Mobile Content Adaptation: Novarra vs Novarra

by: Bena Roberts Monday, February 18th, 2008

Novarra content adaptation is now deployed by Vodafone, Turkcell, Yahoo!, 3 Hong Kong, 3 Italy and Telia Sonera. Mid last year with the Vodafone deployment, Novarra went under the spotlight and there were some issues with the services which were highly documented.

This was a surprise to me as every session I had with Novarra before then had been excellent. I did try and get Novarra to speak to me about the Vodafone issue at the time; but Novarra went into very quiet mode. There was one interview in Tech Crunch but that was about it.

So, several months on – I finally met with Novarra again at Mobile World Congress.

Before we started the meeting I had to voice my disappointment with Novarra for not meeting with me sooner. I am finding that there is some concern about talking to bloggers; but I am also a business and a career woman (blah, blah blah) so not one to get a scoop or a story –but to really focus into the wireless Internet.

But anyway I met with CEO Jayanthi Rangarajan and others including Richard Blades, Commercial and Development Director Europe. We had an open and candid discussion about the past, followed about the future and a demo.
During the meeting I realised something. All the time, Novarra has been talking about making the Internet mobile. But having a first hand demo of the 2.0 solution one year on – I have to say I was blown away.

I am not sure who came up with it first, but now Novarra is also using graphical navigation menu’s and icons to make the internet mobile.

I want to pause here to focus on the differences between the Mobile Internet, the Internet becoming Mobile and the Internet. Novarra has said in the past that they wanted to take the Internet to the mobile device. I always thought this was not enough and the Internet had to be re-invented for mobile if it was going to work or unique mobile sites needed to be created.

But what I saw last week blew me away. So, what Novarra is doing is what I thought they were not but we call it different terms.

I am starting to think that the noise against Novarra is some personal vendetta rather than industry commentary.
The same navigational tool bar that InfoGin has used on the AOL deployment is now available from Novarra. But the keys are much smaller and richer. They provide a unique value added addition to the user experience by providing quick navigation.

So, in Novarra’s terminology this is the Internet on Mobile –but actually it is the Internet optimised for mobile on mobile and is better. The only picture I managed to grab of this is below as Telia hasn’t allowed me permission to use the one screen shot that I do have as yet.

Then I had a demo of the new Novarra mobile advertising service which was deployed by Telia Sonera – more in the next article.

Rating: its in the icons