Kevin Cawley Goes Mobile

Not the Only One Using Skweezer

I just ran across Josh Bancroft’s blog at TinyScreenfuls talking about Bloglines Mobile using Skweezer too…

Great to see Kevin and the team at Skweezer getting fantastic exposure!  I know NewsGator Go! is a much better product beacuse of Skweezer.

September 22nd, 2006

Skweezer is Great

One of the issuesi that mobile developers face is how to render web pages on mobile devices…. Most web publishers don’t provide a mobile friendly version of their site and this makes viewing on mobiles painful and in some cases completely unusable.  Viewing issues (such as excessive scrolling) or memory pressure (when a page is laden with images) can prevent publishers from getting in front of mobile eyes.  This is a problem for the developer, the publisher, and the consumer.

There are a few solutions.  You can roll your own transcoding engine – if this is not your core competency it is probably too much to tackle.  You can use a third party browser, Opera for Mobile is a great choice.  In fact, if Opera is the default browser on your device, you can use Opera with NewasGator Go!  Or you can use a service that will do this heavy lifting for you.  My choice for this is Skweezer and you can also use Google’s transcoding engine!

I found Skweezer one evening while looking for solutions to my mobile rendering problems and was psyched about their offering.  I sent Skweezer an email (I think it was like 1 am or so).  Within 30 minutes, Kevin Perkins, the CEO, emailed me back.  We started a dialog and took it from there.  Kevin was coming into Denver for another meeting, and he made some time to have lunch with me.  I really liked Kevin right away – very smart, honest, and hard working guy and he has a great team.  He also is a very proud Dad which says a ton about one’s character.

I added the ability to use Skweezer to NewsGator Go! in a beta release shortly after meeting Kevin and have been thrilled with the results (see screen shot below).

In this example, I have Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch blog rendered w/ Skweezer.  So, you will notice that ads and images have been removed and that initially may not make Mike happy.  But,  without using Skweezer I cannot even load this page on my Treo 700W.  So, using Skweezer, I can actually view TechCrunch on my mobile, clip interesting articles using NewsGator Go! and then view TechCrunch using one of the NewsGator desktop readers (I use FeedDemon btw) or using NewsGator Online.  Everyone benefits!

Skweezer rocks!

5 comments September 22nd, 2006