Unity Mobile wants to change that with the launch today of its web-based platform, which lets developers create cross-platform apps and marketing campaigns for both mobile phones and Internet web sites.
This is one of many developments that will make it much easier for businesses to reach people via the mobile web. Doctors could send out appointment reminders with maps to their offices. Real estate agents could deliver detailed information on a house for sale in response to a text message ad. Retailers could send out text message coupons to people walking near a location.
It's a kind of one-stop shopping for developers who need to publish apps across a bunch of mobile platforms. Daniel West, chief executive of the Prague, Czech Republic-based company, which has a U.S. office in St. Petersburg, Fla., said the idea is to get the mobile web to follow in the footsteps of PC-based web services. In the early days, it was a hassle to publish content on web sites. But with better standards, automation, and web services, it became far easier to set up sites quickly.
That's what should happen with mobile sites, West said in an interview. It should be trivial, for instance, for developers to add shopping, email service, and other apps to a mobile web site. Developers should be able to set up mobile sites within 10 minutes, taking advantage of the investment they've already made in PC-based web sites. But there is still a big difference between making an app work on a computer and making it work on a mobile phone.
Another new competitor, Webalo, emerged yesterday. But West claims no one does everything that Unity Mobile does. West said the analytics reveal what users are viewing on a mobile web site, which carriers and phones they are using, and other data.
West said developers can easily integrate QR Code into a mobile web site. That's a kind of bar code used in Asia and Europe where the phone can import data and direct a mobile browser to a particular web site as the phone is scanned across a bar code. West said it's also easy to stage and test a site.
The Unity Mobile platform is built on Microsoft's .NET technology. It uses the C sharp programming language and ASP.NET. It passes information between various software platforms via via XML over HTTP.
Unity Mobile, part of the U-Turn Media Group in Prague, was founded in 2001. It built custom mobile apps for clients but found it was hard to expand the business. The money from clients let the company fund itself, but it decided to take a new direction in the past year. It launched the Unity Mobile brand in January. It has 37 employees and expects to be cash-flow positive this year.
[Are you an entrepreneur or executive active in mobile? Come network with industry players at MobileBeat, our mobile conference for industry leaders. Sign up by May 23, and save $145.]