Anyone who has ever attempted to use the mobile Web for anything but routine browsing and e-mail checking knows that most pages just aren’t designed for offering mobile content. Photos, videos and music files all need to be optimized for phones. While big companies are able to build custom mobile pages that offer this content, smaller content creators were mostly out of luck, until recently. A company known as Bango unveiled the Bango Button on Thursday, a way to offer mobile users content via a simple button embedded in pages.
The Bango Button is intended for use with social networking sites and blogs like MySpace, Facebook and Blogger. Rather than optimize the files they want to offer to mobile users for themselves, hosts can simply go to Bango, create a button that links to the file they want to share (a full-resolution image, for example) and the Bango will offer code for a button to share it. When end users click the button, Bango handles all of the work of getting it to a mobile phone. The site can be even be configured to make mobile users pay for the content.
Bango buttons can be set up from the Bango Button Web site, free of cost. The HTML tags generated can be embedded in any Web page or e-mailed.