Well I thought i would have a look at another new mobile offering tonight. And it looks like this time it's some software from the Irish company Nubiq which is a spin off company from Telecommunications Systems Software Group (TSSG). Last month they launched their first product Zindoo.
”Zinadoo is targeted at the average individual/organisation and doesn't require any programming skills. There are also many text based services around the site which users can customise to meet their needs and the needs of their customer.”
This particular product was demonstrated alongiside the launch of dotmobi and they basically provide a quick and easy solution to provide a dotmobi complient mobile website. They state:
“We are dotmobi's site creator tool of choice as we comply with all their "style guides" which are particularly focused on usability issues.”
Well after that I thought I should have a look and see what all the fuss was about. On the surface it looks like a nice solid product with a definate market potential in the fact that it is fully dotmobi compliant. The only big issue that I had was that you have to re-write all the content and then re-publish it to your site.... What I would love to see with this software is something that can feed in the blog rss feeds and then configure them automatically to be dotmobi compliant. Somewhere else that this software could go is to mobilise people's flickr feeds to dotmobi format. It's great for the individual who just wants a site that is dotmobi compliant with no fuss and who doesn't mind manually editing it etc themselves. But most people don't have the time or inclination to do that.
The editing tools are very basic which is great for the basic user, but anyone with any technical ability will get frustrated by it, especially with the image bits, as it doesn't allow you to resize images to fit the screen.
The outcome from my first attempt to use this software to create a mobile version of my www.sarahblow.com site can be found here: http://sarahblow.zinadoo.com it's not very good, and can't link outside of the site to external sources without recreating each page within zinadoo... I couldn't be bothered to mobilize my CV, blog etc... but it gives an idea of where the limitations are and also what you get out at the other end.