Thanks to Naiyer at oh.dirlink.mobi for recommending this pair of Indian financial and business news mobile sites.  India is a very interesting area for global as well as Indian investors. The country’s GNP is growing at a rate of over 9% a year making it one of the fastest growing major economies in the world.  These two mobile sites along with The Economic Times, offer the best and most detailed information and analysis of Indian business trends and news on the mobile web.  All three sites are listed in the Wap Review mobile site directory’s Business/News folder.

Moneycontrol (m.moneycontrol.com) is the mobile edition of India’s largest online financial portal. It provides information on Indian and world financial markets including general and company specific financial news,  an IPO tracker and quotes for equities and  mutual funds. The site also offers investment advice from CNBC India anchor Udayan Mukherjee. Registered users can access their Moneycontrol portfolios and watch lists on the mobile site. To register you have to visit the Moneycontrol PC site at moneycontrol.com though.

Moneycontrol mobile is fairly easy to navigate on the small screen and loads quickly on a good connection, but the page size is a little large for mobile with 20KB of markup and an additional 20KB of images. dotMobi and the W3C both recommend no more than 10KB of markup and the same amount of images for a one size fits all mobile site like Moneycontrol.  The site’s size will keep it from loading in the Motorola MIB browser.  Users on metered data plans will not appreciate that the site uses a meta refresh to reload the page every two minutes.

Mobile Link: m.moneycontrol.com

Ratings: Content: Usability:

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Livemint (m.livemint.com) is the mobile edition of Mint, a major Indian business print newspaper. Livemint has an extensive collection of financial and business news grouped into topic areas like Corporate News, Economy & Politics, Technology, Marketing & Media, International News, Careers and Opinions. A separate “Markets” tab offers reports and prognostications from the New York and Indian stock exchanges as well as commodities and real estate investing news and quotes. It’s not all business at Livemint either, there’s a “Life” section with features on diversions including Sports, Politics, Style and Travel.

Mobile Livemint has an attractive, fluid tabbed design that looks good even on screens as narrow as 128px wide. Unfortunately, the site’s page size (The front page has over 40KB of markup alone) keeps it from loading fully in the Openwave and Motorola MIB browsers found on many feature phones.

Mobile Link: m.livemint.com

Ratings: Content: Usability: