Have a read:

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Hey Ewan,

Wanted you to know that we are launching next week in the US on mobile.

It a “beta” thing initially – a few (but not many) adaptations to the UK service, mainly around registration. We’ll also be live on the iPhone/iTouch and web versions too.

US users will be able to see UK users and vice versa. Initially we’ll test different marketing, all off portal, and refine our approach when we see what we get.

Given that we’ve had a consistent usage of our web site from the US with little or no marketing over there, we’re confident US users will like the product as much as people do over here. We also know that it’ll be tough…..but it’s a big market and off portal looks like it is now big enough there to deliver the volume we need.

Separate note: we decided to give our users some Chinese New Year gifts…..digital fortune cookies…..very popular and now our top seller . Same old lesson, give the customer fun….. I’ve attached one, drop it into a browser to animate…..

Cheers

Mark

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Thanks for the update Mark, that’s sounding rather exciting.

If you haven’t checked out Flirtomatic recently, head over and have a look at some of their latest innovations. But if you’re new to Flirtomatic, try signing up. They’ve got some of the best sign-up logic I’ve seen — which is why they’ve got, what, well over a million members signed-up. And crucially for the development of the mobile industry, the vast majority of Flirtomatic’s members are normobs who typically don’t have computers or internet access at home.

By the way, here’s a screenshot of the fortune cookie Mark sent me. Thanks Mark I bet they’re flying off the virtual shelves at the moment!

It offers full web PC browsing support — and, in particular, it can handle Ajax, Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media — everything that your average mobile browser chokes on. This is the kind of service you need when you’re out and about and you absolutely, positively, have to view some content on a site quickly and without arsing about.

I can’t tell you how depressing it is sitting there waiting for your bog standard Nokia or Sony browser to parse a 250k page. It’s horrific, from a geek viewpoint. You see the text download and you try and navigate… uh.. oh… now the text has disappeared while it parses the style sheet. And downloads the imagery. Total arse.

It’s going to be a particularly useful must-have for Windows Mobile users suffering with the default browser. Symbian too. Nokia hasn’t done much in the way of improving the browsing experience on their devices for quite a while. The fact you still have to click, click, click into navigation options to select ‘go to web address’ (as though that’s some alien stupid command that not many people would want to use) still hugely annoys me EVERY TIME I use my E90 browser.

Version 0.8 of Skyfire for Windows Mobile offers the following:

* Better video quality
* Ability to make Skyfire the default browser
* Faster launch and auto-reconnect
* Improved zooming
* Ability to download content
* In-line text entry

To be clear, it’s still US-only. They’re rushing to offer international support. Patience, patience… Western European support isn’t far away.

Register and download here.