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by Jeffrey L. Wilson on April 16, 2008
SkyfireCOMPANY PROFILE
Established: 2006
Home Base: Mountain View, Calif.
Employees: 25
Funding: Matrix Partners and Trinity Vendors
Why Should You Care
Smart phones have made it infinitely simple for us to check e-mail, schedule appointments, and view Office documents on the go, but they’ve conspicuously lagged in an increasingly vital component of our mobile lives: Web surfing.'
The browsers bundled with most smart phones let us hop online in a pinch, but they often come with a couple of major caveats. One, they typically subject us to stripped-down versions of sites that don’t come close to resembling the pages we’re accustomed to seeing on the desktop. Two, they tend to choke on media-rich sites. Skyfire avoids these tradeoffs and even goes beyond even the iPhone by supporting Flash technology.
“Go to any Web site that uses Ajax, Java, or Flash with your current phone browser and it doesn’t work,” said Nitin Bhandari, CEO and cofounder of Skyfire. The company’s mission is to bring the full Web to Windows Mobile 5– and 6–powered smart phones (with Symbian support coming “shortly afterward”) without sacrificing speed or usability.
Unlike other mobile Web browsers, Skyfire lets users enjoy YouTube clips (without being limited to the mobile site), stream music from Last.FM, view embedded QuickTime movie trailers, and indulge in every other multimedia activity that they’d normally do within their PC’s browsers.
Perhaps the best feature of all is that the sites you normally visit look like the real deal, instead of truncated, barely recognizable pages. And they load fast. It took only 4 to 6 seconds for Skyfire to load sites such as YouTube and NYTimes.com.
Skyfire faithfully recreates the dimensions of a Web page, but the developers took into account that content would be difficult to read on a mobile’s small screen. To remedy that, mobile surfers can pan and zoom Web pages through the use of a small gray box that they can move around the page. The browser also has a SmartFit feature that makes text easy to read in a one-column format.
Why the Competition Should Care
Skyfire is the only mobile browser that supports Ajax, Flash 9, Java, QuickTime, Windows Media, and all the other multimedia formats that you’d interact with on the Web. The upcoming Opera 9.5, for instance, doesn’t support Flash 9, the latest version of that popular multimedia application (it’s stuck with Flash Lite 3.0). And Mobile Firefox, Skyfire’s closest competitor, won’t be ready for close to a year.
The reason Skyfire can render the full Web at speeds that are faster than its competitors is because incoming data is split between the handset and the company’s servers. Server-assisted mobile browsing isn’t new (see RIM’s BlackBerry and Danger’s Sidekick), but Skyfire’s proprietary technology transcodes Web pages into a highly compressed format that is optimized for mobile phones.
Chance of Success
Viewing your favorite Web sites in all of their intended glory on a smart phone may seem like a technological godsend, but Bill Hughes, principal analyst of wireless devices at In-Stat, believes that this browser will appeal only to a select few. “The use of mobile phones as a Web browser is less than 5 percent,” he said. “Most wireless connections involve e-mail.”
Besides a lack of consumer interest, Hughes attributes Skyfire’s potential uphill battle to the competitions’ foothold. “There are other browsers that have relationships with manufacturers, and those manufacturers have a relationship with carriers; it’ll be hard to break in,” he said.
But the carrier-agnostic Skyfire is depending on content-hungry consumers to adopt its browser. All you need to do to is sign up at www.skyfire.com, and wait for a text message that contains a link to download the browser to your Windows Mobile device.
Skyfire will remain free of charge for the immediate future, but the company may also explore monetization via search advertising or other options. Assuming users find out that Skyfire exists, we believe the interest in Web browsing on a cell phone will go well above 5 percent.
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