On the subject of usability and the way that mobile sites render on different screens (see story below),  I also met with Jonathan Viney, Sales Director at Wapple, at the show. He’s just joined the company after 15 years with Vodafone and three as a sales consultant.
He told me he’s currently working hard to get the tecchies he works with to appreciate the value of the technology the company has built that enables mobile sites built using its Canvas and Architect solutions to render perfectly on any device. The tecchies, having built the solution, take it pretty much for granted, but as a relative outsider, Viney believes it’s the company’s “bar of gold” as he described it.
When a phone tries to look at a Wapple-built mobile site, the technology, which Wapple calls Exhibit, first validates the phone using the User Agent Profile (UAProf). It then validates it several more times using a variety of public and private domain information. If the phone fails to pass all the checks, as happened when Wapple first encountered the G1 in its testing phase, and periodically with the iPhone when the software is updated, the system raises an alert and Wapple intervenes manually to fix the problem.
The proof of the pudding for Viney came when he was asked whether Wapple could validate phones being used in Angola. To answer the question, he ran a report, the results of which amazed him.
“The report told me there had been no validation failures,” he told me. “The amazing thing was all these obscure makes of handset that I had never heard of in 15 years of working with Vodafone that the technology coped with.”
Viney says that Wapple is just starting to market the Exhibit technology to companies who have built mobiles sites or applications on other platforms and want to validate phones trying to access them. Going forward, however, he believes the company’s star products will be Canvas, which is aimed at people with no coding expertise who want to build high functionality mobile sites; and Architect, which is aimed at the developer community.
The company is five years old on Monday, currently employs 16 people, and according to Viney, will turnover more than £1 million when its next results are posted. Looking further ahead, however, he says the company is planning for rapid and substantial growth.

David Murphy
Editor