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)
Review of mippin.com for Mobile Industry Review http://tinyurl.com/6qcnt7
Review of mippin.com for Mobile Industry Review http://tinyurl.com/6qcnt7
RT from @mjelly Review of mippin.com for Mobile Industry Review http://tinyurl.com/6qcnt7 – Thanks James.
Review of mippin.com for Mobile Industry Review http://tinyurl.com/6qcnt7
Review of mippin.com for Mobile Industry Review http://tinyurl.com/6qcnt7
one of the problems with this is: how is it different to a list of broswer bookmarks?
it's no immeadiatley obvious why you'd use it
RT from @mjelly Review of mippin.com for Mobile Industry Review http://tinyurl.com/6qcnt7 – Thanks James.
@South77 Mippin is a lot more than just a list of browser bookmarks, which is my opinion people are not really using on mobile phones anyway.
Mippin is a great tool to discover interesting articles, pictures and videos on the mobile web. It also allows you to access content from many sites and sources that don´t even have a mobile website yet.
In addition to that Mippin recently launched a bunch of new community features that allows you to find mobile content through like minded people.
Now show we where you do that with your mobile browser based bookmarks 😉
You should give it a try. I mean put it that way, do you know that many other great mobile websites?
Be good.
Bastian
South77 – the difference with Mippin we hope to convey is that all our content is rendered for mobile, whereas some bookmarks link to sites not made for mobile. In fact there are 45,000 sites optimised for any phone, so we've had to introduces functionality to enable discovery of this content. That's why we'd hope you'd use it. The functionality helps you find new and well known content quickly and easily. Check out our Social Content Discovery video – its fun, bad acting we admit, but hopefully explains why you'd want to use us: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2jN11kwrGro
Yeah… What they said, PLUS – I used to work there – so it automatically ROCKS!
😉
Yeah… What they said, PLUS – I used to work there – so it automatically ROCKS!
😉
Yeah… What they said, PLUS – I used to work there – so it automatically ROCKS!
😉
@mippin Congrats on the @mjelly Mobile Review! Happy to see your service get some well deserved exposure: http://tinyurl.com/6qcnt7
@mippin Congrats on the @mjelly Mobile Review! Happy to see your service get some well deserved exposure: http://tinyurl.com/6qcnt7