Baidu’s open platform for mobile was launched early today. Currently the service it offers is not really interesting, but easy and useful. Basically, Baidu offers a gateway service with which your site can be automatically converted into a wap site. For example, if you are using mobile device to access our blog, you can just try http://gate.baidu.com/tc?from=opentc&src=mobniode.com and you can see the layout and some content will be adjusted to fit for your device. And you can also use a configuration file uploaded to your site to let Baidu understand where your wap site is linked to.
According to CNNIC’s report (June, 2010), by end of June, 2010, the number of Chinese mobile internet users has reached 277millions (65.9% of total internet users), among them there are 49.14million people use mobile phone ONLY to surf Internet. In an open letter, Baidu said its open platform for mobile is to help millions of traditional www sites to have their own wap sites with efficient and easy solution and low operating cost.
It’s a good news for many mobile internet users as they may access many more sites on the small phone screen. I am wondering how companies which are offering the similar wap-site auto-converting services are going to respond. Even for UCWeb the leading mobile browser, many users love it because it does a good job (adjust site layout, remove redundant content etc to meet the requirements on diverse handsets). If Baidu can offer this service for truly free, developing a simple version of UCWeb browser sounds not difficult anymore.
So what’s next for Baidu’s open platform for mobile, Baidu says its Frame Computing for Mobile, Open LBS service etc will be coming soon. That’s what we are more excited about!
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