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February 27, 2008

MoFuse Instantly Converts Sites for the iPhone

Mark Hendrickson

49 comments »

MoFuse is a service that will take your website and instantly create a mobile version of it, sparing you the development costs of doing so by hand. Today the company is announcing that it will now automatically create iPhone versions of sites in addition to the standard versions for dumbed down mobile browsers.

Starting immediately, when iPhone users browse to the MoFuse mobile version of a site, which can be placed at a subdomain, they will be presented a nicely formatted version for their swank handheld device.

While anyone who wants to create a modestly advanced iPhone version of their site will still need to do so manually, many site owners - and particularly bloggers I imagine - will be content with allowing MoFuse to take care of the work.

Click on the iPhone simulated shot on the right to see what a MoFuse mobile site for the iPhone might look like.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. mofuse：自动拥有手机站点 | 互联网创业者的灵感花园

    February 27th, 2008 at 10:26 am

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    February 27th, 2008 at 10:46 am

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    March 13th, 2008 at 6:07 pm

  6.   Mofuse = Motraffic from Mobile Users — Theres a Blog in my Soup!

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  7. Jarrett House North » Blog Archive » Mofuse: Instant iPhone-savvy web sites?

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Comments

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  1. Your Daddy

    February 27th, 2008 at 9:03 am

    Pretty cool.

  2. MoSub

    February 27th, 2008 at 9:05 am

    Good. iPhone only?

  3. Jim

    February 27th, 2008 at 9:08 am

    I’m sorry but I think techcrunch is on the Apple payroll. This is only blog on the web, save Apple.com, that always has a least 1 picture of the iPhone posted. Most of the time its more.

  4. http://yooflix.com

    February 27th, 2008 at 9:10 am

    Cool :-)

    http://www.yooflix.com

  5. Nate

    February 27th, 2008 at 9:14 am

    Has anyone here set this up yet?

  6. http://yooflix.com

    February 27th, 2008 at 9:18 am

    I tried , but most of the good features mentioned in this post (WYSIWYG editor) are part of the paid plan. The free plan is a DUD.

    http://yooflix.com

  7. bob cobb

    February 27th, 2008 at 9:19 am

    or just use the iphone theme

  8. David Berube

    February 27th, 2008 at 9:25 am

    WYSIWYG page editor/creator is part of the free account. The only time when you cannot use WYSIWYG editing is when you are editing the homepage text.

  9. nick halstead

    February 27th, 2008 at 9:34 am

    What is wrong with viewing normal websites on the iphone? don’t understand the need to ‘mobileize’ them

    sent from: fav.or.it [FID7299]

  10. Jesse

    February 27th, 2008 at 10:10 am

    I just set this up, and I love it.

    http://rawberryjams.com

    Though I don’t like the Home title and the Feedback button that they force on you even when you are a paying user.

  11. EH

    February 27th, 2008 at 10:14 am

    nick: It’s almost as if the “real internet” commercial never happened.

  12. Barnabas Kendall

    February 27th, 2008 at 10:16 am

    Thanks for the heads up on MoFuse. Lately there are several interesting mobile site builders popping up:

    http://www.zinadoo.com/
    http://www.jagango.com/
    http://www.wirenode.com/

    Besides these, there are several on-the-fly mobilizers that adapt desktop content to mobile:

    http://www.google.com/gwt/n
    http://www.skweezer.net/
    http://www.mowser.com/
    http://mlvb.net/

  13. Cesar Cardoso

    February 27th, 2008 at 10:18 am

    Why not using Mowser (http://www.mowser.com)?

  14. David Berube

    February 27th, 2008 at 10:26 am

    @Jesse,

    The Feedback button on the iPhone version has been removed. It was there during our beta testing and was never intended to stay there once released.

  15. MadMax3000

    February 27th, 2008 at 10:42 am

    I thought the iPhone was ready to display any type of website? It has safari. Why do we need to re-moodel the site for iPhone now?

    Please don’t defy the purpose it, otherwise it will act like a regular WAP browser that you site has to be set to.

    http://www.givemebeats.com

  16. danny

    February 27th, 2008 at 10:45 am

    Hmm..perfect timing…gonna test this out and see if it’ll work with a social networking site we’re launching in the next couple of weeks…

  17. JVP

    February 27th, 2008 at 10:50 am

    @ Jim

    I agree to a point. But at least admit, this is a pretty rad service.

  18. Scott from popularo

    February 27th, 2008 at 11:18 am

    I just created one for Popularo to try it out.

    Took less than 2 minutes total, pretty slick!

    Try it: http://popularo.mofuse.mobi/

  19. Dito

    February 27th, 2008 at 11:27 am

    The free version isn’t much more than a RSS feed to your iphone, which doesn’t look much different/better than the default RSS reader on the iPhone. Saves you from having to type “/feed/” at the end of your URL and instead makes you type a whole new address for your site.

  20. Pauly

    February 27th, 2008 at 11:29 am

    Looks like a cool service, Now I just need an iPhone.
    Check us at robotliving.mofuse.mobi

  21. .rb

    February 27th, 2008 at 11:48 am

    fustrated enough because their signup (homepage) has a - lack of pricing plan -

    - yeah I know this is free-mium, but PLEASE! show me the “mium” :) pricing and comparison chart,

  22. Jim Long

    February 27th, 2008 at 11:53 am

    Interesting and useful. I’ve used http://www.baresite.com so far to view mobile unfriendly websites with my iPhone. Before that I used skweezer, but that doesn’t work well anymore with the iPhone.

  23. Justin Shattuck

    February 27th, 2008 at 12:27 pm

    No, MoFuse is not just for iPhone web apps; the perk of MoFuse is it automagically delivers content in the iPhone web app format and style. If you haven’t grown your site yet — do so now!

  24. Geoff

    February 27th, 2008 at 12:36 pm

    Mowser does the same thing, no sign up needed.

    http://mowser.com/about

  25. tomas zeman

    February 27th, 2008 at 1:11 pm

    well we are doing the same ;-)

    I think it would be nice to post a article comparing all system for mobilizing the web/RSS or creating mobile websites.

    http://www.wirenode.com

  26. Do research

    February 27th, 2008 at 1:21 pm

    Oh goodness. The dream of converting content automatically is a myth. Sorry Techcrunch. Do your research….it won’t work for any site.

  27. Tim Jarrett

    February 27th, 2008 at 1:41 pm

    Based on my quick trial (http://jarrett.mofuse.mobi), the reader doesn’t use a particularly readable stylesheet. If you navigate to one of the longer articles on my site (e.g. What makes a good product manager, you’ll see that the paragraphs run together and bullet lists are undistinguished from regular content. It’s much harder to read than it needs to be on the iPhone.

    @MadMax3000, one benefit of MoFuse is that it uses a much more iPhone friendly stylesheet than most sites do, so the text is easily readable on the iPhone without a lot of horizontal scrolling and zooming.

  28. George

    February 27th, 2008 at 1:52 pm

    check out plusmo.com as well. Supports all devices including WAP

  29. Faisal

    February 27th, 2008 at 3:18 pm

    # 24. tomas zeman

    I agree , we need such a comparison.

  30. vic berggren

    February 27th, 2008 at 5:02 pm

    #2 mosub… was it your site that made scoble cry (love the background)

    nicely done david!

  31. Allan T.

    February 27th, 2008 at 5:59 pm

    Cool addition to an easy-to-use mobilizer. Just because the iPhone browser rocks (comparatively) doesn’t mean that websites designed for your 19″ monitor are going to be readable at 3.5″. I think that’s what MoFuse is going for with this feature. Besides, most of the world still doesn’t use an iPhone, and MoFuse is a great way to get stuff to that crowd.

    http://hackablecity.mofuse.mobi

  32. Allen Lau

    February 27th, 2008 at 8:52 pm

    Check out FeedM8 as well. Supports all any web enabled devices, from RAZRs to Blackberries to iPhones.

    Regards,
    Allen Lau
    President and Co-founder
    FeedM8

  33. Paul Lavallee

    February 27th, 2008 at 9:03 pm

    Gotta love local businesses succeeding.

  34. James Holden

    February 27th, 2008 at 10:35 pm

    What I find to be more interesting, or even more irritating; is the comment spam placed on this thread. You have guys at MoFuse who have created a service which is definitely succeeding where other service providers have not. They appearantly have worked their butts off on the service and getting exposure; especially getting a write-up on Techcrunch! However, you have people from all these other service providers trying to steal the lime light..

    Oh you think MoFuse is cool “check out my site,” all that garbage.

    Granted its the sphere and you can do what you want — but why don’t you try actually using comment threads for what purpose they service; discussions and reinforcement to the subject reference. They’re not here for you to use for advertising your own services or websites.

    Allen Lau, Tomas Zeman, and George — if you haven’t — why don’t you take the time, effort and energy to contact the authors at TechCrunch and get your website its own write-up. Don’t try to leech the love from another work.. pathetic.

    For those honest, I found these sites too — makes sense — but to blatently throw out your own site — come on kids; what is this? Be respectful, courteous and use common sense. Thought I would get on here and find something new, when in fact I found the same thing I always do — a bunch of kids needing education.

    There is my .02$; I’ll expect some change.

  35. Anon for Obvious Reasons

    February 28th, 2008 at 3:28 am

    @ #34 James Holden.

    Some change for ya.

    “Don’t try to leech the love from another work.. pathetic.”

    I generally agree with the above and other comments you made which i why i did not add my service to this post like the others you mention above.

    but in regards to…

    “why don’t you take the time, effort and energy to contact the authors at TechCrunch and get your website its own write-up.”

    I’m from an unmentioned service that predates Mofuse, working our butts off to offer mobile site creation with iPhone support (plus more) the day the iPhone was released. We contacted TechCrunch at about the same time (and followed up) via the provided channels. Never heard a word back. Very frustrating to say the least.

    So while I agree it’s silly to self-promote as you mention I can also understand why the above list of people (who mostly all predate MoFuse) felt somewhat compelled to post about their service.

  36. carsten

    February 28th, 2008 at 3:31 am

    in my opinion , it doesn`t make sense for blogs because there are enough plugins to convert your blog to a pda version. i use one too, and you only tip my original url on your pda or handy and if you access with an mobile phone you will see the mobile version ob my blog. in maybe three weeks we will offer an own plugin including text to speech engine for wordpress mobile version (engine allready works on http://www.talkingtext.com in english and german).

    mofuse makes sense for small and middle size website owners to create a mobile version of his webseit by doint it themself.

    sorry about my english, i am from germany!

    Carsten

  37. Jan Horna

    February 28th, 2008 at 5:07 am

    James,

    it seems you do not like a competition ;-)

    I personally do not mind if service providers link their own services in comments in the case the services are related to the topic.

    What I do not like is the way of education you provide. It really adds zero-value to the article content.

  38. Jake McKee

    February 28th, 2008 at 7:42 am

    #34 - Personally I have no problem with the fact that other companies are adding comments. On a site like TechCrunch, I think that makes for richer discussion. If this was happening on my personal blog where the topic wasn’t focused on the announcement of a new business opp, that’d be different.

    You also make it sound like TechCrunch is run with a certain level of equality to what it covers, that simply by notifying TC authors that something exists you’ll get anywhere near equal coverage, if coverage at all.

    TC is not a directory, nor is it an unbiased review site. It’s a news site, and like any news site, we find the one that fits with our own personal interests and biases.

    So long as other are ADDING to the conversation, I’m all for it. If they’re simply spamming, that’s a different story.

  39. Jake McKee

    February 28th, 2008 at 7:44 am

    If you’re using WordPress, install this theme:

    http://iwphone.contentrobot.com/

    It’s free and anytime someone hits your site on the iPhone they get an uber fast, iPhone sexy site version.

  40. David Berube

    February 28th, 2008 at 9:53 pm

    To clarify, comment #34 isn’t associated with MoFuse even though the link on his name goes to MoFuse.

    I think it’s fine our competitors — and our friends — are posting their links on the comments. It increases discussion and I think our product will speak for itself.

  41. dave

    February 29th, 2008 at 8:31 am

    i do believe that mofuse is the first to offer such simple URL aliasing for account control and address control (simple subdomains on YOUR site, like m.site.com), along with logo and minor layout tweaks - it’s all rss parsing, seems fast…works very well on drupal…

    the first test i did was on a larger cms install - the actual drupal.org site - it worked very, very well..adds a widget option so site visitors can SMS themselves the mobile link and so on…but i do notice that comments and login and additional tools reroute through mowser…

  42. Thiago Alexandre

    March 11th, 2008 at 6:19 am

    Took less than 1 minutes total, pretty slick!
    Try it: http://britescade.mofuse.mobi/

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