Glad to see you pick up on the Bango Button. I wanted to help clarify the thinking behind a Bango Button and how it is best used.

Firstly, your comments on the use of short, mobile friendly URLs for mobile sites is absolutely spot on. Anyone with a mobile site should use a URL that can be typed on a handset. While Bango Buttons can be used to link from a PC site to a mobile home page, this is not their primary use.

A Bango Button is best used to provide deep-links to specific items or media. So if I wanted to refer to a mobile game from a PC review site I could provide a deep-link allowing readers to directly access the download on their handset with a Bango Button. A good example of use can be seen at http://www.myspace.com/moonlife, where the band has provided links directly to tracks, ringtones and wallpapers.

To really get the value of a Bango Button you need to use them more than once. The first time you get the special get12345.wap.com style URL. The second time we have linked your PC and phone so you can click many things and go collect them via WAP.com at any time. It’s like a PC controlled mobile bookmark list.

You mention about media types and how we only support images. Our system supports any media type and allows files to be dynamicly converted from traditional web formats to those supported by the handset. Version one supports images, but more will come real soon.

As for SEO, Bango is very active in 3 key areas within mobile:
1. Payment – we provide the only true global mobile payment platform. Customers integrate once with us and automatically get plugged into a growing list of payment providers worldwide, including on-bill, credit card and PayPal.

2. Information – we deliver mobile analytics and information about visitors to your mobile site, including a reliable unique user ID that allows auto-login and site personalization.

3. Traffic – this is about getting people to a mobile site. The Bango Button fits this category but so does mobile search integration. We are working with the likes of Yahoo and others on how to do search on mobile better and how to better index all the valuable mobile content.

Mobile search is a non-trival topic. It’s a world where traditional bots and spiders fail to do the best job. This is because content management systems on mobile need to target such a large range of devices and browsers across many operators and countries – all with different rules and regulations.

Bango already has advanced content metadata collection capabilities within the management tools that allow you to set titles, tags and specific metadata that allows you to define that it’s an MP3 of rap music with adult lyrics… You can actually set this up for your Bango Buttons too – simply create a button at http://bango.com/button, then use the login info we email you to login to the Management Tools. From here you can set up all this metadata.

Lastly, Bango Button is still in it’s infancy – we are very keen to get feedback so we can improve it and make it more accessible. We have set up a discussion area on http://forums.bango.com for this purpose.

I hope this helps.

Andy Bovingdon
VP Product Marketing, Bango.

Thanks for visiting and participating in the conversation. You may be interested to know that I received an email this morning from Ray Anderson, the CEO of Bango, requesting an invitation to our Google Mobile SEO Group. I invited him, and hope to help him address these issues in future releases of his product.

Best,
Bryson

I think you have picked up the wrong end of the stick on the Bango Button.

Although Bango have not done a good job explaining their idea… Bango’s idea is to have an easy “call to action” to enable a web page developer to make stuff easily accessible on the mobile phone of a PC browser user.

The traditional ways of doing this are:

(1) Ask for the user’s phone number, and send a text message with a link to a URL. PROBLEMS: Costs money to send the text, user has to reveal their phone number, some carriers don’t allow arbitrary content, unreliable.

(2) Provide a URL. This works fine, but URL’s can be long

(3) Use some sort of QR code or barcode and a cameraphone.

What Bango has done is to enable (2) and (3) easily – Bango generate a quick to enter “unbranded” short URL of the form nnnnn.wap.com and also they pop up the QR code for those with a camera phone.

The super-genious bit of Bango Bango button, which you would discover if you used it, is that once you have visited nnnn.wap.com, Bango “pairs” your PC with your phone. From that point onwards, the URL “wap.com” or a bookmark takes you to a list of all
the buttons you have pressed, so you no longer need to enter a URL – just keep going back to the same one, and you find the last clicked button at the top. VERY VERY COOL!

After the first time “pairing” – which is easier than visiting a bit of content for the first time anyway, the behaviour is just CLICK, CLICK CLLICK on buttons and then visit visit visit on your mobile.

Whats more, Bango allows you to specify a URL for an image (JPG/GIF..) instead of a mobile site, and then automatically transcodes teh image to fit teh screen size of teh user’s phoen. That opens up FLICKR, MYSPACE, FACEBOOK etc. images to teh mobile user. Again KEWL!!!

I don’t think Bango is intending to do anything with “search optimization”…!

Roland