Mowser get me thinking of emerging markets again

Previously, I mentioned Mowser, the mobile-savvy transcoder by Russ Beattie.

It’s really cool that he has so much traffic. But, it’s even cooler to see that the emerging mobile markets are well represented in the top countries of users, and a good quarter of it comes from India!  Along with some other usage data from other services I know, I am really really wondering how things like Winksite, Mowser, and MOSH (from Nokia) are really catering to this unslaked thirst for mobile connectivity and content.

I think there is a place still for mobile-only solutions that cater to the mass-billions of users who have only access to XHTML mobile browsers for all their internet service needs. It’s going to also take a new way of thinking of how to connect folks so that they can form social networks, solely fueled through a simple mobile browser.

I always say that Europeans (North Americans, included) are snobby for thinking that folks in emerging markets and without PCs are clueless and don’t use the same internet-fueled services that most of us take for granted. On the contrary, not only do these folks know _everything_ that they could do if they had a PC, they are frantically looking for ways to hack or do the same things from the only browser they have – their mobile phone.

Before I joined Nokia Multimedia, where Nseries devices reign supreme, I was deep into thinking of what could be done to bring the mass-billions of folks with simpler phone, the last billion of which are in the emerging markets, into the Hyperconnected Age. One of my thoughts did include a transcoder (influenced at the time by Russ, himself). I was trying to add some of the functions that we are used to using in our browser, to be wrapped around this transcoder, giving some interactivity and action.

That said, while playing around with Mowser this past week or so, I was wondering how Mowser could be extended, and stumbled upon this post by Russ about a site that puts, what I call, a wrapper around Mowser. The wrapper makes it easy for you to save some bookmarks that are then opened via Mowser.

I like that and I guess I need to learn to code if I want to play around the same.

Indeed, Russ is encouraging folks to use Mowser in clever ways. There are a bunch of Mowser-types connecting at http://mowser.ning.com/ and publishers and hackers can visit the Mowser Wiki to learn how to take full advantage of Mowser. Guess that includes me, I suppose.