Travel fare and deal finder site Mobissimo has added a social feature, called MobiFriends, that lets you tell your pals where you're going and when, what you're paying for your trips, and your favorite restaurants at your destinations. It optionally updates your Twitter feed, too, so now anyone tracking you can know the optimal time to burgle your house.
The MobiFriends widget will blast your travel details out to your social network, if you want it to.
There seems to be a minor bubble growing right now of travel update sites. Like Dopplr, Tripit, and BrightKite, MobiFriends does a good job of reaching out to your network and telling them what you're up to, so your pals can presumably join you at your destination and make the virtual social network real. MobiFriends' unique value is its integration into Mobissimo, a strong fare finder. If you use MobiFriends on top of Mobissimo, you can easily push your travel discoveries (good fares, for example) out to your friends. Or see the deals and locations your friends are interested in.
I'm not one to blast my travel or location info out to the world at large, but the younger demographic may not be so sensitive to privacy as I am. And Mobissimo's move to add a social element to its fare-finder service is a good way to differentiate the product from a sea of travel sites.
I will be discussing travel sites like this one in the weekly Real Deal podcast I'm recording this afternoon with Tom Merritt. Tune in to the live video and chat at 3 p.m. PDT or check on the podcast page shortly after 4 p.m. for the recorded audio-only version.
Microsoft announced Thursday it has made plans to acquire MobiComp, a mobile-data company founded in 2000
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. MobiComp, which is based in Braga, Portugal, will become part of Microsoft's Mobile Communications Business division.
The acquisition will be used to bolster a number of services on the Windows Mobile smartphone platform as well as the Windows Live Web services division.
MobiComp has developed an array of products: MobileKeeper Backup & Restore, MobileKeeper Sharing & Communities, and Active mTicker. They're used by companies to back up data stored on mobile phones, submit content from mobile phones to social networks like Facebook, and access news and other mobile media.
"People expect their phones to deliver the best experiences from PCs and the Web right to their pockets," Todd Peters, Microsoft's corporate vice president for its Mobile Communications Business, said in a release Thursday. "Investing in the right solutions from companies like MobiComp will extend the capabilities of Windows Mobile and Windows Live to help us provide the most innovative and seamless way to stay connected."
MoFuse, a mobile Web site-creation service, has removed even more steps when converting a .com Web site into a .mobi site, which is optimized for viewing from a cell phone, smartphone, or any other Internet-lovin' device.
With MoFuse Grow beta, individual and business bloggers can simply feed their site's RSS link into the blank field to generate a MoFuse URL with a .mobi suffix. New users looking for a more articulate link are enticed to join the service, which has both free and affordable options (compared here with Zinadoo's similar offering.)
Images render nicely with MoFuse Grow.
The MoFuse Grow interface carries a lush pastoral theme, and stays true to its word with a straightforward field for pasting a copied RSS link. Another link ushers bloggers to a partially-emulated view of a stripped-down mobile site that, in turn, takes you to a full emulator with navigation and appropriately rendered images. Back on MoFuse Grow's landing page, there's a prominent area that market's MoFuse services and gives users the option to register so they can customize and style the newly-created mobile blog site, or buy into additional services, like choosing a catchier domain name.
MoFuse Grow is essentially a supremely accessible, one-click Web app for drawing users in and promoting MoFuse.com's more powerful and more involving WYSIWYG interface for customizing a blog's mobile look. The tool is a gift for those who want a no-fuss, no-muss way to get at their blogs from the small screen. Those who plan to share their URL around, however, are best served by Mofuse.com's full visual design process and by shedding the clumsy, free .mobi URL. For them, MoFuse Grow produces the bud, but by no means the blossom.
In September I reviewed Zinadoo, a free service for creating mobile Web sites with a ".mobi" domain. Zinadoo, and now MoFuse, which joined the mobile Web site creation space last week, give individuals and companies a chance to put their wares in a format that will render well from the mobile phone each and every time, from any browser.
So the question is: which service serves you better? The bird's-eye answer is that they both purpose WYSIWYG editors to make site creation painless. They've both worked well, every time. Zinadoo is much more bubbly, graphics-rich, and a touch more gratifying to use.
Zinadoo's bright WYSIWYG site design page is also well-designed
(Credit: CNET Networks)MoFuse differentiates itself by emphasizing content through feeds; it wants to be the ".mobi" location of your ".com" site, particularly your blog. MoFuse populates the bulk of your mofuse.mobi site with that feed, though you can create static content and more capability is in the works. In many ways MoFuse caters more elaborately to users, who can add quickly widgets and redirect codes where serviceable to promote their mobile site. Customized ".mobi" domain names are also free with MoFuse, in contrast with Zinadoo, which charges 18 euros a year to drop the ".zinadoo" suffix from the URL. Zinadoo also sells text messaging credits. For the time being, MoFuse has shunned all premium services.
That's not to say it's shunned a business plan. Users can place ads from either the AdMob or Google AdSense with MoFuse's revenue sharing program; gains split straight down the middle. Zinadoo also places ads, but doesn't announce a revenue-sharing program.
While there are limitations to both sites in terms of interaction and universal click-to-call capability, MoFuse strikes me as a more practical and user-friendly site for the current clime, particularly for individual bloggers. Zinadoo, however, is better suited to create original content that's exclusively mobile.
A blog feed rendered through MoFuse
(Credit: CNET Networks)
My Zinadoo mobile app
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