10e20 Blog

mdog is a new mobile portal site that allows one to browse the Internet’s latest versions of mobile web sites from major companies and publications. It displays sites without images and in text only format using a proprietary technology. It also includes a search feature which does not perform all that well, yet. The search feature is most prominently placed at the top of the browser, so that is great, and it also has a radio button selection to narrow your search to “local” results.mdog looks to align all of the latest web site versions in mobile display for the mobile browser on your SmartPhone, blackberry or PDA. From the mdog.com homepage you can access 1. Web 2. Blogs and 3. Sign In (to customize your experience). From the “Web” section, one has access to the following categories of sites:

News, Business, Sports, Weather, Webmail, Travel, Food and Dining, Entertainment, Information, Technology, Ebay, TV Networks, Classifieds, Social, Lottery

I happened upon mdog just the other day as I was using my new Blackberry World Edition 8830 from Verizon Wireless, and while reviewing news on the The Wall Street Journal Online. At the bottom of the WSJ page, I found a link that said “WSJ Mobile Edition Beta 2.0 Powered by the mdog mobile Portal” and this linked over to mdog. That perked me up. Mdog seems to pull tons of content from major news publications positioning itself to compete well with Yahoo! News and Google News. They also have a ton of sports news aggregated and from their mobile web homepage, you can access key news sites such as CNN, USA Today, The New York Times, FOX News and more…

One of the great features as well is that you can access your blog on your mobile device. This will allow bloggers to do more real time updating from the field (so long as their fingers don’t get tired typing on a mobile device) which should enhance the quality of real time news and commentary overall on the web.

Another feature that will probably catch fire is eBay access where you can actually access your account, manage the basics of actions and bid. Michelle Menga at Ecommerce-Guide.com quoted Keith Gerard, President of mdog as saying “In the case of eBay, mdog.com displays auction searches in complete detail and even allows users to submit secure, real-time mobile bids from wherever they are. It’s all automatically available to shoppers, so sellers don’t have to do anything, because we’re accessing the actual eBay site, it’s seamless, We do the SSL interface and all that.”

There is not a lot of info out there about mdog at this point, but back in October 2006 Michal Lev-Ram wrote on Third Screen a bit about this Chicago based start-up. A Google search for example pulls up very little information other than the homepage, but there are not a lot of people out there writing about it yet

I like the concept and I think that they are on to something.

I’m wondering if mdog can compete with Google’s mobile version packet? I’m thinking so. I also still believe that creating a mobile version of a web site on a dot-mobi top level domain is a wise choice for business owners and marketers.

Lastly, as for mdog’s own marketing tactics. I like the fact that on most of their pages, they have a link to have a user “send Mdog” to a friend”. This is a great viral tactic. But what about mdog’s search engine optimization (SEO)? Opera currently has the #1 Organic Rank on Google.com websearch for “Mobile Web Browser” mdog is nowhere - at least not in the first 2 SERP’s on Google. On a first visit to mdog’s homepage, there is a flash intro which may not be the smartest approach to their marketing. As well, there is hardly any keyword optimization on the site at all.