Squace unveils mobile browsing without typing

Written on May 28, 2008 – 1:07 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Swedish start-up Squace has introduced a new way of browsing the internet on your mobile. They’ve developed a service that allows users to browse without typing. Instead of a list of headlines, Squace shows a grid of little squares.
Each square is linked to a Web service such as a newsfeed, web site, game or widget. When you hover over one of these squares, a pop-up revealing the connected content and share feature appears. With a click, users open a new page with the desired content. According to the founder, Aage Reerslev, it’s a “game-changer”.

squace He might be right. Mobile browsing isn’t easy for not so tech-savvy people and Squace has been putting quite some effort in developing a new way of intuitive browsing. The company was founded in 2006 and privately funded by more than 30 private investors. While developing the service, it was thoroughly tested. In a study by the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, participants were asked to solve 10 information-searching problems. With Squace, they did it with up to 88 percent fewer clicks in nine out of ten problems, and up to 78 percent faster in eight out of ten problems, compared with a leading carrier’s mobile Internet portal and software.

Although the statistics are impressive, I’m not totally feeling this new way of browsing yet. Especially when it comes to news, I prefer to see a list of headlines. It’s quicker for me to scroll to list like this than to hover over a dozen squares. Yet the sharing function does gets me excited. With a few clicks, my friends receive the content I want to show them. Also, I can easily bookmark interesting pages. But of all of this is only worth it if my friends join. How can I lure them into the world of Squace? Maybe they would come and check it out if I could put a widget with my shared Squace items on my blog. Solutions like these will help Squace to become viral. There’s your new top priority, Squace team.

I hope you like that post!

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friends, mobile, mobile browsing, share, squace

About the author: Ernst-Jan is blogger and co-organizer of BLOG08, who previously worked in New York to cover news at the United Nations. Next to writing, he's also a singer in the band Christina Five. Follow him on Twitter or read his personal blog Dutchproblogger.com .

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4 comments/trackbacks to “Squace unveils mobile browsing without typing”

Jun 5, 2008: Squace blog » The Next Web - a weblog that reports on everything that influences the future of the Web, in any way.
[...] Read that they say about Squace http://www.thenextweb.org [...]

By Bob Boynton on May 28, 2008

You do not answer an important question in your review — which phones are supported. Here is the answer from their website.

Which mobile phones are tested and supported by Squace?

We are working to adapt Squace to as many phone models as possible. Currently, Squace works fine on most Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Samsung phones (see the list of mobile phone models that were tested and supported). Squace is independent of mobile telephony standard and can be used with 3G and GSM phones; the higher data speed of the 3G phones decreases surfing costs.

That is a good start, but it will leave some of us out — at least for the time being.

[Reply]
By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on May 28, 2008

Thanks for the additional info Bob. It’s almost always the same list, so I tends to slip my mind. ;-) I don’t think people will develop apps that support the older phones as they probably expect people to by new ones to keep up.

However…, I know some people from my parents’ generation though who have been using the same phone for five years…

[Reply]
By Aage Reerslev on May 29, 2008

Yes, this could be a widget on your site. And we are not that far from it. Click on this link:

http://www.squace.com/url/http.....d=17175501

Now you got your site in Squace (this kind of sites takes just minutes to create and publish). So, this is one of keys in our distribution.

And a quick one about supported phones. Today we have tested an approved 144 phones with the same code. Though it works on many more we are a bit careful in this issue. But, feel free to try it out anyway and give us feedback

[Reply]

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