VentureBeat

Skyfire is a hot new mobile web browser that touts itself as “The PC web. On your phone.” It also touts itself as “real fast,” something which new team addition Mike Rowehl will have a hand in maintaining as the company’s scalability architect.

We last wrote about Rowehl two months ago when the mobile web browser Mowser, a company Rowehl co-founded and was chief executive of, was purchased by the Ireland-based consortium dotMobi. He stayed on for a bit to help with the transition, but now has moved on.

Rowehl, who has experience as a programmer, an entrepreneur and a blogger, will be in charge of propelling the Skyfire’s architecture and development forward. The company should have plenty of money with which to make that happen after securing a $13 million second round at the end of May.

Skyfire is competing in the mobile browser space with Opera Mini and soon Mobile Firefox. However, in practice, Skyfire may be more like Apple’s Safari browser running on the iPhone. After all, as we’ve had drilled into our brains from the commercials, the iPhone is the “real Internet,” in your pocket. If that is true, Skyfire is just a bit more real as it includes one key element that Safari does not: Adobe Flash support.

However, right now Skyfire only works on Windows Mobile devices. The plan is to add Symbian support sometime this Summer.

The software is still in private beta testing, but you can sign up to be included on the company’s site.

[Check out MobileBeat, our mobile conference on July 24. Also, vote for your favorite mobile application or service company.]

If you know the habits of people surfing the web on their mobile phones, you can make quite a bit of money.

Few are in a better position to know than Opera, maker of the web browser used on tens of millions of mobile phones.

The company says in its “State of the Mobile Web” quarterly report being released today that visits to social networks comprise almost 41 percent of all mobile web traffic. In the U.S., South Africa and Indonesia, more than 60 percent of the traffic goes to social networks. Nearly a quarter of all worldwide mobile traffic goes to search engines and content portals. The data is useful to anyone following the growth of social networks on cell phones. [We recently wrote about the ten most significant mobile social networks, and found MySpace and Facebook surprisingly robust.]

The report from the Oslo, Norway-based Opera shows that more than 11.9 million people used the Opera Mini browser in March to view 2.4 billion web pages. To date, 44 million users have tried Opera Mini. The 11.9 million users generate more than 32 million megabytes of data traffic.

Full web features — where the browser accesses the same content as on the computer-based web — accounts for 77 percent of the traffic while WAP-based content, which is recast for the mobile web, accounts for only 23 percent.

Those 11.9 million people generate more than 32 million MB of data traffic for operators worldwide.
- One Web will triumph over WAP content: Full Web surfing comprises more than 77 percent of all traffic. WAP content still generates the remaining 23 percent of traffic. WAP percentages have declined somewhat as more consumers realize Opera Mini can access rich Web content.

In the U.S., where 63 percent of the traffic goes to social networks, the top ten sites are:

www.myspace.com
www.google.com
www.mocospace.com
www.yahoo.com
www.facebook.com
www.live.com
www.hi5.com
www.wikipedia.org
www.itsmy.com
www.ebay.com

The Opera Mini browser, available for free, runs on more than 700 cell phones, including every phone with Java. The data is based on aggregate and anonymized stats from Opera Mini servers. The browser is most popular in the United States, Russia, China, Indonesia, India, United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, South Africa and Ukraine.

The latest versions of the web browsers Opera and Safari are claiming to have reached the big 100/100 score milestone in the Acid3 web standards compatibility test, making them the first browsers to do so. The two sides are thought to have completed the task within minutes of each other, both beating the much more popular Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers to the milestone.

The Acid browser test is developed by The Web Standards Project in order to check various parts of a web browser to ensure it is compatible with the latest set of web standards. Acid3 is the third variation of such a test, hence the “3″. Acid3 in particular tests for specifications that enable “web 2.0″ dynamic applications to run as they were intended. A full list of those specifications can be found here.

To “pass” the test, a browser must receive a 100 out of 100 score and also must have a test image that is pixel perfect and run the test animation smoothly. The WebKit team (makers of Safari) claim to have completed the score requirement as well as the pixel perfect requirement.

You can test your own browser here simply by going to this URL: http://acid3.acidtests.org. For some reference points, my Firefox 3 beta received a 68/100 on the test, while my Camino browser received a 53/100. Apple’s latest released version of Safari (3.1) faired better, receiving a 75/100.

[Above: The image you will see if your browser passes the Acid3 test]

Safari was also the first browser to pass the Acid2 (the predecessor to the Acid3) test. It did so in 2005. Opera also passed that test while no final release version of either Firefox or Internet Explorer were able to. The Internet Explorer team made some headlines in December by saying that their early testing version of the unreleased Internet Explorer 8 had passed the Acid2 test. The new Acid3 test was released in the beginning of this month.

While passing the Acid2 test was not a huge priority for browser makers (hence why Firefox and Internet Explorer released builds never got around to it), passing Acid3 could become more important given its alignment with dynamic web application compatibility.

1) Yahoo’s Yang lambasted by Congress for China actions
2) Social networks eclipse email in the UK
3) Yet another “semantic” search engine launches
4) Coming to a gas station pump near you: Google maps
5) Coming to online games this year: Google ads
6) Mobile web browser Opera Mini 4 out now
7) Forbes aquires majority stake in political blog site RealClearPolitics.com
8) Google-led Android mobile phone software has a long way to go, says rival

Yahoo’s Yang lambasted by Congress for China actions — When a Yahoo lawyer testified to Congress last year that the company hadn’t played an active role in the jailing of Chinese dissidents, the issue was allowed to blow over. Then an organization called Dui Hua dug up the actual documents served to Yahoo China by Chinese police. It’s pretty clear now that Yahoo did know what was going on, and Congressional leaders aren’t happy about it. CEO Jerry Yang and general counsel Michael Callahan were yesterday called “moral pygmies” during hearings in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. That committee is also urging a bill that would criminalize cooperation by US companies with anti-democratic governments, a significant threat to internet companies looking to expand in Asia. More from the WSJ here (image courtesy of Getty Images).

Social networks eclipse email in the UK — A Hitwise study shows that social networks are now receiving more traffic than web-based email services like Hotmail and Gmail in the United Kingdom. That’s mostly due to strong growth in the traffic of social networks, but there has also been a modest decline in traffic to email sites. Predictably enough, the surge toward Facebook and similar sites is led by users aged 18-34, with the fogeys opting for the more familiar web mail.

Yet another “semantic” search engine launches — TrueKnowledge may or may not be worth its weight in 0’s and 1’s, but it at least has the gamut of buzzwords: Natural language processing, semantic search, internal knowledge bases, etc. Unfortunately, the UK-based company isn’t allowing anyone to touch the goods, including ReadWriteWeb, which has a review and video of the site here.

Coming to a gas station pump near you: Google maps – The Internet-connected gas pumps, made by Greensboro, N.C.-based Gilbarco Veeder-Root, will display the maps to help drivers find local destinations. Notably, the destinations will be hand-picked by pump owners and won’t include a way, for the time being, for people to type in addresses and get directions. Google Maps is also available for mobile phones, specifically so you can get directions. At this time, the maps won’t include ads. AP story here.

Coming to online games this year: Google ads – Google will start beta-testing with casual gaming startup BunchBall Games later this month, embedding 15-second video-style ads that appear before and within some of Bunchball’s games. It will offer PC-based ads in December, starting with cult-classic game Psychonauts. Om has the scoop, here. Bunchball is also a member of OpenSocial.

Mobile web browser Opera Mini 4 out now — details here.

Forbes aquires majority stake in political blog site RealClearPolitics.com — press release here.
Google-led Android mobile phone software has a long way to go, says rival – John Forsyth, vice president of strategy at mobile operating system company Symbian has harsh words for Android. He told the BBC is yet another attempt to introduce a Linux-based operating system.

About every three months this year there has been a mobile Linux initiative of some sort launched. It’s a bit like the common cold. It keeps coming round and then we go back to business. We don’t participate in these full stop. We make our own platform and we are focused on driving that into the mobile phone market at large ever more aggressively.

Symbian sold software licenses for 20.4 million smartphones in the last quarter of 2007.

Jockeying for control of the so-called third screen is intensifying, now that most people are carrying around a phone with them, and will consume more and more information from them.

The move to the cellphone may be one of the biggest trends of the decade.

Microsoft has just released Deepfish, a browser that aims to preserve the layout of documents on mobile devices and making Web navigation more easy — enabling you to zoom in and out of a page, and downloading only areas you are interested in. It uploads a thumbnail of pages initially (see image below), and keeps navigation menus, lists of search results or news headlines more intact. It has limited its client release for now; we tried to sign up but were shut out.

It is an answer to the popular Opera mobile browser, which has shown momentum lately. It also follows the release Tuesday by the Minimo Project of another browser (hosted by Mozilla) that boasts faster access, support for modern web standards Javascript and AJAX, some of which Deepfish doesn’t have yet, and things like social bookmarking, tag browsing and RSS support (but still looks like it has some way to go).