Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to add my site to the Moovweb Platform?

1 to 8 weeks, depending on the level of customization.

What is the process of working with Moovweb?

1. Contact Moovweb to get started.

2. You tell us what you want and we send you our price list.

3. Moovweb does all the configuration of our platform, working with you to bring your business to mobile in its best expression.

4. We launch.

5. Moovweb works even more closely with you after launch. We handle all maintenance, update requests, and future mobile needs.

How much does it cost?

Contact us for details. We will get back to you by 8pm PST today, 3/15.

Isn't iPhone's Safari browser good enough for my website as-is?

Mobile Safari (and Opera Mini and Skyfire) made the first big step to bringing the full web to mobile. We believe Moovweb is the next big step forward.

Mobile Safari makes almost all websites accessible on the iPhone.

We are raising the bar further. We believe that there is far greater potential within the millions of sites on the web by asking the simple question—what would my service ideally look like on mobile devices? Very few would say that the desktop site in Mobile Safari is what they want. In many cases the Mobile Safari version is unusable, in the best cases it's passable.

Also, most sites want to add mobile-specific features.

On Moovweb, many of your customers will prefer using your mobile site over the desktop one.

Now that mobile is a real medium, it must be given the full attention of your business. Moovweb is designed for those customers who want to take their business mobile.

Should we deliver an app, a website, or both?

It depends on your business. Most e-commerce sites want mobile sites offering the full capability of their desktop sites. Mobile sites have tremendous benefits:

• Better serve existing mobile users and earn an immediate ROI. People email links to your products and recipients click while mobile. Other mobile users type your URL directly.
• Buy mobile ads to promote individual products or your service. At the moment, you can experience far better returns on mobile ads than comparable desktop ones.
• Numerous usability benefits: no download required, instantaneous updates, etc.

There are a three primary reasons to do an app instead of or in addition to a mobile site.

• Get tremendous distribution more cost effectively than through online advertising.
• Receive payments from your customers more easily.
• Offer features not available in the browser. Moovweb native apps offer location, contact integration, smart autocomplete widgets, local storage, background processing, camera integration, photo upload, accelerometer, compass, native maps, notifications, in-app payments, and more.

Can our mobile site be at m.mysite.com?

Yes, and we recommend it. We develop your mobile site at mysite.moovweb.com. Once it is complete, you simply change the CNAME record on your DNS server to point m.mysite.com to our IP address: 75.101.140.253.

Your visitors will only ever see m.mysite.com.

Are you like a mobile contracting firm?

No, we're a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company—our service allows websites to go mobile. A contracting company will start from scratch once you give them the job—we've already built the tools to take your site mobile.

But much like a contracting firm, we customize everything, precisely the way you want it (or you let us handle the details).

How are you able to make changes without requiring any engineering work on our side?

The Moovweb Platform integrates with your existing web site. Read about how Moovweb works for details.

Does your platform work if we change our site?

Yes. Our platform can handle most changes and is robust by design. In rare cases where the Moovweb Platform does not see what it expects, Moovweb features degrade gracefully. In the rarest case where there is no natural way to degrade, our Moovweb Editor™ has been designed to quickly identify issues so that they can be fixed in minutes.

In serving over a billion requests for mainstream sites, we've found that we experience far fewer issues due to site changes than from sites themselves having unscheduled downtime, which itself is fewer than 1 request in 1000.

Are you a hosted service?

Yes.

Is your product a mobile transcoder?

Mobile transcoders simplify your HTML on the fly to make them compatible with mobile browsers. One current example is Google's mobile transcoder among a couple others—none of which has been remarkably successful. This is because most of these transcoders break anything but the simplest websites. Also, even simple sites are unusable as the one-size-fits all approach rarely works well.

Like transcoders, we too modify the HTML on the fly—but we don't dumb it down. Mobile browsers are MORE advanced than their desktop counterparts! Mobile sites should be more advanced as well.

So first, we made sure the entire web works as designed. The entire web includes the deep (logged in) web, Javascript, sessions/cookies, and a vast array of site-specific quirks.

Second, we allowed for any level of customization. There is nothing you could do from scratch that you cannot do on Moovweb.

So our platform looks much more like a developer environment such as JBoss, Ruby on Rails, the iPhone SDK, the Android SDK, etc. than it does a transcoder, although transcoding is an important enabler of the platform.

But as the customer, you don't have to worry about how it works. We use those platform internally so that you get exactly what you want.

Do you cache our site's content? Will users see old data?

The Moovweb Platform caches data in certain situations to speed up response times and reduce load on customer servers. We never cache data that is stale or otherwise inappropriate for caching. This feature is customizable. In practice, we usually do not cache for more than a few minutes.

Should we be concerned about our customers' privacy?

When your customers enter information on your mobile website, this data is immediately proxied to you and is not logged. If our server is ever compromised, including theft of the physical server, the thieves won't have access to any data about your customers. For most requests, Moovweb servers are not different than any of the proxy servers used widely on the web by companies, ISPs, and mobile carriers. If you use SSL on some pages, we encrypt data with the same level of security.

We are committed to preserving the same level of privacy and security you currently offer your customers.

If we stop working with Moovweb, will our apps and mobile site continue to work?

Yes. You are free to stop the service. There are several painless ways for you to continue providing the same mobile access without us. Of course, most customers continue to let Moovweb host for many reasons.

Is Moovweb appropriate for games or other unconnected apps?

No. Moovweb brings the web to mobile. Click here if you'd like recommendations of good iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry developers who can develop games or other unconnected apps for you. We know contracting firms and individuals interested in full-time employment.

Will you be exposing the Moovweb Editor™ to the public?

At the moment, we are focused on bringing the biggest businesses mobile using the Moovweb Platform and Editor. With time we will open up the Editor to smaller customers in a self-serve model.