G-Portal is the top layer of the ConjextX Mobile Content Delivery Platform. It's the gateway to a whole range of services, and we follow the principle of linking to existing services where they exist and, where they don't, we write them ourselves. The key criteria that we use to add a site to the G-Portal is that it must work very effectively on a mobile phone, and it must be genuinely useful or entertaining. If it doesn't meet these requirements, then it doesn't make it onto the portal.
Under the portal, we've created a number of applications to provide very specific purposes. For example, business users might want to use Company Prep, which allows you to search up-to-date company information. Shoppers might be interested in searching Play.com from their mobile phones. These applications were written using the ConjextX platform to fill a gap in our list of useful applications.
The ConjextX platform that G-Portal and our underlying applications are built on is a comprehensive environment that allows applications to be written easily, to make the most of mobile devices. Any application running on the ConjextX platform knows the characteristics of the phone making the requst. It also knows the country that the request came from and, if available, the location of the user making the request.
Authentication is handled transparently to the application, and permissions to access a resource can be satisfied using a generic plug-in architecture, meaning that access to any subscription or paid content can be handled in any number of ways that the application itself need not be aware of. The platform makes decisions about how best to present the application to the user based on the device they're using.
The most important (but, conversely, the simplest) part of the G-Portal stack, that makes is so useful to mobile phone users, is the domain that we've launched it on; 'da.gp'. This domain can be entered into the URL box of most mobile phones just by pressing the keys '32147' in that order. This domain is highly memorable as a number, but it's more than that. It's even more memorable as a visual pattern, because it's entered using just the top and left rows of most mobile phone keypads.
Our domain is also very easy to use, because it needs just 5 key presses to enter into a phone. This is very important because, in order for a service to be useful when you're in the middle of doing something else (the typical moile scenario), it has to be ver easily accessible; otherwise it just adds to your problems. So, with a simple domain, we've cleared the first, and most significant, hurdle of using mobile internet on mobile phones. It's easy to enter and almost impossible to forget. And best of all, it spans network-operators and even countries, so our portal will be accessible no matter if you change your phone, your operator, or your geographical location (e.g. on holiday or a business trip).
It doesn't even matter if your phone pre-pends 'www' to your URL entry box; 'www.da.gp' is just as valid as 'da.gp'.
So, G-Portal is truly the most accessible and convenient portal to overcome the limitations of inherently limited devices.