There was an interesting article in Techcrunch yesterday on the decline of the US Newspapers.

Obviously we have heard this story for some years now but two things struck me. Firstly the declines are increasingly rapid and more importantly the decline are in online too. I think that the decline in online is an indication that the newspapers are failing to monetise their content in the online world. I think we all know that online consumption of news is increasing and this is at the expense of print. Furthermore the opening up of mobile content consumption through products such as our own are also reducing the need to for users to take their news via print and there are environmental benefits - removing the  piles of paper waste littering our streets. It just needs the content owners to work out how their content can be monetised. Obviously we feel quite good about this as we have quite a successful route for monetisation for publishers through ad impressions.

Despite browsers on phones getting better and better there is still a need for Mobile formatted sites, if not just for lower end phones, but for those on high end phones that hate the waiting or the difficult navigation of the full web on a phone. 
Once you acccept this the next stage after creating your mobile site (which is easy with products such as Mippin) is how does your site detect between a phone and a PC.

We get asked this question several times a month by publishers big and small.  How to automatically distinguish between phones and pcs and send them to the right version of their websites. Unfortunately there is no simple answer to this question because these publishers have substantial PC users and want to do the detection without degradation to their PC website performance - so they need to do the detection on their own hardware.  At the same time there is not enough standardisation on the server-side to make it a simple answer.

However, we have fully documented several approaches and we detail them here.  There are 3 approaches:

1) Don't make it automatic.  Just create a domain name m.yoursite.com or yoursite.mobi and send them to the right site.  However, this is not very user friendly.

2) The next approach is if the publisher is using Apache servers there is a script that can be put in place. This script is here.

3) Finally for those using Wordpress we have a specific solution for wordpress owners.  There can install a plugin which does it for you.  Details of this plugin are here.

Note that these script are all geared with pointing the user at Mippin as the mobile rendering of the site, but this code is open and its easy to change the code to point at any mobile rendering so you are not forced to use us.

I watched Eric Schmidt on Charlie Rose last night -  very interesting.  Nearly all the talk was about the importance of Mobile in Google's strategy.  Eric explained how Mobile was taking over from the PC in Internet access and as he said he saw another billion phones being sold in he next 3.5 years.  In fact this statistic struck a chord with me as I have a site called phonecount.com which tracks the mobile phone growth and predicts 2.5 billion extra phones by mid 2012 (I wonder if he took account that the population of the earth will also increase by a billion in the same period).  Now I am sure my approach to calculating this increase is flawed as I just do a linear projection on current increases and I assume lots of people will have more than 1 phone too, but I do think whereas my estimate is perhaps over optimistic Eric is under-estimating hugely.  Does anyone reading this have better figures so I can make my numbers better?

Meanwhile I was also impressed by Eric's description of the need for content being implicitly personalised for users.  By this he meant that the Internet server should know what content each user is interested in and exclude what they have already looked at and push that content to them.  Again this struck a chord with me because this is precisely what we are trying to achieve in my own company - so perhaps we have our own strategy right :-).

Another interesting fact he mentioned was because of Moore's law our phone's storage....

" in 15 years, it’s a thousand times cheaper and faster. So unless something changes in 15 years, I have a grandson, he’ll be 18 in 15 years. He will have all of the world’s information, every video, every movie and so forth on a single hard drive. If he started watching it, he cannot finish watching it in 85 years. He’ll always be frustrated." 

This is a fascinating fact.  Could this mean that in 15 years time our phones will have the world's information resident on the phone.  Then all we need the Internet for it how that information is changing.  This offline/online approach to using data requires a re-think to how we use the Internet and the software on the phones themselves.  I can see a few new businesses being created based on these new concepts :-)