If you don’t have a web site designed for mobile phones, you don’t just risk frustrating your customers when they visit you online. You’re also likely to drain their smartphone batteries. That’s the message from a research team based at California’s Stanford University.

The researchers published a paper entitled “Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption” at the World Wide Web 2012 conference last week. They used an Android handset to browse a variety of popular web sites, measuring the phone’s energy consumption as it loaded and rendered web pages. As well as analysing each page, the team also measured the energy needed to render individual web elements such as images, JavaScript, and CSS.

Enabling your website for mobile visitors doesn’t just improve the consumer experience. It also makes commercial sense.

The latest organisation to produce figures that prove what we’ve known for a long time is UK-based search marketing agency Mediarun. It’s found that ‘bounce rates’ from mobile devices are around 40%, which is about 10% higher than on desktop browsers. The company says this means 5.6% of all mobile traffic is being lost by online retailers... and that’s a significant amount of lost sales.

51Degrees.mobi has become the first device detection business to implement Ringmark in its free-for-commercial-use and paid-for premium data sets. This ground-breaking move makes it easier for developers to create mobile web sites that are tailored to the precise needs of online visitors.

Ringmark is the mobile browser test process introduced at Mobile World Congress 2012 by Facebook. It’s designed to help developers learn more about each mobile web visitor without requiring visitors to provide any personal details. Coremob, the Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is eventually expected to be handed control of the project.

Ingeniux Corporation, a leading provider of web and social content management software, today announced it has licensed the 51Degrees.mobi mobile Premium Device Data for distribution with the Ingeniux CMS web content management and Cartella community and collaboration software.

With 51Degrees.mobi fully integrated within Ingeniux CMS and Cartella, Ingeniux customers can easily target web content to mobile devices, preview content display on a wide range of devices, and accelerate development of advanced mobile features.

51Degrees.mobi strongly believes that one size doesn’t fit all. It’s the reason we created our own mobile device description repository, which enables web designers to create a site that’ll adapt automatically for visitors using mobile phones.

However, it’s important to realise that a choice of just two sizes can also be less than ideal. With consumers now using portable internet-connected devices that range from feature phones to iPads, simply deciding whether or not a handset is ‘mobile’ isn’t always enough.

This year's CES event in Las Vegas promises to be the biggest yet. But it's not just the event that's getting bigger.

We've spotted a trend towards larger devices. Sat-nav systems now have wider screens. Smartphones are becoming 'super phones', growing towards the size of tablets. And – despite the occasional rumour – there's no sign of Apple’s market-leading iPad launching a smaller-screen iPad 3 or iPad 4.

But is bigger really better?  Or easier to use?

Christmas 2011 has seem more people than ever using their mobile phones to shop online. That in itself isn’t surprising - but what’s caught our eyes is the scale of the increase.

IBM Coremetrics has released a series of figures that compare 2011’s key shopping days in the USA with last year’s online traffic. First came ‘Black Friday’, which is the day after Thanksgiving Day. It says mobile devices accounted for 14.3% of all US online retail traffic on 25th November, up from 5.6% in 2010. Over two-thirds of that traffic was via Apple iPhones and iPads. Sales on mobile devices reached 9.8% of all online purchases, up from 3.2% year-on-year.

Our mobile web site demonstrates how our device data, device detection and web optimisation can produce an online experience tailor-made for each mobile device.

Visit 51Degrees.mobi from your handset to learn more... or scan our QR code on your mobile phone.

Transition Consulting Limited (TCL), testing experts in the field of mobile telecommunications with clients including Vodafone and Orange, undertook an independent test of the 51Degrees.mobi .NET Mobile Framework product. The results show a near 10 times increase in the performance of ASP.NET with 51Degrees.mobi compared to an unaltered ASP.NET deployment.