ZenZui unveils mobile phone browser

ZenZui, a newly formed company spun out of Microsoft's technology research, aims to help cellphone subscribers easily link to…

ZenZui, a newly formed company spun out of Microsoft's technology research, aims to help cellphone subscribers easily link to their favorite Web sites, even on tiny mobile phone screens.

ZenZui unveils its namesake technology - for Zooming User Interface - today at the CTIA wireless show in Orlando, Florida.

The company's early trials come as the use of cellphones for entertainment and commerce is expected to take off, offering new opportunities for advertisers to reach consumers and for wireless carriers to reap added revenue.

"About 5 years ago we started to really look at the problem of mobile browsing," said ZenZui co-founder John SanGiovanni, who previously worked within Microsoft research.

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"Everyone agrees it's a pretty clunky experience even on the highest bandwidth," Mr SanGiovanni said.

"We wanted to completely reinvent the experience of consuming content."

ZenZui's technology creates a page of up to 36 "tiles" clustered into groups of four on a cellphone screen, each square providing a direct link to a favorite Internet site or an information feed such as weather or traffic reports.

Using a cellphone's keypad, a user can "zoom" into a particular cluster, and from there into a single tile, to access web information.