Want a new homepage for your mobile handset or other portable device that makes it easier to get to the mobile Web sites you use the most? Hop over to FROG, where you can add direct access to mobile Web sites to your phone. This new homepage is free, and offers customizable links and colors. Users register online at GetFrog.com, and do the initial set up from a PC, selecting which sites will become the homepage. Then you send your “Frog” link to your phone, save the link as a favorite and you’re pretty much good to go.
There are six categories of links to choose from including news, sports, tools, shopping, entertainment and business. The number of sources is limited to those with a mobile Web site, and at this point the Frog only works with smartphones with full keyboards. But if this is your phone type of choice, then there is no reason to give the Frog a look
Peter,
Nice post. I’ve been looking at the on-device portal space for a quite a while now and think that this space is quite competitive - there are many startups in this space as well as some more establishes companies. The technology is pretty straightforward but, as always in the mobile space, doing distribution deals with mobile operators (if executing on an on-deck business model) or deals with brands (if executing an off-deck model) are the keys to success.
Vendors such as SurfKitchen, Plusmo, Mobio, Nokia’s Widsets etc. are all aiming at this market in different ways.
It’d hard to tell if there will be a standalone large company created in this category.
Rgds,
Dev
Comment by Dkhare — May 22, 2007 @ 12:15 pm
just used frog, yeah, not even useful in NYC, the only bus route available is NYC water taxi, the ATM locator is fails to mention WHAT ATM is being shown and what the fees are, the movie locator showed me theatres 3 miles away first before I had to go to the one in my neighborhood, the restaurant locator if you don’t choose the correct cuisine, shows you restaurants A-Z and doesn’t allow you to jump to any other letter without going page by page by clicking “next page”.
If it was me, and I had 5 minutes to use this service to find something, I’d do the following:
GO to the NYC transit webpage to find not only bus/subway routes by address, but also find when those busses/subways are coming (NYC Transit now shows me that information)
ATM locator would be either a call to my bank, or a visit to their Website.
Restaurant locator would be a google-based-zip-code search.
Theatres would be a visit to movies.com or again a google-based zip code search for movie theatres.
What’s the point of showing me a link to google email or yahoo email when I can set up the former using pop-forwarding and the latter if I’m paying for a yearly fee and doing the same?
Not a useful site if it’s not even going to show me something that is:
1. Useful to me locally.
2. easy to navigate without having to click through 6 levels of navigation to get to information irrelevant to me.
Comment by sanjay — June 14, 2007 @ 2:33 am
don’t know what all the negativity’s about… I love my frog! I signed up like a month ago, and totally use it to find things.
I live in LA, so I use Mapquest or Traffic almost every day. I’ve definitely used the ATM finder and the movies link, and they both worked pretty good for me.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I barely used the internet on my phone. most websites suck, there all just a bunch of text. but frog rules, I’ll look up anything now online. and I set the frog color to look good in my windows theme on my moto q!
Comment by Andrew W — June 27, 2007 @ 8:37 pm
The above is pretty clearly a planted comment. It reads even more like an advertisement than the original post which sounds like it was taken straight off a press release.
Comment by Riordan — September 10, 2007 @ 8:15 am
gI9i4n hi nice site thx http://peace.com
Comment by bob — January 3, 2008 @ 12:31 am
great phone
Comment by Meetings — May 1, 2008 @ 7:11 pm