The term “mobilize” generally refers to ‘on-the-fly’ conversion of existing content [ designed for desktop ] to a mobile-friendly format.

An example of this development shortcut is Funkify - a free online service promising to optimise your website for easy viewing on a mobile phone.

The service can be utilised in two flavours:

• by accessing Funkify on a mobile browser and typing in your required destination URL - similar to Mowser, Squeezer or Google Mobilizer
• by allowing Funkify to convert your website and host the mobile version at a direct URL, e.g. funkify.tv/yourdomain

“We can also give you a line of code… which will [detect a mobile phone] and automatically direct the user to the mobile friendly version”

Online publishing tools: Zinadoo, mobiSiteGalore and Winksite offer free site creation tools and free hosting of your efforts - the latter a social network platform to connect with mobile communities.

Alernatives, Mob-it and Feed2Mobile will fetch your RSS feed and adapt its content ready for mobile devices. Which is great if you have one!

All of these services make it real easy for the masses to publish mobile content without any technical knowledge.

But I guess that it’s for this reason why Optimisers will take a wide birth. The flexibility to tweak and test the code behind the written word (and I’m not talking Black Hat) is lost - a simple trade-off against the speed of point-and-click.

As a perfectionist, I need to know how the mobile Web functions. As a Consultant, I feel duty-bound to know what the hell’s going on!

Anyone out there know of any other “Mobilizer” services (besides bona fide designers) please comment below.