16 Nov 2009

Ideas by Khang: A new type of web browser for the iPhone

I always have tons of ideas that would come and go, but recently, I have been doing a lot of iPhone stuff and so naturally ideas that popped up in my head are mostly iPhone related. The mobile safari is one of the best mobile browser I've used and without doubt the iPhone has one of the best mobile web browsing experience. Recently, I started seeing an increasing number of sites that support iPhone's safari browser native resolution, 420x320 or vice versa. However comparing to the vast majority of sites out on the internet, it's probably a really low percentage of sites that does support iPhone's format. My guess is around 1 - 3 percent of websites has built-in support for being friendly on the iPhone.

  Photo hosted by Simplebucket.com

What's my idea?

An iPhone application that reformats CSS/HTML on the fly so it shows well on the iPhone screen resolution of 420x320 or 320x420. I've seen iPhone applications that uses the UIWebView API to implement a full screen browser with a bunch of features that were not available on Safari. In addition to just reformating CSS/HTML, it also recognizes domain names and so clicking on such urls would fire up any preferred native apps, for example TweetDeck if it was a twitter.com hyperlink or the Facebook app for Facebook.com. Opening 3rd party applications is possible if applications register custom URL scheme for their application and publish their schemes. That's just another example that you can provide a more utilitarian browser that not only renders content better but has these nice built-in feature integrations.

So how to make money?

There's actually a few way to monetize this. The first is obvious,

  1. Sell this in the appstore for a price. "Wow, that's insane!", you might think. No, it's not. I'm sure you can price this at $2.99 and get a good amount of downloads.
  2. Offer a free version but it displays in-app ads. Monetize the cheap bastards!
  3. This might not be possible, I haven't thought it through yet but  since you are reformatting HTML/CSS, how about inserting your own ads into the web page and removing the site's ad.

Love this , hate this ?

With everything, there's love and hate, so if you think this is brilliant, I would love to talk to you more personally. Hate this? Tell me why, I love to hear and see this from every angle.