51Degrees.mobi, the leading provider of device detection and web optimisation solutions, has expanded its portfolio to include PHP. The PHP scripting language is powerful and flexible, making it a popular choice for web site developers. Around a third of all websites currently use PHP.

This means even more developers and site owners can now discover whether the visiting device is a tablet, whether it’s a smart phone, what the screen size is – and they can then adjust the online content accordingly.

The weather outside may be a typically damp British April - but here at 51Degrees.mobi there’s not a cloud in the sky. We’ve developed a mobile device detection solution that doesn’t rely on a ‘cloud’ connection every time there’s a new visitor to your mobile web site.

As far as we’re concerned, cloud services are very well-suited to location-based services and other applications that require vast quantities of data. They’re also often a practical solution when information needs to be shared but needs to be controlled or monitored as well.

However, mobile device detection is a completely different type of situation.

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.

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.

New figures from smartphone owners in the USA show that retail websites are still more popular than stand-alone apps.

Nielsen’s detailed analysis of smartphone usage reveals that retailers’ mobile websites are more popular than their mobile apps, with Amazon having the most popular retail mobile website of all. The top five retail apps and websites combined - Amazon, Best Buy, eBay, Target and Walmart - reached nearly 60% of US smartphone owners.

The research also revealed that shoppers preferred retailers’ mobile websites over mobile apps, although consumers who used retailers’ mobile apps tended to spend more time on them.

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.

DotNetNuke Corp., the global leader for adaptive web content management software that keeps businesses’ online presence relevant and effective, today announced a licensing agreement with 51Degrees.mobi, the leading provider of automatic mobile device detection, mobile web optimization, and mobile analytics solutions.

Through the agreement, DotNetNuke will integrate the 51Degrees.mobi Device Description Repository (DDR) into all editions of DotNetNuke 6. Access to the DDR is free for DotNetNuke users and further simplifies mobile website development on the platform. The 51Degrees.mobi DDR is used by over 20,000 developers and over 160 million new devices every month. It is one of the most widely used mobile device databases available.

If I see a street sign that says The Close, I’d expect the road to be a cul-de-sac. If it’s called The Crescent, I’d expect it to be curved. The Boulevard may well have a central reservation. And the High Street will probably have shops. Not always but often.

It’s the same with domain names. A co.uk address suggests a UK business, while co.il is most likely to be based in Israel. There’s .gov for government, .edu for education and so on. We’ve chosen 51Degrees.mobi for our business because the suffix indicates a mobile-friendly site.

But the web has just been shaken up. No longer do you need to settle for a suffix chosen by ICANN, the overlords of the internet. (Not even those odd ones like .coop, .museum and .aero). Instead, you can make up your own domain.

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.

In the last few months I've had several questions from 51Degrees.mobi Framework users asking how to implement google adverts on their web sites. Google have a very simple piece of javascript that can be used with high end phones. However this won't work on all phones, and as those familiar with 51Degrees.mobi will know we don't like to exclude people because they don't have the high end phones. The ASP provided for all phones won't work in ASP.NET and requires some tweaking to get working. This blog explains how to use Google AdSense and an ASP.NET user control to get Google Ads on a web page in minutes.