There are more people with internet enabled phones than there are people with broadband, so it makes sense that Volantis Systems has provided simple ways to create a website for mobile viewing. Their “Ubik” offering, whilst only a beta offering, was one of the shortlisted products commended for mobile innovation at this year’s Barcelona GSM World show, where it was a finalist for the “Best Mobile Internet Service 2009” award, which would have added to the “Best Publishing Platform 2008” it had picked up at Mobile Entertainment Awards.
Quite simply, you pick a template on Ubik.com and create your site, edit the content, and publish. Templates are available for a variety of personal and small business needs, and the templates are customisable via an Editor with which you can see a list of all pages, add, amend or remove them, and adjust current content or images. A Preview pane shows changes in real time which makes editing really rapid, and, of course, you can see your site before it is loaded. Once the site is uploaded, you can send images to the site from anywhere via email or MMS and access them in the gallery instantly. The gallery sections have unique address codes, so you can send images to the specific page you want.
The software takes care of rendering the pages for some 6,000 different phones with the variety of phone screen sizes that there are on the market. You can even embed mobile ads on your published pages, you can earn money from your site.
Sites created using the Ubik service are hosted and published for free at sitename.ubik.net. I tried it out and created a 6 page site with some custom text and loaded 2 of my own images in a matter of no time.
