“If you find yourself with a brick through your windscreen [Ed: that’s ‘windshield’ for you Yanks], the one thing you’re guaranteed to have on your person is a mobile.” So says Chris Smith, online marketing manager of Autoglass in the UK, in an excellent interview on e-consultancy .

Autoglass is the UK’s leading vehicle glass repair and replacement company, with 121 branches and a lot of mobile technicians. They do a lot of business on the web but their main site is not optimized for mobile. So they’re ‘testing the water’ with a new .mobi site.

The .mobi site (autoglass.mobi) cost just £2,000 to set up (US $4,000) and is very much a first step. But it’s great example one of the real drivers of the mobile web: utility.

Help people solve a problem when they’re out and about and you’re on to something.

Recent research conducted by the AKQA’s Research & Insights department in conjunction with dotMobi backs this up. The survey reveals key insights into the importance of a better mobile Web for consumers in the U.S. and U.K.

One factoid that supports the utility point: nearly 90 percent of consumer respondents stated that they would be more likely to choose an airline with mobile check-in facilities over one that did not offer them.