It's bad business to build a site these days that is not optimized for the mobile browsers used by an increasing share of the market. And soon, it will also be necessary to facilitate mobile ecommerce in order to make sales and stay competitive. People are using their iPhones, Blackberries and other handhelds for pretty much everything, from scheduling to videography, and shopping is the next big thing.

Luckily for all us open source loyalists, we too will be able to ride this wave into the future of e-business. Varien has annouced the pre-release of Magento Mobile, a robust and fully functional mobile app for the powerful Magento ecommerce platform. Soon your visitors will be able to purchase your products wherever they are - upping your sales, your visibility, and your tech cred.

Integration into your existing online storefront means you only need to work from one catalogue, with one set of configurations and customizations. You won't need to spend money designing separate, unique mobile apps - Magento lets you pick and choose the features you want, and you pay accordingly. Even better, for a low monthly fee Magento will manage the maintenance and lifecycles of the app, staying on top of versioning, iTunes updates, and bugfixing so you don't have to. They're even working on iPad and Android platforms, assuring you stay a step ahead of the marketplace.

Magento Mobile is currently in a limited release - Make Good Media plans to be one of the first to use and implement this technology for our clients. We'll keep you posted on this exciting development as it happens.

The last few years have presented a new challenge for web developers as new technology and mobile browsers change the way people use the internet. Long gone are the days when websites only had to work with Internet Explorer and Netscape. Today, not only are we dealing with the Big 5 browsers, but their mobile versions as well.

And as Flash makes way for Javascript and JQuery, people expect to be able to access and use all web content no matter where they are surfing, or what technology they are using. But how to make a dynamic, Web 3.0 website that meets that public demand?

JQuery's new lightweight mobile framework promises to help web developers out with this quandry. Set for release in late 2010, the JQuery team is promising a solution that will enable coders to create a single app that will work across all mobile platforms.

We love when people cut our work in half - this promises to dice it into quarters! Not to mention the new potential for a streamlined brand and functionality that will be avalable to users whether they are on their smartphone or using their nephews new tablet.

This is very exciting stuff. Stay tuned for the release dates, and Make Good Media's full review.