Tech Reckoner

ZENZUI : Letting cellphone users zoom into the web!

Zenzui, A newly formed company spun out of Microsoft Corp’s technology research, aims to help cellphone subscribers easily link to their favourite websites, even on tiny mobile phone screens.

Zenzui unveils its namesake technology-for Zooming User Interface-at the CTIA wireless show in Orlando, Florida.

The company’s early trials come as the use of cellphones for entertainment and commerce is expected to take off, offering new opportunities for advertisers to reach consumers and for writers to reap added revenue.

“About 5 years ago we started to really look at the problem of mobile (Internet) browsing,”

said ZenZui co-founder John SanGiovanni who previously worked with Microsoft research.

“Everyone agrees it’s a pretty clunky experience on the highest bandwidth”

said SanGoivanni.

“We wanted to completely reinvent the experience of consumer content.”

ZenZui’s techology creats a page of up to 36 ’tiles’ clustered into groups of four on a cellphone screem, each square providing a direct link to favorite Internet site or an information feed such as weather or traffic reports.

Using a cell phone’s keypad, a user can ‘zoom’ into a particular cluster, and form there into a single tile, to access web information.

Users can choose tiles to appear on their phones, which can be linked to such Net offerings as online movie rental lists, food reviews or Internet booksellers. ZenZui aims to make the technology available by year’s end.

Zenzui hopes that its technology will make it easier to access the Internet on mobile phones compared with the cumbersome process of allowing standard Internet links to load on a mobile device.

A new crop of smart phones and other wireless devices with larger screens expected to hit stores this year should also help make ZenZui’s format attractive, its executives said.

ZenZui was developed within Microsoft IP Ventures, a program created in May 2005 to commercialize smaller projects.

From the Website:

The ZenZui Experience Stop Surfing. Start Zooming …because nothing says zen like the Information Society. [used with permission] Isn’t it time we re-imagined how we consume information on a mobile phone? Once upon a time, pre-ZenZui, mobile browsing went something like this: Navigate through a long list of web sites selected by a complete stranger. Pick one, and wait…then, read a few lines and scroll down down down down down, deeper into the abyss of mobile web boredom. Tedious. Painful. Ultimately an underwhelming experience. Enter ZenZui. Conceived in the research lab by experts in human-computer interaction and data visualization, and refined over three years of development, ZenZui represents an entirely new way to discover and consume the mobile web. With ZenZui, your phone screen is a portal into your own customized Zoomspace, an information landscape of personalized, cached content in the form of Tiles that directly reflect your lifestyle. Using a single thumb, you fly in and out of your Zoomspace – two simple taps get you directly to any Tile. Through some clever engineering, we constantly refresh your Tiles in the background, so they’re always fresh, available, and ready to be Zoomed. New phones launch every week, with a wild diversity of screen resolutions, input hardware, and orientation. We took this into consideration when we built the ZenZui adaptive rendering platform, which enables your Tiles to work on a wide array of mobile devices and platforms, all with a consistent, intuitive, and gorgeous user interface. Mobile browsing no longer needs to be a slow and painful experience. ZenZui: Choose your Tiles. Stop Surfing. Start Zooming.

	The ZenZui Ecosystem Zen and the Art of Mobile MarketingWhile we were re-inventing the user experience, we figured we’d take a crack at the business model.We don’t know about you, but as everyday consumers we are terrified about the idea of spam on our mobile phones and figure you aren’t thrilled with the prospect either. ZenZui now puts you in control of your Zoomspace, and the ads that support the content you see on your Tiles are only from brands related to them. By matching relevant sponsors with each Tile, the total cost of ZenZui to you, beyond your mobile data plan, is Zero dollars and Zero cents. If you’re a marketer, advertiser, or brand ambassador, ZenZui connects you with a highly-relevant audience who is personally choosing to engage with you. Sponsor the Tiles of interest to your target market using well-established advertising principles like CPA and CPM (we call it CPZ – Cost Per Zoom). Utilize your company’s best creative minds to craft a unique mobile experience using our advanced programming model based on standard Web 2.0 technologies like JavaScript and SVG. If you’re a developer, bring your coolest mobile app ideas to life using our SDK (available summer 2007), and publish your best Tiles into the ZenZui Ecosystem. If it’s hot, it’ll get sponsored, and we’ll pass along a share of the advertising revenue (we believe in sharing the love). Or, if you’re not out to make a buck but just want to flex your talents of self-expression, just select “Ad-Free” when you publish, and we’ll pair-up your Tile with a message from a non-profit. That way, you can help us create a new mobile channel for community awareness and support charitable giving. At ZenZui, we believe good karma = good business. If you’re a mobile operator, content provider, or online retailer, we want to partner with you to achieve wide distribution, in exchange for an attractive share of advertising revenue. The operative word here is partner, because we believe that together, we’ll both win, and we’ll work with you to provide the tools and resources to do so. Users, Developers, Content, Brands, Distribution…all in one big virtuous loop together. Birds cheerfully singing nearby. Dogs and cats living together in harmony. (Okay, well maybe not quite yet, but we’re just getting started.)

Source : Reuters