ZenZui zooms in on mobile web users

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 28 March 2007 03:50

Your IT - Mobility

Microsoft spinoff ZenZui aims to deliver a new way of interacting with Web content on mobile phones.

ZenZui presents a series of "tiles" representing content or groups of content. Navigation is via the keypad, so you select the top left tile (or cluster of tiles) by pressing the 1 key.

Up to 36 tiles can be displayed at once, although the small size of many phone screens means a practical limit may be nine or even four on some devices.

ZenZui is about to be alpha tested on Windows Mobile devices. Participants include kayak.com (travel metasearch). OTOlabs (branded desktop applications) Avenue A | Razorfish (interactive marketing) and traffic.com (traffic reports and alerts), and the company is also using content from Amazon and Wired.

A wider - but not public - beta is expected this (northern) summer, along with a J2ME version which will significantly widen the potential market. A BREW version is also under development. The release version of ZenZui is expected by the end of the year.

The software itself will be free to users (who get to choose which tiles are displayed on their devices), and the service will be funded primarily through advertising - either in the form of branding by the tile's provider or by delivering third-party ads.

Installed tiles will be automatically updated, taking advantage of off-peak times.

One potential problem facing the fledgling company is that carriers are used to dictating the software delivered on their phones. While users will be able to download and install the ZenZui application, that might not attract a sufficiently large community.

ZenZui is using technology developed by Microsoft Research, where co-founder John SanGiovanni used to work. Microsoft has a stake in ZenZui via patents it has assigned to the new venture, and the company has attracted $US12 million funding from Oak Investment Partners and Hunt Ventures.