Zong, the open mobile platform provider, has announced the launch of Spaces, which it claims is the first service allowing anyone to create a mobile website, including the necessary handset rendering, for free. Echovox, the company behind the Zong platform, says that with minimal technical knowledge, users can create mobile sites from existing web content such as RSS feeds.
Spaces has been developed to help media companies and other publishers create their own mobile sites, rendering and transcoding all the content for thousands of mass-market handsets. In addition to this, the platform will soon include integrated WAP billing functionality, allowing companies to monetise services through their mobile websites.
Echovox says that Spaces will give content owners a low barrier-to-entry route into the mobile web era. It will create new revenue-generating opportunities such as premium content, voting and tailoring of users web presence. It notes that mobile micro-payments are growing as a new revenue stream for web content owners.
Spaces will be available through Zongs website. It offers an intuitive visual interface with which users can not only create a mobile site, but also combine and integrate dynamic content in the form of XML or RSS feeds.
Launching a mobile website can be a much more complex process than launching a traditional website, where there are only a couple of browsers, says Echovox CEO, David Marcus. Companies looking to launch a mobile site have had to contend with issues with the different form factors, screen sizes, capabilities and uncertain and varying mobile bandwidth. Zong brings, for the first time, a one-size-fits-all concept to the mobile web by circumventing the traditional complexity of the mobile sector.”
Zong Spaces is available globally and offers transactional capabilities in Europe.