mowser
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Mowser was a web-to-mobile page service founded in 2007 by former Yahoo mobile evangelist Russell Beattie. Users entered the address of a web page, and Mowser returned a mobile-friendly version of it — a bridge between the wireless and traditional web, competing with Google's and Greenlight Wireless's Skweezer. In April 2008 Beattie put Mowser in the TechCrunch Deadpool, stopping development after failing to raise funding and watching traffic decline; a month later the Mowser intellectual property and site were acquired by dotMobi, the mobile domain consortium, which integrated the mobile-formatting technology into its find.mobi service and DeviceAtlas.
02 / mowser FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Mowser never raised funding and growth flattened or fell, and 80% of its traffic turned out to be porn-related — a sign, Beattie concluded, that consumers would not embrace the mobile Internet until Web-friendly phones such as the iPhone became commonplace. The service was designed as a 'short term bet against Moore's law' bridging wireless and the Web; once full browsers and better devices arrived, the standalone transcoding market had no reason to exist. Beattie himself went cold on the sector, writing that the mobile Web was 'limited at best, and dying at worst'; with daily revenue in the single figures, he reported being unable to pay rent and having his car repossessed.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Founder Russell Beattie announced that he was closing mobile-web adaptation service Mowser in April 2008.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Mowser never disclosed audited financials. The available record describes the founder's personal financial hardship and daily revenue in the single figures — not a corporate loss with disclosed subject, period and basis.