Reiki Music. Video Marketing

This is a copy of the blog article on http://www.MarketingChaps.com

Dear Luca & Vodafone UK.

reference your debate on
http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/vodafonerant/index.htm

We represent several publishing houses and we are greatly concerned by Vodafone removing support, for what is, for all intensive purposes, an industry standard, namely UA http headers.

I can see no advantage to meddling with existing standards.

If you want to try to enhance the Vodafone clients experience, then add additional headers, which people who want to play with Vodafone can adopt. But you can not and should not block other publishers who do not want to, or cannot, play the Vodafone way. So I am talking about a tag addition, not a tag pre-requisite.

But there is no benefit in Vodafone trying to play mobile God. Like life, we do not all worship the same religions, but we all need to co-exist peacefully.

Content is king and Vodafone is damaging their own clients experience and access to this valuable/desirable content.

Publishers like our consortium, will ultimately merely block Vodafone and concentrate on the remaining 72% of the market. But that would be a loss to everyone!

In addition, on our own field trials with the Vodafone re-purposing engine, the results were simply not acceptable. Laughable on many. Unusable on most. So the user experience can not be dictated by Vodafone. The publishers must be allowed to deliver the most suitable content for the device, using the existing standards.

Whilst trying to make the desktop web surfable on a mobile is plaudable and brave, it must not be a dictate methodology which destroys all of the “specific mobile” versions, which publishers like ours produce. We know the devices, we know what content to provide. There is no benefit to Vodafone trying to second guess what we are trying to deliver.

If there is a whitelist, where is it, why isn’t this more publicly available and why isn’t it updated “LIVE”.

Vodafone, as a member of .Mobi, I can’t see how this follows that ethos either.

To not support/pass UA, makes all devices blanket vanilla, and then all we can deliver to a Vodafone device is the worst possible base level lowest common denominator) content.
I’m not sure how Vodafone or their clients would see that as a benefit!

Peter Buick.
K2k Group.

This post now appears on 2 of my own blogs.
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