With the market saying 'no' to Nokia's Ovi Store, what do you think can be done to change this?After a week’s hiatus (I was lucky enough to be relaxing on the beaches of South Goa) it’s James from back with another Mobile 2.0 Service of the Week.
This week it’s the turn of what might well be the UK’s no1 mobile 2.0 startup - 
What is it?
Mippin is a mobile aggregator for blogs, news feeds, video and other content from the web, which it “mobilizes” by optimizing for mobile and putting it in a single portal for users. The portal has around 42,000 sites indexed across over 80 different content channels such as “mobile news”, “celebrities”, “sports” and so on. There are also mini widgets you can insert onto your mippin home-page to customise it such as weather, flickr and twitter feeds, horoscopes etc.
Publishers and bloggers can use mippin to create a mobile feed of their site, for example, at mjelly we use mippin to mobilize our http://mippin.com/mjelly.
Mippin make it really easy to do this - you can effectively create a mobile site out of your RSS feed in a few minutes.
Mippin also recently launched some nice social features including user profiles and social filters such as recommendations. You can follow specific users and see what they are reading and enjoying. Right from the start mippin has built in sharing functionality to let you email or SMS stories to your friends or blast
them over twitter.
Why is it interesting?
Mippin is doing something pretty unique in the world of mobile - whilst there are loads of messaging apps for example, there are very few mobile sites that are really trying to aggregate and mobilize content in this way.
Mippin is also interesting as a case study of how moving from a downloadable application to a mobile-web based platform can pay dividends. Mippin started life as “Refresh Mobile” or “Mobizines” which was an early attempt to help brands put their content onto mobile through developing mobile magazines which could be downloaded as a java app. Since moving to a mobile web platform the site has really taken off and is now getting some serious traffic, which we can’t disclose, but suffice to say they are one of the biggest mobile news and information sites in the world.
The stats we can let you know about are pretty impressive - Mippin has active users in over 200 countries worldwide, on over 2,000 different types of device and the average UK user visits the site once a week with a growing number of users visiting once or more a day. The record was 750 page views in one single
session on a Motorola V3!!
Another interesting point, Mippin find that iPhone users are “prolific” in their consumption on the site, another bit of evidence that shows that just because you have a mobile browser that can handle full webpages, it doesnt mean there’s no need for mobile optimized sites.
Mippin is a fantastic service that really stands out from the crowd - defo one to watch - it will be an ideal acquisition target in a year or so’s time for a newspaper or web portal looking to build scale on the mobile web.
See you next
week!
You can find mippin on mjelly, which is directory of the best mobile websites and other stuff at mjelly.com (PC) and m.mjelly.com (mobile)
