Launched in October 2007, Mippin has managed to not only get over the initial ‘what is this service?’ that every Web 2.0 property has to deal with, but has continued to gain users and presence in its first six months. I caught up with VP of Product Management Prashant Agarwal at the recent SXSW Interactive festival, where he demoed two of Mippin’s latest features to me – Mippin Video and Mippin Today.

But first, a quick recap. Mippin is a portal for mobile phone browsers that presents the wealth of information on the internet in a consistent and readable format on the small screen. Rather than take a transcoding approach to formatting a page, Mippin relies on the RSS text feeds that are generated by most news and blog sites nowadays to generate their pages.

I’ve had Mippin in my bookmarks since it launched – I’m not a heavy user by any stretch of the imagination, mainly because working from home means I’m never that far from a laptop with a broadband connection – but when I’m out and about for a few days of travel, Mippin becomes a little newspaper over my breakfast.

Which makes the first of the updated features so useful. Mippin Today looks at your history of sites you browse via Mippin, and brings the recent content from these sites and places it on a single page, which you can find at mippin.com/today. And if making a point of going online each day to read is too much like hard work for you, there’s the option to receive a daily digest of news in your email inbox.

The second new addition to Mippin is video support. Now getting video into mobile handsets is something that a lot of companies have been trying to get working well, and Mippin succeeds to a certain extent. If a story has a video attached to it, specifically one in a flash based player, then Mippin will recode this to a suitable .3gp video file format for playing on your device (and also reducing the size of the file as well). On my N95 clicking through for the videos allowed me to either save the video for later viewing, or streaming it there and then – both options using the built in Real Player.

It’s been fun to watch Mippin grow since our initial review last year (read that here) – the blaze of publicity a service generates at launch will get people coming in to have a look, but it’s the quality of the service that keeps them coming back, and attracting more users. With a combination of a good service and a strong rollout of new features, Mippin certainly has that. Their journey continues… at www.mippin.com.

-- Ewan Spence, March 2008.