A Fashion Rag on Your Phone

 Daily Front Row Image The Daily Front Row (dfr.mlogic3g.com) is a print fashion magazine published in conjunction with and distributed at major fashion shows. I couldn’t find an online edition other than the mobile one. This is the first time that I’ve seen a print publisher go straight to the mobile web. I’d read more into this but for the fact that the Daily Front Row mobile site is apparently a Cingular promotion targeting attendees at last week’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in Los Angeles. The press release implies that it’s an exclusive for Cingular customers. Nice of them to host it on a public URL for non-Cingular customers to enjoy as well.

This may be a one shot, temporary site built for the event but I hope it’s permanent and regularly updated. It’s one of the more attractive mobile web presentations I’ve seen. Lots of photos of models and gowns and interviews with fashion insiders.

The Daily Front Row is another of the Crisp Wireless mLogic sites I mentioned in the AP Elections 2006 post. Crisp seems to be a major player in the emerging field of providing mobile services and solutions to business. In addition to mobile web design, they do custom Brew and Java ME development and have a mobile payment system. Crisp did the NBC Summer Olympics mobile website as well as all the others I mentioned in the previous post.

I think it’s a real indicator of the maturity of the mobile web that large media properties like Time Magazine, NBC, Business Week, Fandango, The Washington Post and LA Times are all launching new or updated mobile sites. Crisp landed all those accounts – they clearly know how to market to and work with Fortune 500 companies seeking a mobile presence. Crisp is doing some good design work creating visually compelling sites, a real challenge on the mobile web platform where there are so many different browsers – all implementing xhtml and css differently and imperfectly. I’m happy to report that the rendering bug I mentioned in the Time Magazine Review has been fixed on the Time mobile site and most of the other Crisp mLogic sites.

Filed under Entertainment/Entertainment News on the Portal and the Directory.

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