Hello – James from mjelly.com here with another mobile 2.0 service of the week at Mobile Zeitgeist. This time we are going to give you a quick overview of what is perhaps the first big mobile software hit to come out of China – UCWEB. Hardly anyone has heard of this application but it has been downloaded a massive 64m times!
UCWEB is mobile browser and web software
UCWEB is a downloadable mobile browser that can be used as an alternative to your native browser. It provides superior performance, particularly for lower end phones, however, even high end smart phones such as the Nokia N95 have extremely poor browsers included as standard. UCWEB passes web sites through a proxy server which allows the user to surf PC-based websites using a normal mobile handset. Other features include:
- mobile search and media player functions
- download manager (e.g. for large files)
- RSS reader
- converter for file types including word, powerpoint and pdfs
Overall, UCWEB is designed as a fully featured service for browsing and accessing the web on your mobile that is ideal for users in developing markets who might not have PC-based internet access. It works on Symbian, Java and Windows Mobile platforms.
The first big international mobile software success out of China
UC WEB was originally developed by the Chinese company UCWEB Technology based in Guangzhou City in Guangdong. The app was made for the Chinese market but has become popular internationally. The company has 210 employees of which 140 are developers – this has allowed them to create a software platform which is really high quality – UCWEB has some really passionate fans out there and a lot of people consider that it is even better than the Western market leader – opera mini. UCWEB technologies claim that they are only offering the English version as a way of understanding usage habits and that they are focused on the Chinese consumer. However, they appear to have recently upgraded their English website and have invested in updating the English version of the software – historically this has often been done by third party developers as the company itself was slow to create English versions of the latest release. These trends might suggest that the international success of UCweb is becoming a bigger priority.
UCWEB has been downloaded 64m times
UC WEB has some amazing stats:
- downloaded over 64m times
- 10 billion page views per month
- growing at 400% p.a. every year over the past three years
This kind of growth really shows the potential of the mobile web in China and for Chinese mobile web services to expand internationally, benefiting from a large local market and massive local development and technology resources. Who knows – in five years time UCweb might have overtaken internet explorer or firefox as one of the world’s major internet access browsers…
That’s it for this week – see you next time for another mobile 2.0 service of the week.
You can download UCWEB and find other mobile applications and mobile sites at mjelly.com
Author: James Coops has worked in the mobile internet industry since the dark days of ‘wap’ all the way through to the present day. In 2001 he developed one of the first mobile web sites to allow downloading of content over the mobile internet (previously this was done over SMS). He then spent 7 years working all over the world as a consultant for mobile operators, media companies, service providers and investors including the likes of O2, Vodafone, Telecom Italia Mobile, Discovery Networks, FIFA and Goldman Sachs. James has also written for Techcrunch UK, Mobile Industry Review and New Media Age Magazine and runs a directory of mobile sites and applications at http://mjelly.com (PC) and http://m.mjelly.com (mobile) and blogs at http://blog.mjelly.com. He loves Germany, especially the Weiss bier!
