We’re happy to announce that there’s now an easier to way to read Xconomy on your mobile phone. Go to http://m.xconomy.com for the new mobile-friendly version of our site, which we’ve simplified for easy navigation on small screens.
All the usual content is there: our Boston, San Diego, and Seattle news stories, along with Xconomist Forum posts from all three cities, not to mention subject-specific pages for our infotech, life science, startups, energy, and deals stories. But it’s all designed to look super-clean and load quickly on a mobile device.
The truth is that no website designed with desktop browsing in mind fares well on the screen of a mobile phone. iPhone owners might demur, but even with the iPhone’s Safari browser, you have to do a bunch of zooming and panning to make your way around a regular Web page. If you’re on the go and you just want to catch a few blog posts, you don’t want to mess with all that, or with the nifty tabs, menus, and image maps that make many sites more functional in full Web browsers but just get in the way on mobile devices.
That’s why there’s a crop of companies—some of them in Xconomy’s own home towns—devoted to helping publishers optimize their content for mobile devices. We found a great one in Providence, RI, called Mofuse. Funded in part by the Slater Technology Fund, which uses money appropriated by the Rhode Island legislature to help promote technology entrepreneurship in the Ocean State, Mofuse is already helping thousands of organizations go mobile, including Fox News, Harvard Business School, Chicago Public Radio, as well as great blogs like Mashable and ReadWriteWeb. (See Mofuse’s press release about our partnership.)
We hope you enjoy the mobile site, and welcome your feedback, suggestions, and bug notes. Because our office mobile armory is limited to a few iPhones and Blackberrys, we’re especially eager to hear how the site looks and functions on other platforms. Please post a comment below, or write me at [email protected].
