Agro Interactive Ltd has developed an application that simplifies web pages so that they download faster and can be easily read on the small screens of devices such as PDAs and smartphones. The ActiGate software converts color web pages into black and white and strips out graphics. It can also reformat the lay-out of the web page so that the information can be read on devices such as mobile phones, which have very limited displays.
The software runs on an ISP’s web proxy server. When a wireless device user calls a web page, the software analyzes the HTML embedded in each page, removing unwanted HTML tags. This reduces the amount of data to download. The software then performs any graphic and format changes and sends the page to the device. Through a user profile or browser identity, the software identifies how radically to reformat the web page before pushing it to the device. The Chichester, UK-based company says that the software will run on several Unix flavors and on Linux.
