Roland Tanglao's Weblog

My apologies to Oren and the Contec crew; they gave me an early BUZmob heads up and for no good reason I didn't get around to trying it. Tried it tonight and it rocks on my N93 (both WAP and normal WebKit browser). Fast, sleek and useful river of news RSS aggregator. Now if only we had affordable mobile internet in Canada, sigh !

Question for Oren et al: will it work on any WiFi device? It works great on my Nokia N800. Will it work on other mobile devices like a Sony Playstation PSP or Nintento DS? My guess is yes!

And a feature request: please have an automatic 'mark as read' (don't need checkboxes but why show me something that I've already read?).

If you have a mobile device with WiFi or some sort of connectivity built in, you'll have fun with BUZmob. It's a great way to browse the web (since anything important on the web is linked to from an RSS feed!) Check it out! Go Contec go!

FROM BUZme mobile feed publishing service is now in open beta « The Mobile Net - From Useless to Useful:

QUOTE

Wow, it’s been a busy few months here at Contec Innovations. Today we announced the immediate availability of our mobile feed publishing service, BUZmob.

BUZmob is a web-based service which allows content publishers - bloggers, media sites, social networks, business websites - to instantly make their RSS/Atom based content available to all of their mobile readers. Mobile users need not download anything to their phones, and don’t even have to subscribe to a web-based service in order to access mobile content. The service combines text messaging, on-the-fly content adaptation, personalization, automatic bookmark generation and universal access to go beyond technophiles, and to enable even first time mobile-Internet users to easily interact with the content they regularly consume on the web.

END QUOTE

Here's an N93 video of Introductions at Vancouver League of Drupalers January 2007 meeting last night (8 minutes 28 seconds; I missed some people because the N93 crashed and a few were late):

Contec folks Axel and Roland are at Bryght today for the January 2007 Vancouver League of Drupalers to present on their use of Drupal and Drupal with Mobile. Here are rough "live" notes:

• TSX:BUZ is their symbol!
• main market is China, head office is Port Coquitlam (20ish ), 10 in Beijing
• framework for hosting mobile applications
• used to use PostNuke
• moved to Drupal
• need bilingual Chinese, i18n, zh-hans
• used tinymce for marketing
• filerbrowser - Boris suggests taxonomy_explorer which is used for file downloads, can browse files by vocabulary
• nice_menus
• Big question: can we give our members access to their site using mobile phone?
• How to mobilize Drupal page?
• Main problem is that alot of mobile phones only support WML not HTML, small screens, image capability, etc.
• So used rendering service (from Contec naturlich!)
• Re-render based on device's UA profile
• This works just fine with Drupal
• Added some hints to an existing theme
• Limitations: no Flash, no Javascript, no Active/X, no Java Applets
• Do these limitations apply to Drupal?
• What do we do about Javascript?
• Drupal site should work without Javascript i.e. should degrade gracefully
• There is a Drupal mobile theme with stripped HTML - i.e. http://drupal.org/project/mobile
• Boris - Should be able to use this with a module
• Steven - use hook_init() - inside hook use PHP include
• ianiv - use WML theme?
• Answer problem is with images, phone may support only certain types of images, may have hard limit of data, etc
• Boris points to his E61 which has WebKit browser
• Are there mobilization activities within Drupal?
• mobile group at groups.drupal.org
• SMS Gateway module - http://drupal.org/project/smsgateway
• sjdkfljsd
• WAP push - push binary SMS with URL in it, could use for blog subscription, also content download like a ringtone
• How important is this to the Drupal community
• Web service to deliver SMS and WAP push
• interest in APIs
• people would use free service even they had ads