I finally got a chance to read through a post on the Bango blog by their CEO Ray Anderson regarding the still somewhat unknown Novarra transcoding SNAFU. Ray has commented on an interview at Mobile Marketing Magazine with Novarra’s COO.

Ms Rangarajan, as COO of Novarra is at best badly mis-informed or at worst blatantly transcoding the truth in her interview with the Magazine.

I completely agree with Ray on this one.

For those of you not aware of this issue, here’s what’s going on. There are a number of mobile carriers using Novarra’s transcoding technology which allows ordinary Internet web sites to be adapted for mobile handsets. They are not the first transcoder on the web, but I believe they are the first that completely hides the information about the actual phone and browser it is being viewed on.

When Vodafone UK launched the Novarra transcoder on the now infamous 7/7/07 , to enable desktop optimised websites to render better on mobile, the result was outcry from thousands of content providers large and small that their sites could no longer be seen, were corrupted, or were destroyed.

http://uk.techcrunch.com/2007/09/21/vodafone-in-mobile-web-storm/

Advertisers on mobile sites found their ads were no longer viewed. People selling mobile content had a surge in customer complaints - content that was sold did not work (the phone type was unknown) or simply not delivered.

Vodafone UK had not forseen the problem, but reacted very quickly to create a “whitelist” of sites that would bypass the transcoder - and this patch is still in place. Organizations like the BBC, CNN, SKY, Facebook, Flickr and others had service restored within a few days. The problem remains however that sites are “adapted” or corrupted unless the website owner knows how to get themselves added to the whitelist. Estimates of the financial losses to website owners in the UK range from hundreds of thousands of pounds upwards.

Those of us that are techies know that Novarra had to go out of their way to hide the original user agent information. There is no question in my mind that this was done intentionally. While we can identify the visitors from Novarra gateways with Mobilytics, we do not have any info on the phone model, capabilities or other identifying information.

According to Novarra’s COO:

“The problem only arose on mobile sites that were not .wap or .mobi. - but there were a lot of people who didn’t address their mobile sites as .wap or .mobi. They addressed them as .com, because in the world they were used to, it wasn’t possible for their regular website to be rendered on a phone. “

Ray’s reply:

Er, yes. I have no idea what a “.wap” site is, but of course most sites will be .com, .net, .de or .co.uk or whatever. They will be in peoples bookmarks, sent to users in messages etc., why should a person have to change their site address to stop Novarra breaking their site?

This is crazy! They are transcoding mobile web sites that are already built to render perfectly on mobile phone. Mobile developers have painstakingly built these sites to render properly depending on what size screen a phone has and it’s capabilities. Novarra is completely stripping that information. At a minimum all they need to do is look at the headers and not transcode a site that has the proper doc type. They claim to not transcode .mobi or .wap (I’ve never heard of this one either Ray.), but that’s not good enough.

While Novarra would like to claim that one very loud voice is causing industry backlash, this is simply not true. Also, without the Analytics that Ray and I provide, many content providers probably don’t even know this is happening!

This issue needs to be publicized outside the tech community. Big brands and small site alike who have spent time and money tailoring their content need to speak up and let the Carriers that use Novarra’s technology know what’s going on. We are not asking them to stop rendering Internet Web Sites on Mobile, we are asking them the stop rendering Mobile Web Sites as Internet Web Sites for Mobile.

If we can write code to identify thousands of phones, why can’t the transcoders simply not transcode mobile web sites? If the site is .mobi compliant, then don’t transcode it! It’s that simple.

Better yet, here’s a simple fix that can be put in place in less than an hour. If you see this, add the site to the whitelist and don’t transcode it!

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.0//EN”

"http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd">

Even simpler is this: IF THE DOCTYPE CONTAINS THE WORD MOBILE THEN WHITELIST (Novarra, translate to whatever development language used. I put the pseudocode in the public domain.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 9:12 am and is filed under Mobile Marketing, Mobile Web, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Web Analytics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.