Web Giants Focusing on Wireless Mobile Content

Recently Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and other large web entities and portals have been adding a new focus to their content services - the wireless web. Mobile smart phones and PDA’s are finally picking up steam in the US market, after years of lagging behind Asian, European, and South American wireless usage. Mobile email, web surfing, and blogging is almost becoming mainstream among US business communication and college students - the opinion leaders who have the power to change the face of the Internet.

Mobile Movies

One of the most recent deals involves the agreements with Yahoo, AOL, and MSN with CinemaElectric’s PocketCinema, a mobile movie content distributor which focuses on movie messages (multimedia messaging), sports highlights, mini-news videos, and graphic wallpaper. The portal agreements offer CinemaElectric mobile content to mobile customers of AOL, MSN, and Yahoo as well as other Internet portals that cater to mobile phone content customers. AOL, MSN and Yahoo have a total customer base of over 300+ million consumers. CinemaElectric anticipates reaching up to 4% of the mobile user base of this market by 2006 via their reseller network which includes Sonera Zed, Zingy and other resellers.

CinemaElectric has already set up PocketCinema with T-Mobile in the UK, Germany, Netherlands, Austria and Czech Republic, a total European market of over 40 million mobile subscribers.

Microsoft and Mobile

Yesterday Bill Gates announced the new Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition software during a keynote to developers attending the combined Microsoft Mobile Developer Conference, VSLive! Show, and SpeechTek Spring conference, in San Francisco.

The second edition of the mobile platform adds features that include support for square-screen resolution and dynamic screen-switching between landscape and portrait modes. In addition, the OS supports video graphics array (VGA) and quarter video graphics array for high-resolution displays. Pretty nifty for mobile.

Gates also showcased Motorola’s new MPx advanced cellular phone featuring the latest upgrade of Mobile 2003.

Current Mobile Portal Offerings and

Yahoo Mobile currently offers Mobile Messaging, Games, Email, News Alerts, and even a Wi-Fi Hotspot finder for those who are looking for easy and free wireless Internet. MSN and other mobile networks offer similar programs. As more and more businesses and public gathering locales offer free Wi-Fi Hotspots and users are more on the go, the mobile web device is destined to take the place of the trusted lap top. Such moves by these portals are needed to keep their current member and user base active and permanent as the web makes its way from our desk tops, and into our pockets.

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