Wap Review

Wall Street Journal (mobile2.wsj.com/) - News Corp's Rupert Murdoch has said that once he completes the acquisition of the Wall Street Journal he will drop the Journal's WSJ.com subscription model and provide free access to all content. The mobile edition of the Journal has became free since 2006 and was recently redesigned to include more content.

Prestigious international affairs and business news weekly The Economist, has quietly dropped the pay wall on their mobile edition. The mobile site which used to cost $7.95 a month is now completely free.

The Economist Mobile includes a selection of articles from the paper's main on-line site and the print edition. There are typically around 50 articles on the mobile site divided into News, Politics, Leaders, Business, Science and Technology and Business Travel sections.  Most articles include single mobile sized image.

The site's design and layout is generally pretty effective in phone browsers.  Page size is under 20 KB and scrolling is minimized by the hierarchical menu structure and giving each article its own page.

One quirk I noticed is that when visiting the site with Opera Mini, its displayed in a mobile emulator frame (a Nokia 6600!) which makes it rather difficult to use. Opera Mini is apparently being detected as a desktop browser. I was able to override the emulator by using the URL m.economist.com/h/

There is no forced redirection to the mobile site so users of full-web mobile browsers like Opera Mini and Bolt can also view the full Economist.com site without much difficultly.

Time Warner's main financial site on the web and mobile includes content from Tim Warner's Money and Forbes magazines.

Jim Cramer's stock tips and analysis. Business and investment news.

Business news and investment advice

A large collection of current Business Week articles hosted at MSNBC.com

Business and financial news from Forbes Magazine. Full text (but no images) of over one hundred articles from the magazines full web site. Topic sections include business, technology, markets, personal finance, lifestyle, personal finance and opinion. Mobile site design is by mdog

A selection of feature articles from the latest issue of Forbes magazine

The Financial Times' long running mobile site. A simple text-only financial news site. I prefer the richer mobile version of FT on MSNBC (above).

Featured Financial Times articles from MSNBC - also see the FT's own site below.

Best selling author Nicole Williams' ("Woman on Top", "Earn What You're Worth") site aimed at women in business offers career advice, product recommendations and interviews with successful women entrepreneurs and executives. Mobile view by Mobify

CNBC Mobile (cnbc.com) There's doesn't seem to be a direct mobile URL but if you visit NBC's Business news TV channel's cnbc.com with most mobile browsers you'll be redirected to a mobile version, offering stock quotes and business news. There's also a text alert service that you can sign up for to receive a daily SMS listing topics that will be discussed on CNBC's TV shows Mad Money, Fast Money and Power Lunch.

Global financial news from Europe's financial center, "The City of London". Carries about 40 full-length text-only items from hereisthecity.com's full site.

Popular financial CNBC analyst Paull Kedrosky's Infectious Greed blog covers investing, financial news and consumer issues. Mobile view by Mobify

Aimed at would-be entrepreneurs, trend watchers and journalists, Amsterdam-based Springwise, using a network of 8000 "Springspotters" scans the globe for the most promising new business ideas and startup concepts. Mobile view by Mobify.

Market News Video on the web is a great site for investors, particularly in U.S. and Canadian markets.  It hosts dozens of timely video reports including market summaries, company profiles, upgrades and downgrades. Videos are updated throughout the day. The videos average a minute in a half in length and are interesting and informative.

The mobile site, which is new, has most of the content of the desktop edition.  It is billed as supporting the iPhone and video capable BlackBerries.  It works well on the target devices. However the site's videos refused to play on either of the two other phones I tried, a Nokia N95 and a HTC Ion Android phone. The problem seems to be with the browser detection. BlackBerries get a page with links to streaming 176x144 mpeg4 videos.  The iPhone version has an embeded Quicktime player.  The problem is that the site seems to serve unrecognized handsets the iPhone page, which is unlikely to work on anything but an iPhone. If it were to default to the Blackberry format for everything BUT the iPhone, the videos would be playable on most video capable phones.

Bizjournals covers national business news. But the best feature is that you can filter by city, industry or company. Over 50 cities are covered. There is also a search function. Great resource.

The mobile edition of Business Insider, which incorporates sub-sites Silicon Alley Insider and Clusterstock. Business Insider reports and analyzes business, financial and tech news with a conservative political point of view.

There doesn't seem to be a specific URL for the Business Insider's mobile edition which is served to recognized mobile browsers on the main businessinsider.com URL. The browser detection isn't very accurate and many mobile devices, particularly low end ones, are served the desktop version.

The corporate blog of NYSE Euronext, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, covers trading and market news.  The site's mobile view was created with Mobify

Official site of the US Securities and Exchange Commission has news, copies of speeches, public statements, litigation releases, administrative proceedings and proposed rules. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Business and technology news with a focus on companies and news from Boston, San Diego and Seattle. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Text-only financial and markets news site has frequently updated news and analysis and links to quotes from Fidelity.com Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Stock picks and general market news from The Motley Fool website.

Update 20-May-2006 - The site has been broken for about a month now - the front page comes up with just the header and footer boiler-plate and an empty space where the articles should be. Update 8-Dec-2006 - The Motley Fool is back online as a sub-site within MSNBC's Mobile Site

Mobile edition of GreenFaucet,com, a global finance and investment commentary and news site.  There's  a lot of content on this site featuring a wide range of viewpoints. It's a good read if your are interested in where the economy and markets are headed, and who isn't these days! The mobile edition is usable but a little on the rough side with numerous bad links.  There's a classic of bad user interface design too. When you click the link to leave a comment, you get a message to the effect that you need to be logged in to do so, yet there doesn't seem to be a way to actually log in on the mobile site.

BloggingBuyouts is a Weblog's Inc. blog, this one specializing in the little understood area of private equity investing. PEI is where groups of well heeled investors. either individually or allied into limited partnerships to provide seed money to startups in return for equity, and to buy out companies, typically ones whose stock price has dropped low enough to make them attractive takeover targets and to provide venture capital to startups in return for equity.

The Weblogs Inc sites all use the same mobile template. which I covered in detail in my Engadget Mobile Review. It's a typical mobile blog design with a front page of headline links each leading to a post. The posts aren't paginated and include full size images from the PC versions of the blog. This was a problem with Engadget as the site uses lots of big images and occasionally very long posts. Some Engadget Mobile pages exceed 300 KB, too large to display on most phones. BloggingBuyouts tends to have relatively short posts and very few images so the lack of pagination isn't a problem even on the most humble of browsers.

BloggingStocks covers general financial and investing news in a blog format with frequent updates.

Foreign Exchange and currency trading news, current exchange rates and a calendar of financial events. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

InvestmentNews.com: is a comprehensive general business news site site mobilized by mDog.com

Financial news, analysis, blog and video interviews from Moneyweb a leading South African financial news site. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Australia's Business Day Mobile has the latest business news, quotes, charts and bank rates from down under, along with a currency converter, mortgage and income tax calculators.

The weekly advertising trade magazine now has a mobile site. The Ad industry news site is searchable. The search page is much too complicated for good mobile usability, however.

(www.fnweb.com/pda) Financial news from Thailand. In addition to news articles, fnWeb lists stock market indexes from Asian and world markets, exchange rates and Thai bank interest rates.

UK based SportBusiness covers the business of sports. It provides insight and analysis on the sector, particularly media, marketing and events. The touch optimized mobie site was created with the free mobile site builder iWebKit.  Front page size is 90 KB. Unlike many touch sites, this one works in browsers without JavaScript support.

Business news from and for India. The site offers extensive coverage of world and Indian financial and business  news with dedicated pages for about one hundred different industries ranging from Advertising to Tyres. A "Stocks" page offers quotes and charts for securities traded on the New York or Mumbai exchanges.  Registration (free) allows users to create and view personal portfolios.

Moneycontrol 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.

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 resource center for travel industry executives. Market intelligence, trend analysis, breaking news and interviews. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

Travel trade website provides business intelligence for the travel and tourism industry. Mobile version by Netbiscuits

Mobile edition of a trade magazine covering the lodging industry worldwide. Source: Mobility.mobi

News blog targeting agricultural marketing & communications professionals and focusing on what’s new in the world of agribusiness, Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

For agricultural professionals, this site covers  "Precision Agriculture" the practice of using scientific data to determine the best methods of planting, pesticide and fertilizer use and harvesting for a specific field. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Mobile online edition of a print trade magazine for agricultural industry professions. Covers agricultural news, weather, commodity prices and ag stocks. Source Oh! Mobile Directory.

News blog targeting dairy producers with coverage of what's new in the dairy industry. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

Mobile edition of a leading British horticultural trade publication offering news, analysis, opinion, technical reports, product and market data to professionals working in production horticulture. Mobile view by Mobify

The mobile site for investment news in podcast form. Links to 20 or so recent audio files on stocks and investing from around the world.

Mobile edition of a trade magazine for IT professionals  in the health care industry. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

News, commentary, career advice and a job board for higher education professionals. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Mobile edition of an online trade magazine covering the magazine industry with news, interviews and information "blogs" on specific areas of the magazine publishing business like Sales and Marketing, Audience development or Regional Publications.  Mobile edition is by Crisp Wireless. Source Oh! Mobile directory.

A trade journal covering the TV, radio and magazine industries.

Blog of UK based Charlie Trumpess, marketing professional and copywriter covering marketing and advertising theory and practice. Source: Oh Mobile Directory

The RetailBulletin, an online trade magazine for the US retail industry now has a mobile edition at retailbulletin.mobi. The site carries the full text of the last 30 or so items from the full web site. The frequently updated site covers industry news of interest to retailers including financial results, M&A activity and sales figures. Small page size and text-only format makes the site usable, if a bit dull, on most any web capable handset.

Financial news market quotes from India. Keep up with the latest on one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Quotes from the Indian exchanges BSE and NSE.

A business and technology news site aimed at investors and venture capitalists focusing on Silicon Valley startups. The mobile edition contains all the stories from the free web site. Silicontap also has a $25/month premium edition which as detailed profiles of covered companies. The premium edition is not on the mobile web - yet.

News site covering many aspects of commercial design including product, fashion, jewelry, digital web and graphic design as well as architecture.