If the future of the web is the mobile web, then mobile site creation is going to be a big thing. A few services have already spotted the opportunity but Jag.ag a new service coming out from Israel has a very interesting product approach that could make it stand out.
Just to makes things clear i am not referring to technologies that are porting existing websites to mobile devices like Mofuse (for RSS publishers’ usage), Infogin (another israeli startup for existing websites adaptation to mobile) or Momac (operator service). Jag.ag and its competitors like Zinadoo or Wirenode are enabling non tech audiences to create their own mobile presence in a few steps/minutes.
Unlike its competitors, Jag.ag offers you to start your page creation without the necessity to open an account which is a good driver to conversion. You first land on a WYSIWYG simple interface with where you can compose your page. The editor includes a gallery of content you can add which is not really of the highest quality for now but that will be fed over time with better items. The interesting part is the “web grabber” which lets you capture part of the web with a very slick drag and drop interface and that integrates with Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr and Google (any mobile service like maps)
Once your mobile page is done (at this stage you still don’t have to open an account) you just need to set a mobile URL.jag.ag (in our example http://techcrunch.jag.ag) and finalize the creation of your account by simply adding your email and mobile phone. You receive then an SMS and a credit of 30 SMS to invite your friends (the URL can be sent by email). Your site is then accessible freely and hosted by Jag.ag. The rendering should be fine with most mobile devices.
Jag.ag can be used to create mobile sites, mobile greetings and mobile invitations although i am not so sure about the relevancy of this last category since invitations tend to need more features like RSVP management. You can easily imagine how this platform could be used to other purposes (professional presence, advertising,…). If you already have a mobile site you can import if into Jag.ag. A Wap editor is also available although i don’t believe this will have strong adoption for obvious reasons as lack of conveniency. Overall the service is good but the home page design, the content selection and the editor ergonomy could still be improved.
Jag.ag is only a few months in the air but shows already strong adoption from those who came across the site tells me Lior Netzer the CEO of Jag.ag. The company has not raised money from VCs. It is supported by Arik Czerniak (who co founded the company and is a board member) who co-founded and recently left MetaCafe. Some first class angels are supporting this project. The company is betting, rightly so, that many will need a mobile presence, ad hoc casual or professional and that Jag.ag will be a good solution for them. Jag.ag can also be seen as a better alternative to SMS/MMS. The business model can be easily guessed since we are talking about a web to mobile service: premium services and SMS credits for different actions and features will be part of the recipe.
For those who were wondering where this name is coming from: just take your mobile phone and write the URL on it: single clicks and easy memorization (5-2-4-0-2-4)
Does this help publishers get free web traffic?
I’m still skeptical on this too, It’s quite confusing. What’s the use for this service?
And why don’t they use a COM tld if they’re going for stuff like this.. Not many people will remember stuff like these, because it’s not aimed entirely at developers.
Hi Bill,
We wanted to make our domain easy to remember and the fewest possible clicks on a simple (non qwerty) phone. Jag.ag is six clicks, and each letter is the first in the 3 letter combination on each key (vs. say .mobi, .com). In terms of use we see mostly profile sites with personal info, family pics and the likes and fun/romantic messages. You can check out the “recent sites” section after you have registered.
Lior
How is this solving a problem given mobile devices like the iPhone, Instinct, G1, and HTC Touch Pro, as well as browsers like Skyfire making it easy to access a .com website?
Hi Curtis,
Jag.ag is more about creating your own made-for-mobile site or message and sharing it. Then it get’s viewed by your friends/other users. It’s not about adopting regular sites to mobile. It’s true you could view regular web pages with the devices above but Jag.ag sites are made-for-mobile. Easy, graphical, fast and can be viewed properly on over a 1000 devices in our database vs. just the hi-end phones you mention.
LIor
I don’t really get this. What is this ? Geocities for your phone ?
-Marcio Castilho
http://www.uquery.com
It definitely has similarities to geocities for mobile but it is made-for-mobile. Quick creation, works on over 1000 phones (adopted properly to screen size, browser and more), and hooks tightly with SMS (something not relevant for Geocities)
@ Shawn not sure this is the immediate purpose since those sites will mainly be created by private users and not corporations. however i assume jag.ag will have good indexing in google or other mobile search engines
surely its better to grab something like Opera Mini and see the whole web on your phone…?
I think ‘made for mobile’ sites are going to win out in the end. The drop in screen real estate from a PC to a mobile device is huge. Pages designed with this smaller form factor in mind are much more usable, don’t you think?
Ben Lambert
Founder,
Siteswish – The website design tool
@curtis, read again the post. this is ad hoc site creation not about porting existing sites
@marcio yes
Moozey (http://www.moozey.com) also offers a similar service, but it’s mainly oriented for business users. It has very detailed reporting/analysis tools and integrates WAP, SMS and 2D-Barcodes in logical “mobile campaigns”. Just like the products mentioned in the article, it takes only a few minutes to setup your mobile presence.
Another mobile site creation tool worth checking out is Mofon.mobi. We’ve got a lot of features such as password-protected pages, SSL pages, blog/RSS reader, email reader, use your own domain name, and more. Sites can be set up as regular business sites, intranets, or personal sites for keeping lists, photos and useful info.
@Nod again you are referring to existing sites vs creating ad hoc pages
@Can Jag.ag is mainly for consumer purposes, Moozey is not free.
Hmm , i just reviewed Mofuse on my blog , and i tried Jag.ag right now , but still i feel Mofuse is the way to go !
@Rahul, read comments above, Mofuse serves a different purpose and different type od users
Any chance of chaning the Link on MoFuse in the post to go to the MoFuse homepage and not to Crunchbase?
This is just an useless service, I guess you are writing to your friend. Waste of time.
Unless the offer a turn-key solution for marketing or at least getting traffic to those mobile sites I don’t see why I should create one in the first place. GeoCities at least had a catalogue of its users’ homepages.
Hi Bjoern,
We find our users create sites to share with either single person (greetings) or to build their own mobile site to be able to show anyone, anytime, with their own .jag.ag domain (similar to having you own .mobi domain, but free and less clicks…). I can’t rule out monetization to users from marketing but this is not the current focus.
Regarding cataloging like geocities did, we have basic search and categories today: Login and then go to http://www.jag..../community.aspx
to see.
Lior
I think folks are going to demand more and more iPhone-ish devices, that can see the whole internet instead of having one site for regular browsers and one for mobile.
There are going to be whole new classes of sites that make sense on mobile devices but not as regular web sites. In general they will be more compact, but they will deliver information directed more specifically at people on the go. A mobile version of a restaurant site might just have today’s specials, their phone number and address. Mobile intranet sites will be useful for companies whose employees are in the field. Personal or family mobile sites can serve as “electronic wallets” where you would keep shopping lists, photos, useful info such as account numbers, etc. These types of sites would not be as practical as regular web sites, so there is a need for these types of mobile site-building tools.
Hi Brig,
iPhone has definitely shaken the market and made mobile internet a whole lot better. it is also keeping device manufacturers on their toes now that apple has set a very hi par. on the other hand we see based on todays shipments what the phones in the market will be in 2010 and although there will be many million iPhones and iPhone clones/copies, most of the 3.5B phones out there in 2010 will NOT do as good a job as the iPhone. With Jag.ag your sites look great on Any phone, on any network, today and in the future …
Lior
I pefer mippin.com
I think you mean that you developed mippin.com, right?
MobiLuck is launching a similar but much simpler service. People and Places can create their mobile webpage for free in 1 minute. Already 330,000 people pages and 50,000 places pages created and indexed by Google mobile. Premium features coming…
they have a differnet focus altogether with site creation a side focus. their site creation capabilities pale compared to Jag.ag.
How did this post ever make it live? Are we to assume that TechCrunch has decided that basic readability is not part of “new media” – a quaint relic from our journalistic past?
Unacceptable.
Ben, i just pressed the “publish” button on wordpress and it worked suprisingly well
Internet startup GoHoster.com allows the same type of functionality … very easy to use … http://www.gohoster.com
The system looks like it has a friendly user interface and I notice the point. But…
I do understand people saying
How is this solving a problem given mobile devices like the iPhone, Instinct, G1, and HTC Touch Pro, as well as browsers like Skyfire making it easy to access a .com website?
because if I clearly understands it giives a quick and lite and easy to watch version for mobile devices. OK. But then it’s the same debate as usual
specific mobile version vs. standard version seen on safari or other mobile browser…
Because, hu it sounds pretentious to say a thing like that but it’s not… it doesn’t give nothing more than a standard web version seen on mobile
(except some look and feel)
The topic when you go making “business” in setting up your own mobile version of a site is not about getting a friendly looking Techrunch mobile version (which seem to be the case in using jag.ag or mobitype or any other “create your own site by yourself” tool)
The question is why do i set up a mobile site when people can browse my regular one easily?
- i the answer is: providing a beautiful mobile browsing experience for user… ok then use those mentionned solutions.
- if the answer is: trying and get my mobile users to buy something or being convinced by something i try and show them (product dedicated sites like I heard Diet coke set one with Marvellous earlier this week) those site creators are not enough powerful to provide (by now) a real usable response.
- how d’you get traffic from mobile operators with sites that doesn’t respond with them requirements
- how d’you bill a thing whereevver you are (using the best payment method: which can be either mobile paypal, operator N system wich has a good reversing level, payforit, gallery, w-ha…
- how do you promote your mobile version and get people coming to these when they are in mobile environment
- how do i manage specific repositories to store my mobile contents to be shown or sold?
- How can I have a clue on who the f… is my visitor. What is tracked? what’s not?
- How can i manage to do some e-m-commerce with those site
- how do I use CRM features related (like… you buyer you went on my site last week… I’ll send you an SMS just to say i’ve got a new thing in stock. Or moreover. You guy was buying a madonna t-shirt (i’ve seen this by tracking my pages) now i’ll send you a SMS saying the new album is ready to be bought.
- how do I managed an optimise e-m-commerce site that looks great with my Safari, Nokia, Opera… browser.
- How do I manage a version for french users in french, for german in German, for people seeing my site on an operator portal, or on off portal… Do I prefer set up a new site each type I have a new e-m-commerce context (one for Vodafone, one for Orange, one for Bouygues, then one for off portal, another for VIP, another for girls only, another one for Lg user -caus’ i’ve set up a partnership with the manufactuurer allowing me to set a link in the handsets that are bought off pack- etc. etc. Not to mention the specific legal mentions I have to set up on each of those sites versions regarding any specific territory
- how do i manage to collect infos from external web or mobile sites (RSS, content)? How do I manage to collect end user informations related to my web optin base….)
If these concerns are yours when setting up a specific mobile site (meaning you understand that a specific mobile version can give you more sellings the same way the both flash and regular versions of your web site improve the user experience and improve your sales or customer satisfaction) then you:
- need a mobile version: and if your site is basic then try jag.ag or Mobitype creator for example
or
- need a more complex version of a mobile site (CRM, repository, billing, contexts, SMS…) then go and see Momac, Netsize or Netbiscuits projects and end to end solutions for mobile development
Or maybe I’m wrong…
What d’you guys think?
“For those who were wondering where this name is coming from: just take your mobile phone and write the URL on it: single clicks and easy memorization (5-2-4-0-2-4)”
In my phone (A Sony Ericsson), it’s (5-2-4-1-2-4).
With many new 3G accessible phones coming up, surfing on the mobile phone is becoming more common place. Jag.ag application would certainly be useful for user-generated content for the mobile phone.
We’ve been doing this at Wapple for nearly five years now. Our platform is far more complete, better supported and in use by huge brands such as MTV International.
Tagga combines free mobile sites with free SMS campaigns, check it out: http://www.tagga.com
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Great site whatev
completely useless.