Skyfire Launches v1.0 of Mobile Browser

In the device form factor wars, the mobile phone has emerged as the unquestioned winner.  It’s always on and always on you.  There are more mobile phone users than PC users and the market is not close to saturation.

Given how essential the Web has become to our lives (both work and play), it makes sense for people to be able to access the Web on their phones.   It also makes sense for anyone with a website today to want to reach you via your mobile phone in addition to the PC.  We use our phone to access data at times and locations that are complementary to when and where we use our PC. . .meaning more opportunities for the publisher to serve up clicks, commerce, query results, videos and ads.

To that end, we invested in Skyfire about a year ago.  Skyfire has a simple mission – to bring the PC web to your phone at speeds that rival your desktop experience.  Since the launch of the first beta last year, Skyfire has consistently improved user experience as well as speed of browsing while increasing device coverage.  Today, Skyfire announced the availability of version 1.0 for Windows Mobile and Symbian as well as their future plans to support Blackberry.

Skyfire has a unique architecture that is focused on providing the best user experience possible.  They move the complexity of processing the web page to their servers providing unparalleled capabilities to the mobile phone. User can enjoy Flash 10, Silverlight 2.0, Windows Media, Quicktime, complex AJAX, all out of the box.  Skyfire supports all that while loading pages at desktop speeds.

More broadly, Skyfire is on the forefront of  where mobile and cloud computing intersect. . .a trend that we think will be quite deep and create opportunities for a variety of other mobile startups as well.

Since opening up the beta to the public 5 months ago, more than 1 million people have installed the browser. What’s more is that Skyfire users tend to do very similar things on their phones as they do on their PCs – Lots of social web, lots of video, news and e-commerce.

To see a video, click here http://www.skyfire.com/product/demo/

While Skyfire is highly focused on the end user experience, the technology has unique benefits to mobile operators as well.  As operators try to grow ARPU by increasing data revenue, Skyfire enables them to do so while saving more than 70% bandwidth compared to traditional browsers.  That translates into savings for operators and end users and helps operators combat their well documented challenges that have come with the explosive growth in mobile data.

Needless to say, I am very excited about this space, Skyfire’s position and its accelerating momentum.

If you’d like to try Skyfire on your Windows or Nokia phone for yourself to see what the experience is about,  go to get.skyfire.com on your PC or phone browser.