It’s always a good idea to kill your startup in public. Russell Beattie did that last month with Mowser, a service that converts regular Web addresses into mobile-friendly ones, because he said didn’t “believe in the ‘Mobile Web’ anymore.” Luckily for him, some people disagreed with him (and not just Mike).

Mowser’s intellectual property and the site itself was acquired today by dotMobi, the mobile domain-name consortium based in Ireland. The technology will be integrated into dotMobi’s own http://find.mobi/ service, as well as some of its mobile domain creation tools. Needless to say, Russell Beattie is now a happy man.

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Now I certainly think that the day of creating specialty stripped down version of web pages for mobile devices is coming to an end (and that’s what Mowser did). Small screens with poor bandwidth equals an unusable product. In the U.S. today almost all mobile browsing occurs on smart phones with big screens and full keyboards. The iPhone in particular is browsing friendly as users can simply move the screen around with their fingers, and zoom in or out on the extremely crisp screen.

In short, the gains in hardware have made a special markup language for phones redundant. More and more people will be getting true smart phones in their hards that can open and view normal webpages quickly. and see the entire screen. We no longer need middleman software to convert normal websites into stuff that lesser phones can understand. It will be much better to push prices down so that todays iPhone is available for next to nothing in the third world. The First world will have moved on to increasingly better devises.

So I disagree that The Mobile Web is dead. For many of us it is just coming alive. Given the speed at which these devices are evolving and price dropping, I don’t think it’s worth people’s time to build sofware that optimizes the experience. Rather, they should use their expertise to build exciting new applications that will run directly on these new platforms.

So don’t think of this as the death of your startuup, Russell. Think of it as an opportunity to let your creativity fly while you imagine how you can change the world. My guess is you’ll land somewhere very interesting, and start building software that will be used passionately by your users.

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Founded by ex-Yahoo mobile evangelist Russell Beattie in 2007, Mowser offered a web to mobile friendly page service. Users entered the address of the web page they wanted to view into Mowser, and the site returned a mobile version of the page.

According to Beattie, the site was unable to raise funding and traffic to the site has been declining this year. Beattie writes of a serious case of financial hardship, including being unable to pay rent, having his car repossessed, and subsisting on buttered macaroni as revenue from Moswer dropped to only single figures a day.

Notably Beattie has gone cold on the mobile sector altogether, writing:

I don’t actually believe in the “Mobile Web” anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst. I’m talking specifically about sites that are geared 100% towards mobile phones and have little to no PC web presence. Two years ago I was convinced that the mobile web would continue to evolve in the West to mimic what was happening in countries like Japan and Korea, but it hasn’t happened, and now I’m sure it isn’t going to.

The other interesting takeaway: 80% of Mowser’s traffic was porn related.

All development on the site has stopped and although the service will remain live for now, Beattie is preparing customers for a full shutdown. Mowser joins the TechCrunch Deadpool.

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