WapReview

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.

 

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

Business and financial news from Forbes Magazine. Full text (and 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.

This site only delivers a mobile formatted page in the Android and iOS browsers. All other tested browsers (Firefox Mobile, Opera Mobile and Mini) getr the desktop site which features a couple of annoying popups to click through in order to reach the content.

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

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

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

Business news and investment advice quotes and charts. Login to view or create a portfolio and set news preferences.

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.

Fortune Magazine's financial news items in blog format. The site adapts to all mobile browsers and includes videos and podcasts.

A collection of recent feature articles and top stories from Fortune Magazine.

A blog style compilation of Fortune Magazine articles on management technique and career planning.

Fortune Magazine sub-site within CNNMoney.mobi  Like the main site it employs user-agent based adapttion to deliver content optimized for most mobile browser. Opera Mini gets a basic text-only version unfortumately.

Wall Street Journal  - Before News Corp's Rupert Murdoch aquired the Wall Street Journal he said he would drop the Journal's subscription model and provide free access to all content. What actually happened after the aquisition was that even more WSJ content than ever went behind the paywall including most articles in the mobile edition of the Journal which before Murdoch was entirely free.

The Financial Times' long running mobile site was recently updated from simple text-only financial news site to a rich HTML5 webapp replace all of FT's native mobile apps.  In the process it also gained a paywall. You can see the headlines for free but reading an article requires a login. A subscription uis $35/month or $325/year. However, If you register on the site you can still view eight articles per month for free.

The mobile edition of fast growing financial news site Minyanville has the latest items and videos from the main site's news feeds and blogs.

The global edition of a leading on-line financial publication with market, company, science, technology and business news from around the world.

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 has 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.

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

Veteran investor, author and Seeking Alpha contributor Van Beek's blog covering stock investing for beginners using a system he calls "Stock Trend Investing"

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.

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

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

AOL's DailyFinance 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.

Mobile edition of Advertising Age, a.k.a., AdAge, the venerable (founded in 1930) weekly news magazine covering the global advertising business.

The well organized AdAge mobile site includes the full text for hundreds of stories and articles, including all of its highly regarded blogs and columns, from the desktop AdAge site and the print edition. I like that registered readers can comment on stories from the mobile site although disappointingly registration requires going to the full site and filling out a form with no less than 14 required fields.

There are some other unnecessary limitations to the mobile edition that may have smartphone and Opera Mini users reaching for the "Full site" link - which unfortunately takes you to the AdAge desktop homepage rather than the desktop version of the current page. Only a single image from desktop edition is included with each mobile formatted story. All videos are stripped from the mobile pages even though AdAge uses YouTube embeds for many of its videos and YouTube can automatically deliver a mobile formatted version.

AdAge also has free mobile apps for Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Window Phone which I haven't tried.

(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.

Tips, advice, and news for marketing professionals from a team of PROFessors and PROFessionals. Some content is behind a paywall but the majority of articles are free.

There's currently a bug in the mobile template that causes every other headline of the front page to go to the desktop version of the article, which will surely annoy users on a slow connection or metered data plans. 

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.

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

News blog covering the tourism business. It's a wordpress.com hosted blog and benefits from WordPress' built-in mobile browser detection and adaptation. See: Updated: All WordPress.com Blogs Are Now Mobile Friendly.

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

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

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.