Instant Mobilizer Taking Off

Instant Mobizer Screenshots

Ronan Cremin at dotMobi sent over an image containing sheetshots of some of the thousands of sites that have been created with Instant Mobilizer since its launch at MWC two months ago.  I’ve reproduced a small part of it above.  The whole image is 2714 x 3473  px so what you are looking at is only about 1/60 of it.  If you want to see it all,  click here.  Be warned that the jpeg is a little over 3 MB in size – you probably don’t want to try viewing it with a mobile browser.

I’m not surprised that Instant Mobilizer is an instant success.  Sure, it’s basically just a transcoder.  Built on the Mowser platform in fact.  But it’s free with the price of a dotMobi domain and has some nice touches like recognizing phone numbers in the page and making them click to call, linking addresses to mobile Google maps and detecting Google  AdSense  and replacing it with Mobile AdSense.

Admittedly an Instant Mobilizer site is unlikely to be as attractive and mobile friendly as one built from scratch to be mobile.  I see the target market of Instant Mobilizer as small local businesses that can’t justify the cost of a custom mobile site. It takes only a few minutes and no coding to create an Instant Mobilizer site. Hosting and domain registration for a low traffic small business site should run under  $100/year.  Every restaurant, hair salon and nightclub that has a web site can now easily have a mobile presence.   Mobile web use doubled  in the last year and will likely double again this year.  With that sort of  growth even small businesses need to be visible to mobile searchers.  An Instant Mobilizer site can provide the information that potential customers need to find your business; hours, phone number, address, maps and driving directions.

Solutions like Instant Mobilizer help  bridge the mobile web content gap. As Fierce Wireless points out, there are currently about 77 million PC web sites but only 1.1 million mobile sites.  The web’s long tail, the fact that everything and anything is a Google search away, is a core reason for its success.  The web on mobiles has a lot of  catching up to do and Instant Mobilizer can help with that.