VentureBeat

Proteus, a Washington D.C. area mobile applications company recently launched Swift, a service that lets anyone easily create websites specifically geared towards mobile devices. Company president Guy Vidra recently spoke with us about the product’s launch.

There’s a pressing need to solve the current stalemate in the mobile web market. Most consumers don’t access the web on their mobile device, partly because the experience is poor; most websites don’t create a mobile-specific version because the low market penetration doesn’t justify the effort.

In the past, Proteus has built mobile sites based upon the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) for large media companies such as ABC and FOX. The WAP standard takes into account the limited screen real estate available on mobile browsers as well as slower connectivity speeds on mobile devices.

Proteus has now launched Swift, a browser application that lets you create WAP pages using a simple WYSIWYG interface (the What You See Is What You Get tools that Microsoft made famous with Word). Users can create sites through point and click. Swift also caters to bloggers because RSS feeds can be automatically imported (screenshot below). Overall, Swift is intuitive to use but requires real effort if you’re going to create more than a couple of page’s worth of content.

In my opinion, there are three major issues with Swift. First, web usage within the mobile market is still rare; a new report by M:Metrics shows that only 13 percent of mobile phone users accessed information over a mobile web browser in January 2008. At these levels of penetration, it’s hard for small publishers to justify significant effort in creating a mobile site. Secondly, mobile web usage is increasingly popular amongst owners of advanced mobile devices such as iPhone and Blackberry (commonly termed “smartphones”). These devices don’t require WAP-enabled sites to load web pages.

Third, while a customized mobile site is still key for large sites — Facebook’s mobile version (http://m.facebook.com) is a great example of a WAP site done well — I’m not certain there’s a need for average bloggers and other small sites to go through the same exercise. Add to that the fact that Proteus retains all of the revenues generated by placing ads on the free version of the service, and you have to wonder how the company plans to attract users.

Overall, I believe Swift’s premium version — which costs $3,000 for the account and a monthly licensing fee — would prove a useful self-serve option for publishers that have the traffic to justify a mobile-only site. Unlike the free version, the premium version lets publishers control the monetization units and retain 100 percent of revenues. It also provides reporting and additional premium features.

Proteus was founded in 1996 and is located in the greater Washington D.C area. The company was acquired in 1996 by 2Ergo, a U.K. listed company, for an undisclosed sum.