Best-of-breed vs mobile application suites
There are lots of attributes to what people like to refer to as "Web 2.0". The one that we are leveraging is the separation of presentation and content on most modern web sites. Web sites are now built with a presentation front end (e.g. RoR application running on/in an Apache httpd) talking to a database backend. As these system have matured, standardized external services have evolved out of them. These include RSS feeds and web service APIs. Our system takes advantage of these to create a "friction free" vehicle to deliver that content to mobile devices. Rather than face the painful (technically and financially) task of dealing with the multiplicity of handsets, operating systems and carriers, our content partners merely "publish." We take it from there.
By utilizing modern web standards and our high performance content switching infrastructure we are able to make it possible for all content players to participate, allowing for the scale of a Yahoo! class publisher while creating the low entry economics that opens the market for the individual blogger. This is far different from a portal. We do not set the content or control the user choices. Indeed, our system already supports addition of geo-tagged content by the user with a simple cut and paste of the appropriate URL. Hardly a closed portal.
We do believe that our content partners will want to customize the content experience for their users, however. We have crafted our platform so that our partners can deliver content with the graphics and specific user interaction that fits their brand. But unlike a portal, this is open to all of our content owners.
That said, I do still believe that there are plenty of arguments for dedicated applications. You can absolutely tune the experience for the utmost consumer pleasure. But what if everyone on the web had to write a custom application to reach the user? Do you think that blogs such as this would have ever reached critical mass? I doubt it. The idea of services such as ours is to open the mobile opportunity for new ideas and applications. While possibly compromising the ultimate experience, we allow the type of innovation that brought us so much of the rich experience we call the web today.
In response to Antony Brydon's Post: Best-of-breed vs mobile application suites:
I would never have thought to compare our system to a portal. I don't like portals. They're closed little worlds in which someone else decides what you can or cannot see. This is exactly the opposite of what we are providing at LightPole. We are building enabling technology that allows a much wider variety of content and applications to be delivered to the mobile phone. You could think about it as bringing web 2.0 to mobile (versus previous attempts at bringing "the web" to the phone). Let me explain.