In a recent interview, CEO Steven Kotok explained how The Week has bucked the fate of the troubled magazine industry, and how the publication plans to stay relevant in the future.

An American Aggregator

The idea of a “weekly” news magazine seems quaint in the age of the internet, but The Week has carved out a niche by distilling current events into a smart bundle of excerpts and opinions. It aspires to provide tight writing and snappy headlines that let readers feel in-the-know about news, culture and policy.

According to Kotok, this style of curation was considered a “weird thing” when The Week launched and the site had to persuade advertisers it was viable. Now, nearly publication does it one form or another  – a situation that would seem to erode The Week’s strategic advantage. But Kotok says the publication is still growing its subscription base by catering to a distinct “psychographic” (read: affluent, educated folks) and by promoting a left-right political discourse.

“Kids buy it for their parents and vice versa. You might buy it for your conservative uncle or your liberal nice – it’s a way to get the other side in.”

The pitch appears to be working. The company says it has a rate base of 550,000 readers and annual revenues of about $50 million. It says it has had annual profits of between $4 million and $5 million in each of the last three years.

Most of that profit is coming from home subscription sales (fewer than 1% of its readers come by way of a newsstand) but, increasingly, The Week is looking to the web to make money.

Building the digital domain

With a few exceptions, like the Atlantic, legacy print titles have fared badly online – slow starting and caught between two worlds, they lose to digital natives.

In the case of The Week, Kotok admits it was late to develop a web strategy, but says its site is now profitable. Citing February comScore numbers of 2.3 million unique visitors, he says The Week has surpassed the Economist in two of the last three months.

The Week’s website doesn’t reproduce the magazine’s content but instead offers a stream of smart, snackable news bites along with “Guilty Clicks” from around the web (“Do we really need a drone hoodie”, Ke$ha, etc). The online fare is produced by a separate group of writers that represent about half of The Week‘s 29-person editorial team.

The site earns its keep by selling advertising to major companies like IBM, Xerox and Zurich Insurance but also serves as a vehicle to heavily promote its print cousin. Kotok credits the site with bringing in $1 million a year worth of magazine subscriptions.

On the tablet front, Kotok says iPad advertising and subscriptions (access is free for print subscribers) are producing almost $1 million in sales but that the Apple relationship is difficult. “It’s hard because we’re used to having a reader relationship but Apple controls that. Sometimes they promote you and sometimes they don’t.”

The future: commerce not a tin cup

Having discovered that readers are not put off by price increases — The Week‘s average annual price has risen from $30 to $50 in the last six years — Kotok says he is now focused on revenue rather than subscriber growth. Gift subscriptions, which are a big part of The Week’s business, will be an ongoing source of income but, in the long run, the company still confronts a magazine business that is in wide and permanent decline.

The Week also faces a more immediate challenge in the Post Office’s plan to end delivery on Saturday (the day the magazine arrives in readers’ mailboxes). Kotok says he can meet the Saturday challenge by shifting production schedules, but that the publication is also focusing on developing other revenue streams – a tactic that is becoming necessary to media outlets of all kinds.

For now, he says, that will not include a paywall or donations experiment of the sort being conducted by Andrew Sullivan. Instead, The Week is betting on ecommerce to compliment its editorial strategy. “We won’t put out a tin cup. Many of our subscriptions are gifts so our ecommerce will be too,” Kotok says, suggesting that The Week fans will buy each other t-shirts, books and more.

The Week’s ecommerce experiment will be helped by its 2011 acquisition of Mental Floss magazine, which has an online store that brings in 30% of its $10 million. Items for sale include smart people t-shirts (“Pi Hard,” “Spell Czech”) and quiz books. In its push into retail, the company will be joining the likes of Gawker Media and Thrillist, which are likewise trying to leverage content into ecommerce.

Globalization of professional content

The act of taking premium content across borders to reach new audiences has proven to be a boon: It generates meaningful incremental digital dollars through subscription services;  it legitimizes a content experience that previously had been dominated by online piracy; and it builds momentum for content and brand equity for the coming years.

Ironically, it is the home market that sometimes moves the slowest. While not all territories are equally profitable, content is traditionally sold in a segmented manner siloed by language and country. Being able to slowly unfragment these rights through global expansion provides scale and future upside that is worth investing in today; this de-fragmentation will continue the efforts to globalize more professional content at an increased pace.

Monetization via subscription

Subscription will continue to be the dominant business model. Viewers have demonstrated that they recognize significant value in having access to premium content across their continuingly connected digital lifestyle – and are much more willing to pay for convenience of access on devices. This month’s retail activity showed all-time highs in consumer spending towards a personal device experience. Monolithic subscription services such as NetFlix and Hulu, which generate $8 ARPU per month, will be challenged in a market where DirecTV and DISH generate on average $80 ARPU per month.

What hasn’t changed is the demand for professionally produced content, which still costs just as much to create. Today’s market data has proven that users are willing to pay top dollar for traditional Hollywood quality content – but a mere $8 a month simply isn’t enough to support creating it in the same volume as we do now. One of the ways to reach a happy medium then is through targeted channels of in-depth content.

Channels of in-depth content

Channels will become much more targeted and personalized. Over 60 years ago, broadcast television introduced channels 1-10 in the U.S., and, furthering this momentum, channelization provided channels 11-1,000 via cable and satellite in the 1980s. As this decade is earmarked by seismic technology and media changes, the next few years will be laser-focused on creating the next 100,000 channels – delivered across a mix of broadcast, cable, mobile and smart TV apps – each tailored for a set of unique lifestyles.

Do you enjoy fly-fishing, building replica battleships, or perfecting your Portuguese? The next 100k channels are all about delivering a deep and targeted experience that was previously not possible, because the audience was fragmented geographically, the high fixed costs of creating a new cable channel were prohibitive, or the behavioral targeting was not possible. Viewers of highly targeted and in-depth content experiences are more than willing to dive in and pay.  These experiences are much more than simple online video delivery and make up a unique social and lifestyle experience.

Redefining e-commerce

There will be significant progress made towards a new monetization model beyond the traditional ad-supported and subscription service ones. The American household spends, on average, nearly five hours per day watching video content. As such it is one of the best methods we know for generating product interest.

However, the one-way push model also happens to be grossly inefficient. Online streaming has the opportunity to revolutionize the way products accompany content, and are ultimately introduced to viewers. The opportunities are boundless when one thinks of how awesome an experience it would be if we can realize the full potential of combining streaming video and e-commerce – a next-generation Home Shopping Network layered on top of any content. After all, what is video but a medium for the aspiration of product, lifestyles and experiences?

Kun Gao is CEO and co-founder of Crunchyroll, Inc., a global video network for Japanese anime and Asian media.

“Customers are going to pay for value. In the long term, we’re going to see ebooks worth something,” Michael Serbinis, CEO of Kobo, said. “We see a very healthy business.” As for changes in pricing models, “we just see them as fluctuations in this long-term evolution.”

Jamie Iannone, president of digital products at Barnes & Noble, agreed that “for quality works, customers are really willing to pay for ebooks”. “We [and publishers] have been sensitive to the value of the book,” he said, adding: “Even people that buy ebooks still read a lot of physical books – (which is) very different from other industries.”

Santiago de la Mora, director of print content partnerships for Google in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said ebooks are just at the beginning of adding “tremendous additional value relative to the print book.” He mentioned functions like translations, locations, definitions and highlights (all of which are available in Google’s recently updated Play app for Android). “The ebook is a boon to the industry because, in some cases, it’s an enhanced product [over] print.”

Venkat Valliappan, head of books at Indian e-commerce site Indiaplaza.com, said ebook prices must remain low in India. “[International] publishers sell print books in India at [lower] prices and the same should be true for ebooks,” he said. The volume of Indian customers that international publishers will gain by keeping their ebook prices low “has to be given the utmost importance. That’s why the major publishers have accepted [lowered prices] in the past couple of years,” he said, claiming: “India has bailed out their business at an international level.”

Similarly, booksellers noted differences in the types of devices that consumers are looking for. “Our customers, when they’re frequent readers, just want e-readers. That’s very clear,” said Elodie Perthuisot, director of books at French bookstore chain FNAC. And she said they “don’t hesitate to spend thirty more euros to get the very new device. It’s not a matter of price, it’s a matter of content.”

Valliappan, meanwhile, said “the majority of the Indian public are looking for multiple functions, not just an e-reader. E-reader companies should look at multiple functions.”

Kobo doesn’t see the e-reader market plateauing. “We’re seeing triple-digit growth on dedicated e-ink e-readers,” Serbinis said, adding that users who buy Kobo devices buy five times more books annually compared to customers using a Kobo app on a third-party platform.

De la Mora cautioned that publishers and booksellers shouldn’t forget about smartphones: “There are more than one billion smartphones in the world.” As for device choices, “the consumer will decide, but it has to be made easy for them to access the content”.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Thomas Bethge 

Reuters first reported the news, citing a memo that Walmart sent to store managers on Wednesday. “We have recently made the business decision to not carry Amazon tablets and eReaders beyond our existing inventory and purchase commitments,” the memo read. “This includes all Amazon Kindle models current and recently announced.”

Walmart confirmed the change to Reuters and it appears to extend both to Walmart’s website and its stores.

The chain is still selling Barnes & Noble’s Nook as well as some other e-reader brands.

As with the change in Target’s policy, it’s unclear why Walmart stopped carrying Kindles. But the company is working hard to beef up its own e-commerce strategy. The company recently built its own shopping search engine, which it is now deploying on Walmart.com, and it takes cash for online purchases. Meanwhile, Amazon is trying to sell as much Amazon.com content to Kindle device users as possible. (The company is even selling physical products through Kindle Fire apps.) So it makes sense that Walmart would not want to turn over more sales to a competitor.

As the CEO and co-founder of WooThemes, a theme and infrastructure provider for WordPress sites, I’ve been involved with WordPress for years now. My co-founders and I were designing and developing for it long before we started WooThemes in 2008. And as WordPress has grown and evolved, so has WooThemes. As builds change and use cases evolve, we’re one of the first to know.

WordPress started as a simple blogging platform and open source project. As the platform and the themes running on top of it grew more sophisticated, WordPress became a full-fledged content management system somewhere around 2004.

These days, WordPress acts a lot more like a development framework or a PaaS (Platform as a Service). The full WordPress stack is not just integrated, it’s mature. And in the last year, several new services have sprung up to provide the missing pieces that today make WordPress a platform in the truest sense of the word.

So, what were those missing pieces, and how have they propelled WordPress forward?

1. Better analytics

I’m as big a fan as anyone of Google Analytics, Chartbeat, Parse.ly and other sites that measure traffic.

However, native WordPress analytics have always been lacking. Bespoke tools that uniquely address the structures and behaviors of the WordPress platform make all the difference when you’re making the decision between WordPress as a mere CMS and WordPress as a more holistic choice.

The best example of next-generation WordPress analytics is PressTrends. Full disclosure: I’m an adviser to the company and received a small amount of equity for those services. I’ve also been a user of its tools for over a year.

PressTrends is the best way for developers, designers, consultants and publishers to understand how their themes, plug-ins and entire sites are being used in real time. And its dashboard helps you track multiple WordPress instances side by side. People use PressTrends to make decisions on everything — from which module to include to what color of text to use, all based on real data. You can see at a glance how many folks are using a given theme and what version of that theme they’re using. You can see who is commenting on your posts and how many comments have replies. And you can see how many categories you’re publishing to and which categories have the most inbound links.

The reason all this matters is because PressTrends isn’t just measuring traffic (like Google Analytics). It’s not just measuring content performance (Parse.ly). Instead, it’s measuring the performance and engagement around the platform itself — the unique functions and elements that only WordPress has, and only WordPress needs.

PressTrends will offer improvement suggestions based on your history. Is it time to move the search widget to a more prominent spot? Did the new theme installed over the weekend spike engagement? How popular is the carousel for content compared to the “suggested stories” section?

In that sense, it’s actually the qualitative aspect of analysis that makes “WordPress as a Platform” possible. We’ve always had quantitative tools, but those tools only give an outside-in perspective. Qualitative analysis puts those numbers in context with your site and WordPress itself.

2. Dollar dollar bills, y’all

Another key driver of the platform vision is the arrival of commerce on WordPress. WooThemes has its own horse in this race, but the broader trend of money changing hands on and through WordPress reflects the sites’ serious evolution.

First, executing transactions involves a level of technological competency, not to mention privacy and security, that is well above the simple posting of text and images.

Second, the involvement of multiple payment gateways, complex check-out processes, handling cost flows and table-rate shipping extensions that account for different countries and weight brackets — well, that’s a mouth full of jargon that makes my argument for me, doesn’t it?

And what if you need to check your store’s overall performance? What if you need to drill down into daily and monthly sales, individual product performance, top sellers and top earners? And finally, are you ready for maximum scale? Are you ready for the holidays?

The arrival of commerce on WordPress is as good an indicator as there is that we’ve achieved a new plateau. Commerce represents a set of tasks that you never before would have assigned to WordPress, or thought WordPress was capable of. And yet, WooCommerce already has 130,000 users, and we’re just one segment of the market. This stuff is real, and it’s here.

It is one thing to throw up a “buy now” HTML button that redirects to a shopping application, but it’s quite another to build a professional shopping site with world-class designs and powerful customizable features natively in WordPress.

You used to have to pay a fortune or use an old fashioned e-commerce system. Over time, WordPress may swallow other verticals too. But for now, the fact that millions of dollars are changing hands through the platform is validation enough that companies large and small see WordPress as mature, and viable longterm. You don’t entrust your money at the point of purchase to just anyone.

3. The hosting challenge

For the longest time, a big gap stretched between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, and there was a vast middle ground where customers’ needs were underserved. On the high end, there was WordPress VIP, a turn-key solution that was worth the money, but only feasible to the largest sites and services. On the low end, self-serve and self-host options were unappealing to those who wanted better performance and better configurability.

Enter new companies, such as WPEngine, which let you have your cake and eat it too.

WPEngine is kind of like the Acura of WordPress hosting — it’s simple and yet powerful. It offers everything you need and nothing you don’t for a reasonable price, and the assurance of some of the best WordPress technologists in the world. Competing services like Page.ly offer similarly well-managed WordPress hosting for anyone who is getting serious about WordPress for the first time.

And importantly, these players offer a lot more than just “hosting.” They include hassle-free backup, curated plug-ins and themes, automatically configured caching for surprising scale, and integrated content delivery networks with insane speed.

This means that the rich middle-ground of WordPress — the vast majority of those 75 million websites and counting — now enjoy a cadre of hosting options that match WordPress’s own maturity in scope and tenor.

WordPress’s early DIY culture was wonderful, and it’s the reason for its continued success. But these days, WordPress developers and consultants are finally backfilling core pieces of the stack. This allows the rest of us to focus on great design and new applications, so that we can move the platform forward.

Conclusion

Are we there yet? We’re close, but not all the way.

Today, I’d argue that we have all of the elements we need to make the true “WordPress as a platform” vision a reality. But what’s missing is integrations — API calls and shared data models that can integrate these new offerings into a singular experience.

I’m not suggesting that these companies shouldn’t remain independent and laser-focused on what they do best. But, the characteristics (integration with third-party services beyond plugin architectures, up-to-date asset deployment processes with heavier consideration for performance, etc.) that have made platforms like Heroku, AWS and Azure so compelling are still nascent in the WordPress ecosystem.

Even though the parts are pretty damn impressive right now, WordPress can be greater than the sum of its parts.

Adii Pienaar is the CEO and co-founder of WooThemes, one of the largest theme and infrastructure providers for WordPress sites. He is also the founder of the Rockstar Foundation, a non-profit organization which aims to empower disadvantaged girls in South Africa through superior education. He is an active advisor, mentor and investor to other startups and the author of Rockstar Business. 

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

Image courtesy of Flickr user johnharveytolson.

Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten has confirmed it is leading a $100 million investment in Pinterest, together with existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital plus angels.

WSJ reports sources as saying the deal means a $1.5 billion valuation.

Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani (via announcement):

“While some may see e-commerce as a straightforward vending machine-like experience, we believe it is a living process where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining.

“We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest’s vision and Rakuten’s model for e-commerce. Rakuten looks forward to introducing Pinterest to the Japanese market as well as other markets around the world.”

In other words, Rakuten is excited about how enthusiastically Pinterest users clip and share items they might want to buy.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silberman:

“Our goal is to help people discover things they love, by connecting people through their shared interests. Bringing Rakuten on board gives us an amazing opportunity to move a step closer to this goal.”

Pinterest’s visual presentation of those products is not the only potential boon to e-tailers (it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to present product listings in this way); the tie-in with social sharing could effectively enable social commerce.

There is a wide number of retailers for which Pinterest could perform this role:

• Rakuten has built up its heft through acquiring the online retailers Buy.com in the U.S., Priceminister in France, Ikeda in Brazil, Tradoria in Germany and, recently, Play.com in the UK.
• It also recently bought the Kobo e-reader and e-book store business.
• And it has made investments in Russia’s Ozon.ru and the AHA Life luxury shopping site.

Pinterest has boosted web referrals for sites in certain categories like women’s lifestyle publishing, so some publishers, as well as retailers, had become excited about the possibilities.

It’s unclear what the e-commerce investment means for the media’s current Pinterest penchant, but some pundits think content and commerce is a marriage made in heaven.

The Next Web had reported on Wednesday its expectation that Pinterest would announce a funding round at a $1 billion valuation on Friday, which is also Facebook’s IPO day.

Pinterest had previously taken a total $37.5 million from angels, Bessemer, Ron Conway, FirstMark, Andreeson Horrowtiz and others, through an angel and two proper rounds.

“Design is a universal language. It’s a lifestyle,” the company said on its blog. “Great design exists in every country and in every region of the world. An essential part of our vision is to help people everywhere benefit from great design.”

Less than a year after its launch last June, Fab is on track to become something of a phenomenon. The site, which attracted 1.5 million users in its first six months, is nearing 4 million members today, said CEO and co-founder Jason Goldberg at Business Insider’s Startup 2012 conference today.

Given the recent buzz around the value of design and the beautification of the web (think Facebook Timeline, the Path re-launch and, of course, Instagram), Fab’s mission is very on trend. But Goldberg said the dual drivers behind Fab’s growth are social and mobile. About 50 percent of Fab’s membership comes from social sharing (about 20-40 percent of daily referrals are from Facebook and 2 percent are from Pinterest), he said. Ahead of its conference, Business Insider reported that 35 to 40 percent of Fab.com’s traffic comes from mobile apps.

And, recent stats on repeat purchase rates suggest that Fab is building a strong community. About 50 percent of members make a second purchase, and about one third of members make a third purchase, Goldberg said. The company said repeat purchasers make up two-thirds of each week’s purchases.

This year, the company is expected to make upwards of $100 million in revenue, and Goldberg said it can be profitable in the U.S. whenever it chooses. However, he added, that won’t be this year.

For now, he said, their focus is on building a long-term business and making Fab synonymous with design. But, he acknowledged that Fab’s mission wasn’t always so clear.

Before launching the current version of Fab, he and his co-founder spent a year trying to launch a gay social network. They raised $2 million and tried creating a product that would work. But when they realized that they weren’t succeeding — and weren’t having fun to boot — they wasted little time switching gears. They had an hour-long conversation with each board member, a 20-minute board meeting formalizing the decision and, the very next day, they shut down their original site.

Goldberg’s ultimate lesson to entrepreneurs: “If you spend a year on something and you haven’t figured it out, move on to something else… You can’t iterate your way to a business model.”

Both will be EVPs, both will report to Thompson directly, and both will be on his executive leadership team.

Shrauger was VP of the global product and customer experience organization at PayPal before he left earlier this month. Spilman heads marketing for the Americas group, which is being split into product through the new consumer group and sales, which stays with the regional setup. Put another way, Shrauger knows e-commerce; Spilman knows media, marketing — and Yahoo.

The announcement late Monday includes a little more description about Yahoo’s e-commerce plans than Thompson included in last week’s re-org unveiling:

Under Shrauger and Spilman’s leadership, the new commerce business will focus on delivering engaging and personalized consumer commerce experiences which will connect consumers to marketers and merchants. Based on Yahoo’s unique understanding of customers needs, the commerce offerings will be relevant and customized in specific categories where people are already transacting on the web, such as autos, travel, jobs, personals, real estate and retail goods. This business unit will initially be made up of existing Yahoo! properties and is expected to include new offerings over time.

So first, Shrauger and Spilman need to figure out how to use the parts they already have, and more importantly, how to match them with the consumer data that flows through Yahoo and how to make more than incremental money in the process.

Two weeks ago, Thompson laid off some 2,000 Yahoos, about 14 percent of the workforce. At the time, he offered little explanation. Last week, he sketched an outline.

Tomorrow, during Yahoo’s earnings call (5 p.m. edt), he has to color between the lines. It doesn’t have to be Sunday in the Park with George, filled with detail. But Thompson has to offer more reason for investors (activists and backers alike), analysts and the employees still there to believe that he can manage his way to growth.

Thompson’s job doesn’t depend on it. For now. He has the CEO equivalent of a golden ticket, a chance to remake a mature Internet media company in the image he thinks will work.

It’s not a clear path. Activist shareholder Dan Loeb was vocal about the need for major change at Yahoo before Thompson got there and has since started a proxy battle aimed at getting himself and three others, including former NBCU CEO Jeff Zucker and Activate’s Michael Wolf, on the board.

But barring anything startling, Thompson will get his opportunity. Tuesday is when the latest remake of Yahoo really starts — not May Day, when the changes kick in.

The market is crowded with “what-to-do-in-NYC” apps — including offerings from the New York Times and New York magazine as well as consumer review-centric apps like Yelp and Urbanspoon. But Time Out New York hopes to appeal to a base of local readers who trust its editorial brand and already read the magazine and website. The company’s iPad app offers a “personalized, citywide recommendation engine,” and the iPhone app provides info on arts, entertainment and venues. (An Android version is on the way.)

Time Out New York is also adding restaurant reservations, though a partnership with Open Table, and theater ticketing to its website. Eventually, it will expand to offer tickets to other types of events as well.

In addition, the company is launching daily deals and other special offers. New York City is particularly saturated with daily deals, but Time Out North America president Askel van der Wal says the offers will “fit with what we stand for as a brand. We’re not suddenly [offering] teeth whitening.”

Venture capital firm Oakley Capital Investments purchased a majority stake in Time Out New York last year and Time Out London already offers daily deals and ticketing.

Fortune first broke the story Thursday morning, reporting that the initiative as a new service, but according to The Next Web, the offer is really an extension of the Go Mo program Google launched in November. TNW cited a post on Duda Mobile’s blog that has since been removed from its Website:

“Our hope is that by offering both the education AND the service at no cost for one year, we can help businesses make the shift to mobile more quickly, benefiting both their business as well as us consumers who no longer want to pinch and zoom our way through their regular websites on our phones.”

The service wasn’t exactly expensive beforehand, costing $9 a month, but even a $108 annual fee can be a barrier for entry for a mom-and-pop site with good content but no online revenue stream. Duda keeps its costs low by using templates that automatically plugs content optimized for PC browsers into fields designed to fit into the much smaller footprint of the mobile browser. Duda offers free customization tools as well as gratis support via e-mail and phone.

Google has a significant motivation to bring more Websites mobile. The more phone-friendly content available on the Internet, the more mobile searches Google can generate and the more mobile ad revenues it brings in. From the Fortune story:

Even with the advent of fully capable browsers on current smartphones, many companies are still failing to take even the first step into the mobile space, says Jason Spero, head of mobile sales and strategy at Google. According to Spero, 62% of Google’s top advertisers don’t have a mobile site. “Businesses are kind of late to arrive to this consumer trend, and a large part of that is because they don’t know exactly what to do,” Spero says.

Still this particular promotion isn’t targeting those big advertisers or businesses. Duda’s tools are geared at getting small companies a basic mobile Web presence, not building sophisticated mobile interfaces or m-commerce sites. Duda’s templates don’t yet support Flash, framesets or e-commerce.

Companies that depend on the Internet to generate their revenues have already seen the mobile light. As my colleague Ryan Kim wrote in January, companies ranging from Twitter and Pandora to the newest startups are taking a “mobile first” approach to their services, realizing that the phone and the tablet will ultimately be the primary source of their traffic and profits. Those companies don’t need Google and Duda’s help. It’s the legions of sites out there still unfamiliar with the mobile Web that Google is trying to nudge along.