dotMobi

The Mobile Internet ... Now in Book Form!

As you can probably guess, everyone at dotMobi loves the mobile web. And when we're not building new sites and services for the mobile web, we're often writing about it. Sometimes on this blog. Sometimes at mobiThinking.com or dev.mobi. And sometimes in a brand new book called Mobile Internet for Dummies.

dotMobi's VP of Technology, James Pearce, is a co-author of this new Dummies book, which is designed to help consumers best use their mobile phones to access made-for-mobile Internet content and services.

 

James is part of a top-notch author team that includes John Levine (author of Internet for Dummies), Jostein Algroy (industry adviser / journalist based out of Toronto), Daniel Appelquist (a mobile web thought-leader at Vodafone and Mobile Monday London co-founder) and Michael O'Farrell (Chair of the dotMobi Advisory Group).

The book covers a variety of subjects, including text messaging, email, blogging, games, music, pictures, shopping, banking and building mobile web sites. The book also includes tips on finding the best deals on phones and carrier network plans for mobile Internet use. The authors have started a blog at http://mifd.mobi to help users find more services in the mobile web space.

 

Mobile Internet for Dummies is in bookstores now and is also available for online ordering from Amazon or Barnes & Noble (USA) or Indigo/Chapters (Canada) or directly from the publisher.

autism.mobi

Today, dotMobi announced the launch of autism.mobi, the result of a project lead by Steve Edelson, Director of the Autism Research Institute in San Diego, in collaboration with dotMobi.

autism.mobi was a Premium Name and one which we were delighted to release as part of a closed Request for Proposals process.

The content which is being made available to end users ticks all the right boxes: it is practical, informative and helpful and the ARI, the oldest autism research institute in the world, has demonstrated that it understands the needs of today's market by adapting its information and making it accessible on mobile devices. It already does a fantastic job of disseminating information and research findings across various mediums, and it is now targeting the huge number of mobile phone users with features such as its Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist, which is designed to evaluate cognitive, communication, sensory, and social skills of individuals on the autism spectrum.

In other Premium Name news, dotMobi recently issued the Premium Name why.mobi via RFP to online forum Mobility.mobi who have since developed the domain as a educational site. dotMobi is also currently working with some other RFP candidates and hopes to announce some additional site launches shortly.

dotMobi Grows Up

New week, new start, new office!

The dotMobi team, having outgrown its last space, has taken over some new digs in Dublin's IFSC (International Financial Services Centre) this morning ... just down the street from our previous address. The new accommodation is better equipped to handle our growing staff numbers and, having been around since we opened our first office, I can't help but feel proud that we've come so far (and sentimental at the same time).

Back in November 2005, a team of four dotMobi staff members met and introduced themselves over morning coffee at Café Sol before heading over to a temporary office on Dawson Street. We soon came to learn that we really were in a start-up situation as we headed off in pairs to buy pens and stationary, fax machines, phones etc. Morning journeys were planned with military precision since we had just one set of keys and the absence of a lift and presence of far, far too many stairs left staff and visitors gasping for water on arrival. It was, however, a fun and exciting time and what we lacked in facilities, we made up for in energy and enthusiasm.

Now in our third office, we have settled into rather more serious surroundings with our banking and trading neighbours. Let's hope they don't get too rattled when they hear the whoops of the developer's  daily Wii battles as the team lets off steam at the end of the day before settling into the evening shift. Starbucks is still comfortably close by, although rumor has it that a brand new coffee machine is set to replace the now battered gift offering that saw us through many bright and early starts in our old Exchange Place offices. And, better still, we're all the closer to our favourite "OK, just one drink before I head home" haunts.

Our door is always open for anyone passing by so be sure to drop in if you ever find yourself in Dublin: 2 La Touche House, IFSC, Dublin 1. (Phone numbers remain the same).

Onwards and upwards!

Horn Tooting

As you’ve heard many a time, "It’s an honor just to be nominated."

And while that’s true, winning is nice, too.

In that spirit, I wanted to take a minute and congratulation our friends at ZAGAT Survey, who -- earlier in June -- won the Best Listings & Updates site of the year for zagat.mobi in the Webby Awards' People's Voice Awards.

We’ve been talking up the zagat.mobi site since it launched because it’s an excellent example of adapting web-based content to a mobile user’s needs and ensuring those users can easily locate the content with a .mobi domain.

While the other .mobi nominated entries didn’t win, it’s still great that they were recognized. The folks at The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences -- the people behind the Webbys –- are stringent judges, so it is indeed an honor just to be nominated.

But they’re not the only winners this month ...

Registration Open for All dotMobi Road Show Dates

As a follow up to my blog posting yesterday, we've opened registration for all six of the dotMobi Road Show events:

• May 29, San Francisco, mobiThinking / Marketing Event
• May 30, San Francisco, Building Device-Aware Content / Developer Event

• June 12, New York City, mobiThinking / Marketing Event
• June 12, New York City, Building Device-Aware Content / Developer Event

• June 26, London, mobiThinking / Marketing Event
• June 27, London, Building Device-Aware Content / Developer Event

As I noted before, space is limited, so please register ASAP.

We really ARE mobile! dotMobi Road Show starting soon.

.mobi = mobile content on your phone ... and sometimes dotMobi = mobile content in your city. Well, content about mobile, at any rate.

Based on the success we had on the road with our "Happenings" earlier this year, dotMobi is heading to San Francisco, New York and London for three mobile developer mornings and three mobile marketing afternoons.

The developer mornings will be devoted to learning to build device-aware mobile content. dotMobi's Paul Nerger has a dev.mobi blog about the developer mornings, including dates and registration information.

The three mobile marketing afternoons are designed for brands, agencies and in-house marketing teams who are investigating a mobile approach and can benefit from learning best practices, so they can get started quickly and confidently in the mobile world.

The marketing events all begin at 4 p.m. local time and last until 8 p.m. (that's including cocktails and conversation after the session) and are scheduled as following:

• San Francisco: Thursday, May 29 at the Hotel Palomar. Tina Unterlaender from AKQA Mobile will be our special guest at this event. Click here to sign up
• New York: Thursday, June 12 at the Westin Times Square. Sign up info coming soon.
• London: Thursday, June 26 at the Hospital. Sign up info coming soon.

Space for these events is limited, so please register sooner than later if you are interested. I will post updated on this blog as registrations open for the New York and London events.

No Mistaking It

You've been hearing us talk about "dotMobi Thinking" for months now. The ideas behind good mobile web sites are simple but the execution isn't always so easy. Many of us are still thinking of mobile web sites as small versions of their PC-counterparts. That's simply the wrong approach. We've reviewed this and other pitfalls in mobile web marketing to produce a new, free eBook called Ten Mistakes in Mobile Web Marketing.

In addition to highlighting some traps to avoid, we've shared great examples of best site practices from some of the mobile web's biggest brands including Bank of America, Smirnoff, Virgin Atlantic, BMW and Jaguar. Keep your eyes out for more from us on that on mobiThinking.com because we're just getting started. You can stay up to date by joining our mobiThinking email list.

A new era of easy mobilization is coming

In case you haven't seen the press release, today dotMobi announced that it has acquired the IP assets of Mowser, which is a content adaptation engine created by two Bay Area mobile pioneers, Russell Beattie and Mike Rowehl.

Everyone in dotMobi is very excited because having access to this technology will give us ways to let owners of existing PC-based sites quickly and easily utilize those existing assets to create .mobi-compliant sites designed specifically for the needs of mobile web users.

One question I've already heard is, "But won't having a tool that can convert a PC site to a mobile one mean there's no need for a .mobi domain?"

Hertz doesn't think so. Hilton doesn't think so. Amtrak doesn't think so. 1-800-Flowers doesn't think so. And I certainly don't think so.

Those brands (among many others) use similar tools to create .mobi web sites that address the needs of on-the-go users. They've thought about the mobile context and want to assure their users that their sites will work on a mobile phone and that they won't encounter a frustrating desktop PC site (poorly) transferred to a phone.

That's one reason I think that bringing user-controlled content adaptation to "the masses" will be a significant accelerator for .mobi domain usage.

Another reason is that I don’t think businesses will want to hide their mobile sites. Even with all the cool technology we have, it can take a bit of effort to think through and create a great mobile site.

The Nielsen top ten web mobile sites use multiple URL conventions, but .mobi is the one most frequently used to ensure that their sites can be found because brand.mobi is the most easily guessable convention.

So welcome to a new age of easy mobilization ... and more .mobi domains than ever.

A big day for dotMobi R&D

Last Wednesday marked a milestone for dotMobi's R&D team.

After crawling 100 million domains, running the http://ready.mobi report more than 80 million times and running 22,000 tests of the service in April, the team announced that find.mobi is ready for public scrutiny.

One thing to keep in mind is that find.mobi only displays results on content that wil work on a mobile phone. Since the mobile web is still young, some searches won't return many results. As one of the R&D team members put it, "If you're looking for information on llama farming in Ecuador, the mobile web still doesn't have answers; but for common, day-to-day information, there's a good chance you'll find something."

By the way, find.mobi displays all mobile-ready sites, not just .mobi ones; however, it certainly can the site crawler's job easier with a .mobi domain and can help it get into the search engine faster.

If you want to try find.mobi yourself, break out your mobile and try some of the following searches:

• Search for brands that have gone mobile: BusinessWeek, BMW, ESPN, etc.
• Use keywords to find mobile versions of your favorite sites: Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, BBC, etc.
• If you're travelling, try entering your flight number -- like aa100 or ei153 -- and find.mobi will tell you departure/arrival times, terminal number, etc.
• find.mobi does stock quotes, too. Just enter any NYSE/NASDAQ ticker symbol (e.g. aapl, goog, msft, etc.)
• Find.mobi can convert currencies. Try any of the following formats using any standard 3-letter currency codes: usd, "usd gbp," gbp, "100 cny usd," "convert 10 dollar in euro," "$10 EUR,"  etc. In each case, find.mobi will convert to USD & EUR if no other currency is mentioned, or to any other currency you specify (e.g., "10 cny gbp" converts 10 Chinese RMBs to UK pounds, using the latest rate).

In our press release on this, Paul Nerger, dotMobi's Vice President of Advanced Services and Applications, said, "find.mobi was built to serve as an example to the search industry to change the way that it should think about search when applied to mobile."

I hope you find it as compelling -- and as useful -- as I have. It's the start page on both of my mobiles and has quickly become indispensible. I'm willing to bet you're quickly going to think the same thing, too.

Left to Your Own Devices ...

... is the name of a free webinar that the dotMobi Advisory Group is hosting on 6 May 2008.

The webinar, subtitled,"Building Device Aware Content - new tools to simplify the process and increase your business," will be presented by Paul Nerger, Vice President of Advanced Services and Applications at dotMobi.I know that many followers of this blog have heard about DeviceAtlas, the dotMobi device database, but many be curious to learn more about it. If so, this will definitely be a good session to attend (and as I mentioned above, it's free).

Date:

• Tuesday, 6 May 2008

Time:

• 07:00 am PDT (USA, Canada – Pacific Coast)
• 10.00 am EDT (USA, Canada - Eastern Time)
• 15.00 pm UTC (United Kingdom, Ireland)
• 16.00 pm CET (Norway, Italy, Sweden, Germany, France)
• 17.00 pm EET (Finland)
• 19.30 pm IST (India)

To register for the session, please send an email to Wendy Holloway with your name, job title and an indication that you wish to attend. Once you have registered, she will send you details on how to join the presentation.