… the likes of Opera, Mozilla and others, but who will come out on top once the dust settles?

Skyfire, a mobile browser we’ve kept our eyes on for a while now, is ramping up its efforts and making a few changes internally to better compete in the increasingly crowded segment of mobile browsing.

Along with recently hiring former Travelocity CFO Jeffrey Glueck, the company has closed a series B round of funding in the amount of $5M, raising its total capital investment to $22.8M …

Skyfire has been a leader in mobile browsers for a while now, and yesterday marked the long-awaited release of the 1.0 version of it’s full-Web enabled browser for Windows Mobile and Symbian devices.

The key difference with Skyfire remains the ability to support popular Web standards and plug-ins such as Flash 10, Silverlight 2, Ajax and JavaScript that we’ve all come to expect from the traditional Web experience.  The browser will now let users watch any Web video and live event on a small-screen mobile phone, and Skyfire users can even customize their start pages with RSS feeds from their favorite Web sites, integrate their Facebook and Twitter accounts to import status updates and tweets, and easily publish their status to these networks with a single click.

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A big theme this year at the Mobile World Conference has been an emphasis on full-web capable mobile browsing, and for good reason.  Not only is it key in the advancement of mobile devices, but also key in the development of mobile advertising.

In addition to Apple’s mobile Safari, Opera Mini, Skyfire, the upcoming Firefox for mobile and Microsoft’s new IE Mobile 6, Bitstream unveiled one of their own today in Barcelona.  Dubbed “Bolt,” the new mobile browser will be available for any device sporting Java’s Mobile Information Device Profile, which is most phones offered by GSM carriers worldwide.  

While Bolt is just another full-web capable browser like many others, it differs in the fact that it will be provided as a white-label solution for mobile carriers, meaning all capable phones sold via those carriers will have Bolt installed by default.  Since Java’s MIDP platform is used on most so-called “feature phones,” or lower-end phones, it means Bolt will get into user’s hands that much faster.  

In the end, the massive push to bring full-web capable browsing to all mobile devices- both low and high-end, will have a huge impact on the mobile content industry, and more important the mobile marketing industry.  Breaking away from the normal WAP-based mode of web browsing, and the subsequent forms of mobile advertising needed for WAP will be a huge step in the right direction.  

With so much focus on high-end smartphones like the iPhone and Android-based phones, we tend to forget that a majority of mobile users are still carrying around very simple devices with very simple mobile-browsing capabilities.  Hopefully, 2009 will be the year low-end mobile devices benefit from new technologies high-end phones have had for years.  When it does, the opportunities for mobile marketing will flourish even more.

A Bango study released this week, revealed that half of the Top 20 most trafficked PC websites (according to Nielsen Online) did not work well when visited from a mobile phone. The study noted that some of the sites that did not work well had a mobile version of their site, but when the study’s users went directly to the computer version of the site they were not directed to the mobile version.

If you have a mobile site then make sure your PC site detects a mobile device and presents the made-for mobile version.

That used to be easier said than done. Fortunately there is a free online file generator which enables webmasters to create a meta.txt file of their site. This file contains all the information necessary to help a visitor to your site get to the right version of your site. The meta.txt file is the brainchild of Visibility Mobile, a mobile search engine optimization firm offering services and tools to brands, search engines and mobile agencies. Continue Reading

Since the iPhone has revolutionized the thought of a full-web experience on mobile devices, other companies and software makers have been hot on its heels to bring the technology to other devices. SkyFire, a new startup out of Mountain View, has introduced their version of a mobile browser that fills the void nicely.

SkyFire’s new browser is a lot like iPhone’s Safari browser in that it provides full-page views of websites in their entirety, but differs in the compatibility with java and ajax based websites.

A huge complaint with Safari was the lack of java and ajax support that many of today’s websites include as part of their design. Things like videos, embedded Google maps, and other new-age web-based technologies can’t be viewed on the iPhone without opening a separate application.

SkyFire’s version uses the method of loading most of a websites content, including java and ajax elements, to its third-party servers rather than the mobile device. Its servers do most of the “heavy lifting” and the website, once loaded, is shot back to the mobile device without the user knowing the difference. This makes for seamless, and quicker web-browsing experience that finally includes almost all elements of every website. You can watch YouTube videos and scroll through Google maps directly in the SkyFire browser.

The browser is available for Windows Mobile, but they’ve also recently launched a beta program for Symbian’s S60 platform. Invites are available on their website.

Any kind of media advertising requires the use of robust analytics to understand user-behavior and to better plan for future growth, and mobile advertising is no different. Actually, it’s perhaps more important than traditional web-based metrics, given there’s more information that needs to be understood about mobile users over PC-based users to make informed decisions.

During last Monday’s Mobile Monday meeting in a Microsoft Conference room, some 150 mobile professionals discussed the state of mobile analytics and what the mobile industry as a whole needs to do to improve on it. With the introduction of new internet-savvy devices like the iPhone and upcoming Android-based devices, the need for better metrics will be apparent when companies start to monetize their services, and try to develop user-habit-data to better aid in marketing, and other big decisions.

As users start doing more “PC-like” interaction on mobile devices like access news and entertainment, and use social networking, the big companies and portals on the web will start to notice that more and more of their overall traffic is being sent by mobile devices. When this happens, they have to shift their thinking (and analytical systems) from PC-based techniques to mobile. New mobile operating systems like Opera’s Skyfire Beta, and Apple’s Safari already bring the full web-experience to mobile devices, now it’s just a matter of measuring the data and building upon it.

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