Today's web experience is all about connected screens and the technological complexities and challenges this brings, which is Netbiscuits’ field of activity. The company was founded twelve years ago in Kaiserslautern, Germany, and has set itself the goal of becoming the standard mobile web platform.

Asian e-Marketing covered Netbiscuits already in the February issue, but last week, during an Emerging Technology session at SXSW Interactive in Austin,Texas, the company launched its new product “Tactile”.

According to Netbiscuits, Tactile is an efficient design and development framework that utilizes today’s web standards to enable the seamless creation and delivery of engaging mobile web experiences. Utilizing the Netbiscuits SaaS Cloud-Based Platform, it simplifies development and deployment complexities while reducing the time and cost of publishing and maintaining high-quality, rich user experiences for today’s feature-packed, gesture-driven devices.

“As more consumers across the globe turn to the mobile web to search, shop, share and connect, marketers have to create and deliver even more engaging branded experiences in multi device environments,” said Netbiscuits CEO Michael Neidhoefer. “We help Enterprises to do this efficiently without compromising quality of service. Netbiscuits Tactile closes the technical and creative gaps encountered when trying to create HTML5 based, touch enabled mobile web apps that render properly no matter the device, operating system or country in which the consumer is going mobile."

Combining server-side optimization, client-side optimization, device detection, progressive enhancement, and responsive design, Netbiscuits Tactile is an unparalleled cross-platform publishing environment. Using next-generation web standards such as HTML5 and CSS3, web apps can be rapidly created without wasting time and resources compensating for browser, operating system and device fragmentation. For developers and designers, Tactile identifies the specific device classes requesting access to their content, tailors diverse multimedia content from a server and delivers that content in formats optimized for a device’s specific profile and screen dimensions. Web apps produced using Tactile provide end-users with an instantaneously responsive and reactive experience equivalent to those enjoyed on native applications.

All in all, Tactile delivers four main benefits:

  • Tactile Mark-up replaces a large portion of JavaScript, reducing the size and complexity of the code without compromising the user experience;
  • Large number of “out of the box”, cross platform optimized display and behavior effects and events;
  • Device Information Services provide device characteristics from the device and from NB Testing Intelligence to all touch points of a web application – at the edge enhancing redirection decisions, at the backend systems allowing for specific device-class computing and at the client side for native user experience.
  • Tactile’s HTML5 framework allows developers to extend the JavaScript library at all layers – from kernel to UI components – or using CSS pre-processor capabilities.

Netbiscuits Tactile addresses timely all the technological complexities and challenges the changing landscape of connected devices brings. It can be leveraged on all multi-touch devices, as it is integrating with any backend system for all types of mobile web sites. Still in beta status, it is planned to start officially in April.

By Daniela La Marca