (mobile portals), it can be from 3% to 6% CTR. I have personally seen it in different campaigns, as we have done more than 10 different mobile campaigns. Screenshots of some of them you can find at our "Mobilni marketing" page (still only in Czech).

The author argues, that higher CTR on mobile is because mobile is more engaging, but I have a different view.

I have two arguments, why CTR on mobile is higher than on Internet:

On a typical mobile page, there are fewer links, because this, there is a bigger chance, user click on the advertisement.
On mobile, its hard to "switch to different tab", so if user knows every outgoing link from the page, and he knows where they go (and don't want to go there), he automatically clicks on the new link (advertisement), because otherwise he would close the browser. Than he is lost, because from most of the landing pages, there is no way how to get back to the original portal.

The better the mobile browsers will be, the lower CTR we will see. Anyway, I hope we will soon see paying for CTR not for CPM. CPM on mobile is very expensive.

btw.: I would like to know, what is a CTR on some local search site, I can imagine, that in this case, if the ad is targeted well, the CTR can be more than 10%.

Collecting customers phone numbers

2008-11-01T21:37:00.003+01:00

It is true to say, that brands who understand that future of the marketing is interactivity collects telephone numbers of their customers right now. I believe in it too. But I could not resist myself to post here the classic Southpark video about collecting underpants. I believe, collecting msisdns is not the same ;-)

2008-10-27T15:50:00.002+01:00

Thanks to Tsahi Levent-Levi, we have made it to this release of Carnival Mobilists. It's hosted on Radvision blog.

Thanks a lot and I can recommend you to read this release of Carnival.

Mobile Marketing Mess

2008-10-26T17:36:00.003+01:00

I have visited Communication Wednesday conference in the Prague about two weeks ago. It was organized by Tuesday business Network, where Wirenode is a member.

The topic was targeted mobile marketing and there were people from marketing & advertising agencies, mobile operators and mobile technology companies present (more than 100 people). Most people at the conference were talking about bright future of mobile marketing. On other hand, people from companies who already invested in it and tried it on their own skin were less optimistic about how it helped them. It looks like we have still a lot of work to do.

The biggest problem, which I think we have in mobile marketing, is its fragmentation. I will try to illustrate it on this picture (feedback is welcomed). Traditional media usually have one form of advertisement. It can be print advertisement in magazines, sound clip in the radio or TV commercial in TV. It’s easy to explain how it works to potential person interested in it. Also it is clear how much does it costs and how many people will see it. Some of those advertisements are evolving for some time already.

In mobile marketing, we have so many different types of it and all ends in the phone, that it’s almost impossible to explain. For example on our Czech market, the situation is like this:

Mobile operators are offering mobile banners on their mobile portals (Vodafone live!, O2 Active and t-zones). They are offering it to companies, who usually don’t have their own mobile websites, but we can fix this problem for them. Nostromo is offering branded games and in-game advertisement. CrazyTomato is offering Bluetooth marketing. Tagg is offering QR codes, ATS is offering SMS and MMS, O2 is offering sponsored calls and Wirenode together with Micromedia are offering mobile landing pages.

All those companies including ours are talking to marketing agencies (to the same one) about their offer and how it can be useful for their clients. I myself have visited more than five of those agencies in last month and I am only talking about the possibilities of the mobile web with them.

People from marketing must be totally confused about our offerings. I myself strongly believe in the future of mobile marketing, but I think it will be something else than what we see today.

Some of companies named in this article are offering more than one technology. On a 60 minute meeting with a marketing person, it not possible to explain more than one of those very tech ideas. If a marketing person hears about all of them during one month, he would better spend the client budget in TV.

The main reason I think that mobile marketing will evolve slower than we all would like it because this fragmentation. I understand that it is necessary to try everything and find out what is working and what is not, but it will be a long run for this industry.

Only one person at the conference had an idea, that we first should ask the client what is his goal and what he wants to achieve. When we know it, it should not matter for the client, which form of advertising it is (sms, mms, etc…) but only if he got results he need.

So next time you will be explaining to somebody why the mobile marketing is cool and all its possibilities, ask what is the client goal.

Easy - Central Europe Investment Marketplace Prague Conference

2008-10-04T17:10:00.002+02:00

I have visited Easy conference in Prague yesterday. There were 30 selected startups with their stands and 15 of them were presenting.

For me it was good experience, where I have seen how other EU startups present their projects. If I can compare it with USA startups and pitches I have seen at TC40 conference last year, American level of presenting is much better than European. It's sad, but true.
At the conference, there were about 5 medical/biotech companies presenting. For me, it was sort of funny, because I had no idea, what they were talking about. So now I understand that in my presentation about Wirenode, slide called "Technology" was not useful at all. Non IT people could not get what I was talking about.

To the ITC startups from the conference, I will write only about the ones I liked at least a little bit.:

GuardSec - (camera to phone/web streaming used for protecting the houses/offices). This is a startup which belongs to the Naveed Gill, former director of Tiscali Czech Republic. I have been talking with Naveed, if he could help us and get us in contact with anybody, who might be interested in licensing our platform, but we did not agreed on cooperation yet.
His latest startup idea makes sense, but I don’t know how he will compete with software, which camera makers are bundling with Pc camera sales. The software is very similar to what he does.

eVision - They are making some SW on top of Microsoft SharePoint and they have a lot of customers between governments and banks. I don’t know why they want investment. From my perspective, they are good SW company oriented on business sector and they need a good sales person and not investment.

OnTheRoad - Service for travelers. It can create "travel blog" from your posts you are doing during your trip. The site web site has really nice design. The CEO is a former CTO of the Czech second biggest internet portal.

Renzoo - They are creating Mobile marketing platform similar to ours. Good news for us is that we are about a year ahead in development than they are. After I talked with the CEO, I think our companies might cooperate together, at lease share some info about what ideas customer likes and which not.

Locify - Mobile application, which works with your location and adds it to different mobile or internet services. Their website is nice, I have also seen how the application work and it works ok, but I think it will be difficult to get revenue stream.

BuzzMedia - It's a Czech version of Federated Media company. They cooperate with Czech top bloggers. The owner, Pavel Neuman is the Czech premium blogger about startups, aka Czech Techcrunch ;-)

Its hard to tell, who will be a "winner" in two years, but all of them have a chance and are "playing".

About money and valuation:
Each company has to present a slide about they revenue forecast. For me, it was a sad moment, because about a year ago, I made the same hockey stick chart about Wirenode. Almost all presenting companies were at zero revenues in 2007 and they are planning to have about Euro 2.000.000, - in revenues in 2011. I wish them luck, but after my experience, I think no one will be able to achieve this.

About presenters:
Some of the CEO presenting were trying to impress investors with their track record and CV. From my perspective, why somebody with a 17 years expertise in project management starts a crazy company? I don’t know. The crazy ideas don’t look crazy to a person, who creates them.
One particular presenter were telling us, that he was pitching his startup to Adobe, and they did not wanted to buy it, but wanted to employ him and Google did not wanted to buy his startup but they wanted to employ him too. He presented this as his success.
Anyway, good luck to all Easy startups. It was a good event.

New Release

2008-09-11T21:10:00.003+02:00

We have released new version of our platform today. This version improves RSS and blogs mobilization and fixes some bugs.
We have also added new Google Maps widget, so you can put a Google Map into your mobile page. As we are preparing some other new mobile widgets, it would help us, if you let us know, which one would you like to use.

Meantime we are doing some landing pages for mobile marketing purposes, for example the last one was a micro site for LG for Vodafone Czech Republic.

I will try to blog more often, what I can tell now is that it was really busy summer and I hope we will be able to announce soon some major news.

Interesting articles

2008-07-14T17:46:00.002+02:00

I have read two interesting articles about mobile future recently.

One of them is about mobile as the 7^th mass medium. This article helps me to explain the difference between mobile internet and web. We had problems with some people, who were arguing that it’s the same. This articles game me some really nice arguments how to show the differences. The article is full of examples.

Second article is depressing one. It describes one nice mobile innovation example and the author analyze, why reality is so much different than all those nice mobile ideas.

I can recommend you both articles.

Mobile Computer

2008-05-20T12:36:00.001+02:00

Thanks to Mobile Computer magazine and Mark Wilson, you can read in depth review and tutorial of ourplatform.

Two mobile resources

2008-05-17T22:59:00.003+02:00

Mistakes in mobile marketing. You can download free ebook from .mobi
Mobile advertisement standards. Other free ebook.

I did not have time to read them myself yet, but from the quick view, both look interesting.

TechCrunch Prague

2008-05-09T11:37:00.002+02:00

There will be TechCrunch meetup in Prague on Friday, May 23, 2008 from 7pm, at Restaurant Zvonarka.
This party is organized by Jack from Nelso.

Wirenode is sponsoring the party together with Geewa, Gooddata and Newstin.

More than 100 people will be attending, so if you are in Prague, you are welcomed.

Mashable startup review

2008-05-01T21:08:00.002+02:00

Thanks to Mashable and Sun Startup Essentials, we got very nice review on Mashable blog.

Read the review

Thank you all!

Mobile Facebook

2008-03-31T15:49:00.007+02:00

We have just recently released our platform for Facebook.

You can add our Mobile websites creator widget to your account. It will allow you to create your mobile website and automatically link it together with your mobile Facebook profile at m.facebook.com

Our Facebook app demonstrate, how we can integrate our project to 3rd party websites. If you have website with mobile games or ring tones, Blog publishing platform or simple website with SMS, we can integrate Wirenode to your project and you can let your users to create mobile websites.

We have won Creative Mobile Award 2007

2008-02-21T13:48:00.004+01:00

Our project for creating mobile websites has won Creative Mobile Award 2007 competition in the Czech Republic.

This competition is organized every year by Tuesday Business Network. We had some of our projects there every year in last 3 years and finally we have won.
This means, Wirenode is the most innovative mobile project in the Czech Republic, at least we would like to think that ;-)

Thanks to everybody who supported us and of course the whole Wirenode team.

New home page

2008-01-10T15:27:00.000+01:00

We have released new version of the Wirenode mobile internet platform yesterday.

We have fixed a lot of bugs since the last release, but the main difference you will probably notice is the new home page. We think that we improved it over the last one significantly. Its more clean, less confusing and tells what it needs to tell.

We have spend some nice time discussing how our home page should looks like. The main criteria was, that it needs to be simple, with few texts and visitor needs to understand what the site is about in reasonable amount of time.

We were looking what other popular web 2.0 system has on home page, here I will post some webs we were looking at.

Collaborative goals websites:
www.43things.com and superviva.com
Two same project, each with different home page. We prefer 43things home page, because its more simple and I think less confusing.

Web analytics websites:
crazyegg.com and www.clicktale.com
Two same project, different home page, but only a little different. We think Egg's home page is a little bit better.
I was thinking how to improve those last two home pages if I were in their shoes, but I did not have any brilliant idea how to do it.

If you can look at our new home page and write us some feedback or ideas how to improve it in the future, please let me know.

Mobile Web

2008-01-03T15:51:00.000+01:00

I have just came across very nice article from Ewan MacLeod about The Mobile Web and the ‘m.’ solution. I agree with almost everything in the article and if you are interested in Mobile Web, I recommend you to read it.

Interesting is also a debate in comments, about what approach to use: m.something.com or something.mobi. I think both approaches will coexists together. Big sites will use "m.", because they are afraid what .mobi guys can do one day (.com domain have better rules/legislation), but smaller sites and projects will be fine with .mobi domain. We at Wirenode have several of them and are quite happy.

New version of our mobile page creator

2007-12-11T17:21:00.000+01:00

Everything is done and we would like to introduce you the new version of our WEB 2.0 project. See screenshot bellow.
The most important changes are:

Better design which is more compact and more flexible
Improved RSS support
New wiki for documentation which is going to be filled in in a few days
Better iPhone layouts for all pages

And finally

New mobile portal at the address http://wirenode.mobi try it now from your mobile phone.

In the Wirenode.com platform, we now host about 2000 mobile pages. We believe, that all new changes will help new and and old users too.

Please let us know what do you think.

Mobile Analytics waiting for Google?

2007-12-09T12:41:00.000+01:00

Does anybody know about some nice Mobile Analytics solution, something like Google Analytics, but for mobile websites?

The solution should show these basic statistics:

Unique visitors per day/month/year
Page views per day/month/year and per visitor
Mobile phone types
Countries of visits
Mobile operators per country and wap or Internet APN
Referrers (not very well supported on older phones)

There are several attempts from Mobilestats, Amethon or Redboss (now Mliven), but non of them are really user friendly and open as it should be. To track mobile users using webalizer or awstats is not useful either, because two few IP addresses used, so there is no good mechanizm how to track unique visitors.

My personal opinion is, that there are no Mobile Analytics project simply because everybody is waiting on Google.
If you start this kind of project and Google will launch it one month later, you are doomed and you can maybe close your project if you don't find any value added services, which Google is not offering. I believe, that good solution could be premium (for example statistics about operators) and the whole project can be profitable next year (if Google will not do it).

So dear Google, when we can start looking forward your mobile version of analytics?

Mobile friendly blogs at WapReview.com

2007-12-02T20:12:00.000+01:00

WapReview have published nice article where it compares various methods how you can make your blog mobile = your readers will be able to read it from their mobile phones.

As you see, we don't have some features which other projects are offering. This is going to change quickly. We are testing new version of our platform right now. It will have new design, will fix some bugs and finally will support wirenode.mobi portal. The portal will be considered "stable" in next release and after a while, we will start promoting it. It will be the first portal, where if you don't have your mobile site, you could create it from scratch ;-).

Silicon Valley (and TechCrunch 20)

2007-11-04T11:23:00.000+01:00

These are some unsorted photos from my Silicon Valley trip with Petr Kral from Skillr.

See Lions at Fisherman Wharf.

At Accel Partners I had a chance to speak with Richard P. Wong who sits in Admob.com board of directors. Pity that they already cooperate with Volantis, one of our competitor.

Office of Tagged, the were sponsoring Lunch 2.0 and have very nice office.

San Francisco from a ship going to Alcatraz Island.

Alcatraz Island.

Hotel rooms at Alcatraz are not very comfortable :-).

Japan garden in Golden Gate park. Pity you have to pay to enter it.

Classic Fireman's car.

University at Standford.

Fleet Week, where we saw Blue Angels, USA top pilots.

Crazy Burning Man party at San Francisco.

Golden Gate Bridge. From Fisherman Whaft it took us couple of hours to go there.

CalTrain, the train we used to travel around Silicon Valley. If you are an VC and never used it, here is how it looks from inside. Its quite comfortable and cheap travel.

See shelf on our way to Santa Cruz.

Crazy Santa Cruz decorated cars festival. This city is weird anyway ;-).

This 160 room house is an attraction in the Valley. I am glad we have real Castles in the Czech Republic ;-).

China town festival.

Unique skyscraper.

Me and Petr after a busy day.

A very long street in SF, one of many.

Golden Gate bridge.

TechCrunch 20/40 Wirenode stand in the DemoPit.

Classical burger restaurant.

Plug and Play Tech Center, where was another conference where i have been pitching.

Yes, its Guy Kawasaki. We had paid $20 to visit one of his speech. He is really good. This one was about how he started Truemors.

What is this? I can tell you it doesn't taste as one we have here.

Union Square in center of SF with many expensive shops. Those shops have some really nice clothes, but coat from Armani for $6000 was just too expensive for me ;-))

Old famous tram.

TechCrunch conference.

DemoPit at TechCrunch during the day.

Lunch 2.0

2007-10-16T14:09:00.000+02:00

Julie Sloane from Wired News wrote very nice report from Lunch 2.0 party at San Francisco last Friday.
What is cool, is that she mentioned Wirenode and my Silicon Valley trip in her article. Thank you Julie for that.
Lunch 2.0 was nice event, the Tagged office is really cool and shows how "investors money are spend" ;-). when I spoke with their CEO about their mobile version, he told me its not their priority at the moment. Looks like they have to compete very hard in the Internet space with MySpace and others right now.

Two different widgets

2007-10-12T08:59:00.000+02:00

We currently offer you two different widgets you can put on your blog to show others, that they can read it on their mobile phones. You already did it, right ? :-)

examples

Mobilize your blog in less than one minute

2007-10-04T07:04:00.000+02:00

This week, we have released new cool feature. If you have your blog and want to allow your readers to read it from mobile phones, it is now really easy.

1. Go to www.wirenode.com.
2. Enter your blog URL in "Mobilize your blog" section on the main page.
3. Follow instructions and choose your domain.
4. Put promotional Widget to web version of your blog.
5. Done.

Try it, its really easy.

Conference

2007-09-19T21:59:00.000+02:00

Thanks everybody who stepped by at DemoPit at TechCrunch 40.

I have got quite a lot of interesting contacts to people, several VC's and angel investors.
I will start co contact them and hopefully getting meetings ;-), I will tell you how it goes.

DemoPit at TechCrunch 20/40 conference

2007-09-11T15:47:00.000+02:00

We will present our mobile web hosting platform at the TechCrunch 20/40 conference in the Demo Pit! During Tuesday 18th, you can visit there our table and I will give you live demonstration of what our platform can do.
I plan to stay at the Silicon Valley area for some time (about 4 weeks). If you would like to meet, please send me email at tomas.zeman@wirenode.com. I will be looking for partners or investors for our project there.

I am looking forward to see you there!
September 18th, DemoPit at TechCrunch 20/40 conference, San Francisco

Nice article

2007-09-03T17:44:00.000+02:00

Tony Dennis from the Inquirer have written nice article about what we are preparing. Thanks a lot Tony.

During last week, I have send email with beta account to several bloggers, who write about mobile technology. Well I think it's pity that only few of them were interested in what we do.

We are still tuning our system and we have renamed it a little bit to be less confusing.

So the main slogan is: Mobile web hosting.

If you need to create and host mobile web pages, static or dynamic (from RSS, etc..), we are building the tool and the platform to do it in a simple way for you.

Private beta

2007-07-30T13:04:00.000+02:00

We have released the first official private beta version of our new system. For you who don't know, we are now doing "Platform for mobile web". As the first step, we have released Ajax based tool, for creating static mobile pages. We plan to improve it a lot and add some cool dynamic features to it.

If you want to be our beta tester, please let me know (tomas.zeman [at] wirenode.com). We will provide you with an username and password and we will be looking forward all your comments.

iPhone

2007-07-13T10:21:00.000+02:00

I had a chance to play with the iPhone for a while. Its really cool device, mostly for multimedia fans.
I have tried how our Rock for People page looks on it and if our new mobile page creator works in the iPhone Safari. It works! The browser in the phone is really amazing.

Mobile web platform

2007-07-12T00:25:00.000+02:00

News, news, news!

We are working on a mobile web platform already for some time and today, we decided to change our home page and put a teaser video, which shows one of part of our new platform (platform will have more part and features).
Visit www.wirenode.com and see the video for yourself. Soon, private beta will be announced and you will have possibility to test the mobile web creator for yourself. Don't forget to register your email on the home page.
We are looking forward your feedback. If you have any idea or suggestion or maybe some idea about cooperation, let us know!
The creation of mobile web pages just could not be easier.

Device Anywhere

2007-07-05T14:55:00.000+02:00

We have created mobile site for Czech famous concert - Rock for people. Mobile site is accessible at rfp.wirenode.mobi and it was created using our new mobile platform. I will write more about our new platform next week. We are finishing it right now.

For testing purposes, I have tried to use DeviceAnywhere and it works fine.

Mobile Monday - Munich

2007-06-05T18:08:00.000+02:00

I have been at Mobile Monday Demo Night at Munich yesterday. It was a one day trip with bus and train for me.

I have met there some really interesting people. Looks like Germany is not sleeping and they have there some nice start ups.
During the demo night, there were 16 mobile projects, which were presented. I was presenting www.mobiode.com. Some of the demos were absolutely crazy, some of them did not worked during the demonstration (Murphy's law) and some were useful only for small niche of the market (same as MobiOde which is not useful for everybody).

I am planning to visit MM London later this year and I hope we will have our new project finish by then, so we would be able to present it.

MM room

Cathedral

Gate to the old city centre

Carnival of the Moblists 68

2007-04-09T16:42:00.000+02:00

This week Carnival of the Moblists is hosted by

Always On Real-Time Access

I can only recommend to read it.
Thanks very much to Chetan Sharma, that he mentioned my article.

Mobile users feedback needed

2007-04-06T22:52:00.000+02:00

As number of mobile sites increase and operators are still attracting users to visit their portals, it is difficult to communicate with users visiting them. Mobile user usually doesn’t want to send you SMS with feedback while surfing the mobile web and sending en email for him is even more difficult.

If you are a mobile operator, you probably have all data from how users behave and who they are in a database. You can track them by their msisdn. But to get any useful information from all those data is not very easy and it requires some sophisticated data mining. Other think is that if you are a portal manager, you would need to ask your IT department for those data and that could take some time. But true is, if you got all those data, you than know all users customs, from when they woke up to what they like.

Its much harder to get some information about users for independent mobile portal, except what kind of mobile phone does user use, because you cannot track him by msisdn and cookies are not very well supported on mobile phones. It’s not recommended to use them.

Which choices do you have, if you want to ask your user some questions to get feedback?

In reality, not many. You can encourage your users to send you SMS and hope that they are willing to pay for it to send you feedback. Or you can create simple input field and put it into your portal so users will be able to input there some text. We were using this approach for some time, because we had some mobile services running for operators in the Czech Republic, which were quite obscure, but they have quite a lot of users. Pity for us was, that we never met those users and had no idea who they are. (We only know that they exist.)

As we started to have bigger need for some tool which would allows us to get feedback from users for a lot of different services and to be able to easy create questionnaires, we have created a mobile survey system, which can be used just for that purpose.

You can try it for yourself at www.mobiode.com , create a survey for your users and see how easy is to start getting feedback.

Its as easy as those three steps you see on the picture.

New version of MobiOde is out

2007-04-04T12:20:00.000+02:00

We have released new version of MobiOde survey system. There are several improvements inside. The biggest one is an actual subscription model, so finally we have a answer to your most common question, how much does it cost (see the price plan).

We would be happy if you try the service, the FREE model have almost full functionality to create working mobile survey.
If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to contact me.

We all hope you will like the service and it will be useful for you.
The whole Wirenode team.

Mobile phones for March (by User Agent)

2007-03-25T21:27:00.000+02:00

I post here statistics for mobile phone usage from more than 20 different services we are running with all three operators in the Czech Republic (Telefonica O2, T-Mobile and Vodafone).

I will post top 10 User Agents here every month, so you can see, how mobile phone market and mobile surfing is evolving here.

Nokia6682
Nokia6820
SonyEricssonK750i
Nokia6230i
SonyEricssonJ220i
Nokia2610
SAMSUNG-SGH-X480/1.0
Nokia6070
SIE-ME75
SonyEricssonK600i

(table shows top 10 mobile user agent from 20 different mobile services in the Czech Republic)

MobiOde presentation

2007-03-22T11:42:00.000+01:00

For all who are interested in mobile surveys, we have created a pdf presentation of MobiOde, where you can see how the system works.

Download presentation (pdf)

btw.: new version of MobiOde will be public soon, with new features and actual business model.

Article about Fanerotica

2007-03-17T20:46:00.000+01:00

Tony Dennis from the Inquirer have written a nice article about Fanerotica. The article is great and we like it very much.
I would only disagree, that its only for geeks. From the traffic we have at the service and response from players from the Czech Republic, not only geeks plays it (we know about severals girls playing the games too :-)). The article was translated to different languages, which is quite interesting. You can find these articles if you type Fanerotica to Google.

Product brochures

2007-02-21T12:44:00.000+01:00

We introduced several new projects at 3GSM. In case you don't have their marketing prospects, you can download them in pdf format.

MobiOde - mobile customer surveys
Fanerotica - interactive video adventures
Community portal - white label mobile community portal
MMS to postcard - real printed postcards from MMS messages

If you would like to have more information about any product, please let us know.

3GSM - the end

2007-02-16T18:25:00.000+01:00

3GSM world congress has finished. I would like to thank all people who visited our stand. It was a pleasure for us to describe them what we do and what we offer and describe them our company. I hope with some of them we will be able to cooperate and they will use our services for them or their customers.
I would like to thank our team at the stand too. We all worked very hard and these were really
busy 4 days.
Now we will relax for 3 more days in Barcelona and on Sunday, we will return to Prague.

3GSM day 2

2007-02-13T23:08:00.000+01:00

It was a really good day today and good parties yesterday. That's the reason why I was not able to write the blog spot and put here pictures of our stand with posters and all the other things. During both days, mornings were not quite good, because there were not many people on the 1th floor of the hall 2. But both afternoons were really good and we hopefully have some new relationships and possible cooperation in the air. We have definitely met a lot of interesting people during both days.
I have not seen much from the conferences yet, except Yahoo mobile press conference, but I plan to use part of the mornings, which are not very busy for looking around other stands.
Here I post some pictures of our stand and some from the opening party featuring Jamelia.

Tomorrow is the day

2007-02-11T21:23:00.000+01:00

We arrived to Barcelona yesterday, got to the hotel and luckily, we have here free wi-fi. We all have to thank the unnamed guy ho has unsecured wi-fi spot here.

Today, we came to our stand and started to build it.

Tomorrow, I will send pictured of complete stand with posters on walls etc. :-)

Organization is fine and we have so far no problems. Only pity is, there is quite a few free space around the stand, it looks like some companies canceled their boots.

The whole adventure begins tomorrow at 9:00, so see you there at 2.1D85 or here if you are not coming.

Btw. Mobile surveys www.mobiode.com are up and running. Mobile video adventures www.fanerotica.com are up too and finally you can try our MMS Postcards for free if you will visit our stand.

3GSM

2007-01-23T17:19:00.000+01:00

We are working hard as we can to finish everything for Barcelona.
We will actively present there three mobile products.

Mobile customer surveys
Mobile video adventures
MMS to postcard

Each project will have a web with information and of course mobile part.
We will have other cool projects with us too, so stay tuned, I will write about them more later.

Sales representative

2007-01-12T15:14:00.000+01:00

Last Dilbert series, where Dilbert is a sales engineer is really very funny.

This one is the best. Therefore we are trying to make our products self explanatory, very easy to use, with simple GUI, so that everybody can use them.

3GSM

2007-01-11T22:32:00.000+01:00

We are going to have a stand at this year 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona. This will probably be the biggest off country event for our company.
You are welcome to visit us at Hall 2 Level 1 (2.1D85), we are looking forward to meet you.
Next week, I will write more in details, about what we are going to present there. For now, we are still in a hurry to prepare everything for this event.

Merry Christmas

2006-12-23T18:21:00.000+01:00

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year from Wirenode

wap.lide.cz II

2006-12-19T00:57:00.000+01:00

There was printed advertisement about wap.lide.cz included in all Telefonica O2 invoices. Everybody (more than 3000000 people) got very nice article about lide community portal.

Other news is, we released wap.lide.cz for Czech Vodafone Live! portal. While developing PML for Vodafone, we discovered several bugs in their PML implementation + their PML emulator ;-). But finally, it worked out. Thanks for help everybody.

Mobile tariffs

2006-12-10T23:49:00.000+01:00

In mobile world, data traffic can be still expensive, plus only few people understand data tariffs, difference between WAP APN and Internet APN and all this mess. Having unlimited data plan helps a lot, but when you travel abroad, you are in a tariffs hell again. Listen to this call, which is self explanatory.

wap.lide.cz

2006-12-06T00:11:00.000+01:00

We have finished 1th mobile version of the Czech biggest community portal www.lide.cz last week. Mobile version is at URL wap.lide.cz. The whole system is based on our Babylon framework which takes care of the presentation part. Mobile portal is part of the O2 portal and next month, we will customize wap.lide.cz for Czech Vodafone and T-Mobile too. I will inform you more about user experience and other things later, but whats clear now, it will be the biggest community mobile portal in the Czech Republic.

Content shop

2006-10-08T20:14:00.000+02:00

I have seen this very nice content shop at the Amsterdam airport. You can buy there different content like music, movies, ringtones and audio books and pay it with your credit card. Unfortunately, my Treo 650 was not supported, but most phones and PDA were.

I think, that to place this kind of shop at the Airport makes sense, but I doubt that people are using it. We was thinking of creating this kind of shop in Prague using a PC and a lot of different cables for all phones, but I don think this kind of shop can pay for itself. I believe that future is online downloads rather than syncing with a computer.

iDate 2006

2006-09-30T00:53:00.000+02:00

I had visited internet dating conference held in Amsterdam in the beginning of the week. I had a opportunity to speak there about mobile technology (thanks Marc).

Topic of my presentation was Tips for coding a mobile dating site and my presentation was mostly about what all different thinks you have to have in mind when creating mobile site [download pdf]. In the beginning of my presentation I was speaking a little bit about mobile business and difference between mobile users and web users behavior. I will try to write a longer post about this later.

The event was a great experience for me and I had a chance to speak with major European dating sites owners. Its really surprising they don't have clear mobile strategy for their sites. It looks like mobile waters are not quite new to them, but they really don't know how to handle it. Their proven business model where man pay using a credit card for a month subscription is not very good for mobiles, but it looks like they are not willing to change it.

Some photos from O2 partners day

2006-09-18T11:18:00.000+02:00

Our yellow team. We finished the 2th.

Some zorbing, its actually fun.

Some more adrenaline.

Have you been sitting in this with your head up side down? :-)

An evening show.

Some more fun with head upside down.

We got some very usefull info.

Telefonica O2 Czech Republic

2006-09-08T14:36:00.000+02:00

At September 1st, Eurotel has become Telefónica O2. We don't have anymore home operator in the Czech Republic, all belongs to foreign companies. O2 come with massive marketing, billboards, newspapers and TV sports.

They arranged party for their partners too. It was an adrenaline day full of different attractions with big raut at the evening. We all had lot of fun and chance to speak with the O2 management and our concurrence in an informal way. Thanks a lot O2.

Wirenode at Mont Blanc

2006-08-02T12:43:00.000+02:00

Last week, Tomas Randus, who is my partner at Wirenode was traveling across Europe. He climbed up the Mont Blanc, which is the highest mountain in Europe.
He was sitting on top of it, smoking Havana cigar and of course, showing Wirenode flag :-). When he described us the climbing, its really not so easy, but to deliver our flag on Mont Blanc was a big challenge for him.
Good that he is back in Prague now.

Google bot is Nokia 6820

2006-08-01T13:21:00.000+02:00

Just recently, one of our mobile sites was scanned by Google bot. Everything is fine, but why Google bot is Nokia 6820?

User-agent: Nokia6820/2.0 (4.83) Profile/MIDP-1.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

I think that Google just use it because its quite popular phone. Good is, that we will serve it rich xhtml mobile version of pages. Google will not see our WAP version.

Prague post article

2006-07-29T00:12:00.000+02:00

In Prague Post newspapers was an article about Doschranky. This whole week, all Czech major magazines and internet sites wrote about it. After 1th week of run, we have learned new things and fixed some bugs too :-).

It looks like, people are really using it and the service is starting to be popular.

The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less

2006-07-24T16:05:00.000+02:00

I have just watched this video about why if people have more choices, they are not happier than with less choices and I have to agree with Mr. Schwartz.
The same happens when users have to choice from various mobile phone plans. In our country, we have only 3 different operators, each having from 6 to 12 different plans.
It’s almost impossible to figure out, which plan and which operator to choice. I believe, they are created the way, that it’s not possible to compare them. Its better to select one plan which looks good and simply not think about possibility that with some other plan you can save some money.

Free emails

2006-07-07T11:15:00.000+02:00

At doschranky.cz, we allow to send text you want to have printed on a postcard with e-mail. It did not look like a problem, until somebody got postcard with message: "Scanned with AVG, 0 viruses found."

The system is fully automatic, but now it looks like we will have to check all texts by hand. Antivirus software and some free emails adds various text at the end of each email.

I am trying to figure out, how to discover text not added by user, but manual check will be the best fix at least for now.

Doschranky.cz mentioned in magazine

2006-06-27T18:45:00.000+02:00

Doschranky.cz was mentioned in the Czech magazine Mlada Fronta dnes. The article is quite good, but miss some important points like that the service will work with all mobile operators in the Czech Republic etc...

I hope we will soon have more articles like this.

Doschranky.cz

2006-06-26T02:44:00.000+02:00

Doschranky.cz is a project we are doing together with Czech Post.
It's a system for creating standard postcards from simple MMS message.

Users can make photos using their MMS enabled phone and send us the picture together with name, address and message they want to deliver. We will print the image and deliver it to specified address to any place around the world. If users doesn't have MMS handset, they can send us the picture with email or they can upload the picture to our site. All payments are made using Premium SMS.

This project is based on a fact, that Czech Post have some free capacity on their printing equipment. I think they will print the postcards during the night :-) and customer will get them the next day.

This service is independent on operators and works from abroad too, so users can send nice pictures from see or their mountains holidays.

Pity is, that only people with Czech SIM card can use the doschranky service. WE are working on the solution, that foreigners will be able to use it too.

Blogs to read #1

2006-06-26T00:55:00.000+02:00

I am writing here a list of interresting blogs, which you might want to read from time to time.
All those blogs are mobile related, so I am trying to read them sometimes, because there is a lot of new ideas inside them, which we might do in Wirenode one day :-)

http://mobilecrunch.com
http://theponderingprimate.blogspot.com
http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com
http://www.mobili.st
http://www.wirelesswatch.jp
http://wblog.livejournal.com
http://www.m-trends.org
http://www.mobhappy.com

I hope you will enjoy them, if you know about some more, please let me know.

New mail server

2006-06-20T23:40:00.000+02:00

We finally have new mail server. Thanks to Czech company Cybersales , we are running latest mail technology based on Linux. Our mail server is powered by postfix, supports secure imap and pop3, spamassassin helps to get rid of spam and we use Fedora LDAP server for user accounts.
Now I can finally have a good sleep at night :-). If the new mail server will work at least as long as the old one, it would be great.

Ad-subsidized calls on mobile

2006-06-05T12:33:00.000+02:00

Virgin mobile announced free mobile calls, if you watch or listen to the advertisement before the call. (virgin free calls)

It looks like interesting concept and I am sure, that a lot of young people will like to use it. For mobile operators, it can be big a thread too, they are not used to sell advertisement space to third parties, plus revenues from such a channel is harder to predict than from calls. (We know, that people will call to each other in the future too)
But it definitely looks like good weapon againts Skype and free wi-fi calls.
In the Czech republic, one operator offered free SMS from internet, but 80 character long advertisement was included in the message. This service was not very popular, so I am looking forward to see, if free calls with advertisements will be something what customers wants and will accept.

SMS Farm

2006-06-01T19:24:00.000+02:00

We had finally created a SMS application, which use standard GPRS USB Wireless modem using Java.

We are ready now to send and receive standard SMS messages and do some mobile marketing and promotions independentrly on SMS agregators.
The modem cost about $250, which is not very cheap, but it only needs USB connection to work. Its hard to find mobile phone, which can be charged using USB only.

The Java library we use for our project is java smslib. (We have tried others too, but this one works ok.)
As soon as smslib will start to support WAP Push, we will do some mobile content promotions too.

Mem 2006

2006-05-29T17:55:00.000+02:00

I have visited MEM 2006 conference in London last week. I was at similar conference at Barcelona (3GSM) earlier this year and I have to say that MEM is its poorer brother.

MEM is a two days conference about mobile content. More than 1000 people came to Islington Business design center in London. ItÂs a very nice number, because entrance ticket cost about 499 pounds, which is not cheap.
What interesting one could see there? There were several very nice booths with mobile games from various genres. Mobile gambling was big topic this year too, gambling has now doors open in mobile entertainment and I believe, we will soon see mobile casinos in the Czech Republic too. You can play not only poor slot machines, but rich roulette or poker and pay it using your credit card directly from your mobile phone. Global SMS aggregators or mobile community portals with photo blogs had nice booths too.
If you are not sure, where to go next year, I would suggest going to 3GSM. ItÂs much bigger, with more attractions and new information. MEM is moving to Monte Carlo next year, so if you want to make a nice trip, you will be mostly welcome there.

Linux session

2006-04-08T17:10:00.000+02:00

Last wednesday, I was teaching Microsoft partners what is Linux. pretty interresting. MS is finally starting to learn what Lnux on Desktop can do.

I think Linux desktop will be pretty soon ready for SME.

best treo freeware

2006-01-24T00:44:00.000+01:00

Hi,
I just got my Treo 650 back nad I have to reinstall all my applications. This is the list of my favourite freeware apps for Treo 650

Radio control - can turn radio off in the night and save the battery
ssh for Palm
Ledd off - will turn off the green light
Key shades - turn off light in the keyboard and save battery

If are using any other good app, please let me know.

Design Bros

2005-12-20T19:13:00.000+01:00

We are cooperating with Czech company Design Bros. They are very good at creating 3D animations, check their web site.

I believe their set of animations for mobile phones will be very popular. I will post some examples soon.

moving the servers

2005-12-20T19:12:00.000+01:00

We were moving our mail server from eTel finally, they were ALL day without power, so we desided to move servers to globe (www.globe.cz).I hope they will be better.

w2forum

2005-12-04T13:31:00.000+01:00

I was invited to join Wireless World Forum recently.
This web site is very similar to LinkedIn, but only people from wireless world are there. The design not very good, site is confusing, but it looks like to me that people there are more active and they communicate with each other very well. Pipy, that now I will have to take care of two very similar services.

eTel server hosting in Czech Republic

2005-11-29T15:21:00.000+01:00

Two of our servers were down in the night! I called during the night to the hosting facility and they told me they are correcting it right now, but in the morning one of the servers was still down. From log files I discovered, that they were without the power during the night.

I called to their hotline in the morning and lady there did not even know, there was problem during night. Thats really crazy.
Later they told me that by accident their ups were down too and they were not able to say if this situation will not happed again.

I think I will move the servers to different company, GTS or Nextra.
eTel http://www.etel-group.com is basically really bad.

So whats cool about Pipay?

2005-11-26T05:41:00.000+01:00

Pipay is a user friendly mobile payment portal using premium SMS. It allows any user to receive or send premium SMS. Users can start receiving premium SMS and mobile payments SMS right after registration on the site.

Users can use Pipay to charge for access to their web pages, sell mobile content, create SMS games or create their own SMS products. Every user than get complete statistics about how many SMS was send and much money they will get. They don’t need technical knowledge or any other requirements to use Pipay. Registration is free for all.
Its really premium SMS for everybody this time.

Pipay.cz press release

2005-11-24T00:21:00.000+01:00

Hi all,

so finally we had a press release conference at Wednesday. It was at Louvre Cafe in the very centre of Prague.
About 12 journalists from different news and magazines came. They all were paying attention and had really clever questions, everybody got bottle of vine as a present at the end and I hope they will come next time too.

I will write about Pipay in next post, so you will know, what its about :-)
In case you are hungry, see an example what was for refreshment there, so you will come next time too ;-)

If you want to see what the next press release will be about, watch our mobile projects web site

1th post

2005-11-20T21:38:00.000+01:00

Hi all,

thanks that you have come to my blog. I hope that we all will have great time here.

You can expect the first "real" news at wednesday, when we have a press release conference about our payment service here in Prague.

I will inform you right after the Wireless Wednesday, which is a mobile event number 1 here in Prague each second month.

Regards
Tomas