BigShinyThing

Context: the stunning Opera Mini, iGoogle and the GMail mobile client give us pretty much everything we need on the road: Search, WordPress, FaceBook and email. And Opera Mini does a fair job of managing our RSS life as well. So when Refresh Mobile invited us to come and check out their new mobile midware thingie, touted as ‘a window to the mobile internet’, we were interested to see what more we could be convinced we need. Due to London transport, we didn’t make it to the demo, but we’ve spent the evening messin’ with their product instead. Here are our first thoughts.

Mippin (dreadful name, kids, and the default colour scheme sucks: change it, purleeze!) is a WAP 2.0 social RSS aggregator and news reader for mobiles, with aspirations to greater things, from the people who brought us Mobizines (yes indeed).

On the couple of native phone browsers we tried, as well as an online WAP emulator, and Opera Mini, it all worked as expected: type in the URL of an RSS-enabled site, and off you go. No RSS? Too bad: at this point Mippin only works with feeds. Oops. And the press release is relentless is calling potential subscribers consumers. Get with the program, kids: we aren’t consumers, we’re multipliers, damn it — flatter our egos and we’ll give you a bit more slack on the features and functionality!

Anyway. Sign up, and you get a Mippin profile preloaded with a bunch of the usual-suspect blogs, in categories including Men and LifeStyle (LifeStyle, interestingly, seems to be mostly ‘girl stuff’ — don’t Men also have LifeStyles? Not online, it seems). There’s no indication as to whether those categories are static, or dynamically-generated based on Mippin users’ usage patterns and interactions. After experiencing the subtle magic of FaceBook’s filtering systems (’A friend of a friend who you often email has posted an event in a category of events invitations which you usually accept, so I’ll tell you about it’), we’re kind of hoping that Mippin has some collaborative filtering magic behind the curtain as well. If so, the press release is keeping schtum on that whole area. Mippin does, however, make it easy to text, twitter (do people really use twitter — real people I mean?) or email stories to friends, and encourages readers to vote sites up or down in popularity. All a bit 1.0, but better than nothing, we guess. And Mippin is still in beta.

But, we’re left feeling a bit whatever. Mippin is a decent WAP-based RSS aggregator, with a bit of a social media flavour thrown in for the kids. And it adapts well to the capabilities of the different handsets we tried it on, without the need for any installs. If you’ve got a WAP-only phone and need a news fix, Mippin might be a must-have as-is. For the rest of us, I guess it’s wait-and-see on what emerges as the beta progresses. To us, it all currently feels akin to an open source project a few months prior to it being Slashdot-worthy. Refresh promises to listen to community feedback: we say try it out, and let them know your thoughts. If they’re serious about that, your feedback might be just what Mippin needs to shine.

Publishers are trying to gain the attention of a young audience by sending books to cell phones and flashing the text before users’ eyes one word at a time. Launched in England less than a year ago, ICUE software lets users read novels on their cell phone without the irritation (to some) of constantly scrolling through heaps of text on a small screen. Instead, the text is flashed on the screen one word (or phrase) at a time. It’s positioning? Moving the way you read. This is clever stuff — a product following the consumer, not the other way around.

The application (like lots of other cool stuff) was originally developed by the military. It is based on the tachistoscope, a rapid image recognition device that was invented by the US Air Force and first used to train pilots to recognise enemy planes from a distance. The device was later used to teach speed-reading techniques.

ICUE currently has some 10,000 customers and claim that their audience are used to digesting content in this way (advertisers and content owners take note) because they already spend hours staring at rapidly moving images of video games. According to ICUE managing director Jane Tappuni,

Our customers are split between business and tech-orientated readers and, obviously, teenagers. It’s the 16 year olds who are using us the most because they are the ones who are on their mobiles the most. Their reading is split between the classic list that has to do with what they’re reading in school and the contemporary list.

ICUE has already brokered deals with mobile books with major publishers like HarperCollins, Pan MacMillan and Pearson. Interestingly, the company plans to launch in the US only once it has cracked the UK market because - in mobile terms — it is so much more developed:

The UK is 18 months to two years ahead of the US cellular market. Only 35 percent of Americans have sent a text message, as compared to almost 100 percent in the UK.

Tappuni says that 80 percent of users who download ICUE and view the demo text go on to buy ebooks and that she often hears from teachers interested in making ICUE books available to their classes. After all, those kids are glued to their mobile screens already.

Source: MIT’s Technology Review.