In developing a mobile vision, the Greenlight Wireless team has been tempted down several paths over the years. Should we get into video? Unified mobile IM/SMS? Should Skweezer be a mobile Pageflakes? We have thus added/dropped features as they compliment/detract from our main goals because we have to pick our battles. There are some things we do well (like mobile browsing) and some things we don’t (like e-mail). There are some things that we are too small to attempt, such as developing our own web search engine from scratch, and so we partner with companies that offer these things as a service or API we can use. For example, we use WorldLingo’s excellent translation API.
I mention this because I was looking at Clusty’s new mobile search and web proxy, which was announced earlier this week. There is no doubt that Clusty has some advanced search engine technology, and it has an obvious mobile application. However, their mobile web proxy leaves a lot to be desired. I know it’s still in its infancy and they probably intend to improve it, so it’s not fair for me to criticize it yet. However, if I were an executive at Vivisimo, I would take a hard look at build vs. buy or partner in this case. Mobile transcoding is one of those easily underestimated technologies. Skweezer powers the search results of other large search engines, and we’ve been doing it for years. Clusty search with Skweezer-powered results would be pretty nice and might free up a Clusty engineer.
