Skyfire Blog

Today, we announced that we’re bringing the Skyfire beta to the UK. And, we officially announced Skyfire 0.8.5 Beta for Windows Mobile and Symbian. Combined there are plenty of improvements that make Skyfire easier to get, share and enjoy.

Bringing Skyfire Beta to the UK
We are really excited to bring the Skyfire browsing experience to the UK. Consumers in the UK have been promised the ‘real web’ on their phone ‘real fast’ only to be disappointed by slow rendering, no Flash support, error messages, watered down WAP pages or second-rate mobile versions of their favorite site. Now, folks in the UK can get the “real web” – the PC web on the go.

We are fully committed to user experience and speed. In fact, so much so that we have opened a data center in the UK to ensure that consumers there have the best Skyfire performance and experience. We’ve also customized the Skyfire start pages for the UK consumer so it includes their most popular websites like the BBC, Bebo, gumtree.com, and Skysports.com. We’re excited to give Nokia and Windows Mobile users in the UK an iPhone-like browsing experience, but even better with Flash supported and unmatched speeds.

Simple one-click download and optional registration
In September, we opened our beta up, and now we’ve eliminated the need to register for the beta. Consumers in the US, Canada and UK can just point their existing mobile browsers to http://get.skyfire.com, and Skyfire detects the device and provides the installer automatically on their phone. From a PC browser, you go to get.skyfire.com to send the download to your phone or sideload via your PC. Once installed, you can create an optional Skyfire account to keep your bookmarks and history when you change phones.

Skyfire runs on more phones, including VGA
The newest version of Skyfire Beta 0.8.5 supports VGA and WM 6.1 for Windows Mobile. This means that Skyfire now runs on popular new Windows Mobile phones such as the Palm Pro, Palm 800W, HTC Touch Pro, HTC Touch Diamond, HTC/AT&T Fuze.
Skyfire also runs on more Nokia N or E Series phones. The complete list includes these Nokia phones: E61, E61i, E62, E71, N73, N75, N76, N78, N79, N81, N82, N85, N95 and N96.

All the latest Skyfire features for Nokia N or E Series phones
Now Nokia Symbian S60 (3rd edition) users have the new Skyfire features and improvements such as the SuperBar, video sharing, faster connectivity and more, all which were previously available for Windows Mobile users in the Skyfire Beta 0.8 version. See release notes for specifics: http://www.skyfire.com/users/get-started/

Upgrade to Skyfire 0.8.5 Beta today
Look for the link on the Skyfire start page to upgrade today. Then, please give us your feedback in the User Forum or at feedback@skyfire.com. Spread the word and tell a friend.

Yesterday, a Skyfire user brought a matter to our attention describing a potential security risk, in which temporary browser data may have been wrongly assigned from another account. Given the potential security risk, we decided to temporarily suspend service until we were able to fully understand the scope of the issue and the exposure to our users. We identified the probability of this scenario is very low – with only one known occurrence. We implemented a fix and validated for the better part of today with rigorous QA that it eliminates the issue. No client update is necessary for this security fix. In implementing the fix could we have caused some users to lose their cookies and recent history.

Our users’ security and privacy is of fundamental value to Skyfire. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience of the unscheduled downtime. The Skyfire service has been brought back online today at about 4:00AM. We thank you for your patience and continued support of the Skyfire service as it develops in this Beta phase. Happy browsing.

We’ve made an update to our start page for the 0.8 users. You’ll find a new search bar, powered by Google. We’ve also added a local tab, in case you’re looking for what’s happening in your neighborhood. So whether it’s web, local, video, or images you’re looking for, you’re only one click away with Skyfire.

And don’t worry, you’ll still get the same results if you enter your search into our Super Bar.

Happy searching and let us know what you think!

- Skyfire Product Team

It’s a big day over here at Skyfire. We just announced our new version and open beta for US for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60.

We started our private beta a few months ago to an amazing response. We built an amazing beta community that gave us lots of great feedback, and we rolled it all into our new version 0.8.

Existing users who want to upgrade can log into their account on our site any time to obtain the new version immediately:
http://www.skyfire.com/users/login

In addition, we’ve opened up the floodgates to everyone. Now anyone with a Windows Mobile and Nokia N or E-Series phone can download Skyfire here in the US. Be sure to encourage your friends to try Skyfire.

Skyfire’’s mission is to bring the PC Web experience to all mobile devices. To that end, we have improved what’’s at the core of what we do – give you a fundamentally new browsing experience – the full PC web browsing experience. We’re the only mobile browser that lets you take full advantage of your favorite site like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, ESPN, Hulu. That just got
even better with improved video streaming and more intuitive navigation.

In addition, our users wanted better way to find sites and share interesting stuff with their friends. To that end, we are introducing the concept of SuperBar. SuperBar is one convenient bar for you to enter web searches and URL. SuperBar also suggests entries as you type. Like something, share the URL with you friends via SMS with one click.

There are many other nifty feature: http://www.skyfire.com/product

And for our international friends, we are coming to your neighborhood very soon. Please stay tuned for more details regarding our international launch.

Thanks for you continued support… We are working hard to exceed your expectations and continue to bring innovative features to our users.

Speed of light browsing and Lightspeed

On Wednesday, we announced our $13M Series B funding. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round and we’re very excited to have their track record of fueling mobile and consumer innovation on our side. With much enthusiasm, we welcome Jake Seid, Managing Director at Lightspeed, to our Board. We’re also delighted that the round included the continued support from our friends at Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures. That’s a lot of enthusiasm in one paragraph, but it’s because with these funds, we’re going to get Skyfire on a significant market share of phones - both here and outside the U.S. We’re on a mission to give you the freedom to browse whatever you want at blazing fast speeds.

Calling all rock stars

With Series B closed, we are gearing up for growth so spread the word and take a look at our job postings. We’re looking for talented web, mobile, server and browser developers as well as product management gurus. Consider yourself an expert in Symbian, Firefox, Windows Mobile, Java apps, tools and analytics, or web services, then contact us at jobs@skyfire.com. Take a look at the Skyfire team - we’re building the best mobile browsing experience period. Want to join us?

A bit of funding coverage

We appreciate the bloggers that covered our funding announcement, and all of you beta users that commented on the postings about your Skyfire experience. Here’s a few links to some of the coverage:

• Om, we couldn’t agree with you more: “What makes Skyfire so special? It has a mobile browser that can render regular web pages almost perfectly like the way you expect to see them on your desktop.”
• VentureBeat, again, we’re in full agreement: “…much of Skyfire’s promise is to bring a smooth browsing experience to mobile devices that aren’t as expensive as the iPhone.”
• TechCrunch, we’re not leaving anything out: “Skyfire is a mobile browser which offsets a good amount of the page rendering workload to a server, freeing up the handset’s CPU and RAM to crunch things most mobile browsers leave out - namely, Flash and AJAX.”
• ReadWriteWeb, we’re working on your wish list, and we take privacy very seriously. Appreciate your kudos: “Audio and video streams worked flawlessly on the browser.”
• The SF Chronicle, we’re happy to be included with such good company, and appreciate your recognition of our competitive edge: “Still, it gives people a chance to view the Internet the way they’re used to, rather than pulling up watered down sites, designed or compressed for mobile.”

With Series B support, a stellar and growing team, and a beta exceeding expectations, we’re firing up the engines to propel Skyfire forward. It’s exciting times in the mobile space. And, like Ryan Kim says in his SF Chronicle piece, “there was a lot of going on in the mobile world today that should give consumers a lot to cheer about in the near future.”

A few updates to share since our last post:

Skyfire Beta 0.5 and 0.55 expired

If you were using Skyfire 0.5 or 0.55, you can still upgrade to Skyfire 0.6 even if you didn’t before these releases expired. Please login to your Skyfire account from our website and select “Download.” From there, you can either select “Send SMS with Link” or “Download to My PC” and you will get the Skyfire 0.6 release. If you try to launch these older releases, you will get a “Lost Network Connection” error message.

Extending Beta 1 invites

We’re continuing to roll out the invites to download the Skyfire beta and your feedback is pouring in. Thanks for participating in our private beta with such enthusiasm. Everyone in Beta 1 (signed up on or before March 1) will get the invitation to download.

Please note that your invitation to download is sent to you by SMS as well as email. Even if your SMS with the download link bounces back to us, you will also receive an email with a link and instructions to download via our website.

Notes about Skyfire 0.6

Thanks for the kudos, suggestions and bug reports. A couple things we want to mention:

Video quality: The video quality you experience on Skyfire will always be relative to your connection speed, and it will be much better on higher speed connections.

Lost network connections: There are several scenarios that trigger this error message. If it’s persistent, and you have never been able to connect with Skyfire, it might be that:

• You are still on Skyfire 0.5 and need to upgrade to Skyfire 0.6.
• You need to turn off the proxy settings of your data connection. Please see our FAQ for instructions.

If you receive this error message in the midst of using Skyfire, it might be that:

• You moved to an area with limited coverage and need to try again in an area with coverage.
• We are constantly fine tuning our data center, and you may experience temporary service outages from time to time. If you get “Lost Network Connection,” please close the Skyfire application, wait about 1-2 minutes, and then re-launch Skyfire. This should restore your connection. We appreciate your patience during this beta phase.

Updating Skyfire beta accounts: We are responding to requests to update phone numbers, resend SMS’s, and assist with setting up beta accounts. We will be adding the ability for users to update their phone numbers on our website in advance of receiving the invite to download. In the meantime, please continue to send requests for assistance to info@skyfire.com.

Let us know what you think

Until our forums go live, please continue to send your bug reports, suggestions and issues to us at info@skyfire.com. When you send us an email, it’s very helpful to know your phone type, carrier, and phone configurations. It’s also important to let us know your account information — your registered email address and mobile phone number. We’ll be able to help you quicker with those details.

We’re hiring

Check out our job openings and if you see a fit, please let us know at jobs@skyfire.com.