.Mobi Sunrise Registration: Some Thoughts

I have to admit... I feel a great sense of pride as I look at the hundreds of companies who reserved a .mobi domain name for their trademarks when dotMobi officially opened its doors. It's these trademark holders who are leading the way for the mobile phone to become the communication and computing device of choice.

It's a diverse group with carriers like including AT&T and Sprint and content providers like 20th Century Fox, the Canadian Broadcasting Company and Sony. 

It's a fun group giving us content like Batman, Bugs Bunny, Family Guy, Major League Baseball, Quidditch, Scooby-Doo, the Simpsons, Superman and even The Matrix.

It's content for an on-the-go society that wants their fun - and wants control on how and when they get it.

But I'm even more proud of knowing that this is just the first step to helping bring the power of the internet to people around the world. I think Microsoft's Eric Rudder was on target when he said, "Most people's first computing experience will be via a cell phone" (PDF). When I begin to consider how a unified mobile phone experience will bring practical content like maps, email and search engines to countries across the world where the price of computers will keep them out of most people's hands, I'm proud to be part of the team helping to lead the way to a true global village.

More in the Journal.

Technorati Tags: dotmobi, wireless, internet, mobile

Comments

[Shannon J Hager]

I work almost exclusively in the mobile web area these days and I don't think I would say those companies are "leading the way" so much as "forced to buy yet another round of domains in order to protect their intellectual property".

Those of us who are leading the way are the companies who have been working with adaptive rendering, device detection, open standards, and the other available tools in order to make the WWW work for every device as well as possible. Some of the companies mentioned above have been doing this, so don't think I am discounting their efforts.

I am simply disagreeing with your idea of these domain name purchases as anything other than additional forced business expenses.

Let's take google as an example.

http://google.mobi works now. However, last week, http://google.com worked in the EXACT SAME MANNER on my mobile phone as google.mobi does now: a redirect to google.com/xhtml

So now there is an additional yearly fee for google, an additional domain name for me (.com was fine, no need to clutter my head with .com and .mobi), and, if I choose to enter "mobi" instead of "com", additional keypresses (mobi is 7, com is 5). In return for those three factors, there is no additional functionality. Thus, a net loss.

Unfortunately, Google can't just sit back and refuse to register the .mobi domains. If you don't buy your domains, someone else will. Every .com owner has to choose whether or not to also buy .net, .us, etc and now that .mobi is a reality, there is yet another choice to make: do you buy the .mobi domain as well? The answer has to be "yes" for almost any content, service, or internet-related domain because mobile functionality is sure to be a part of their future (and current) strategies.

So those companies may (like Google) have been leading the way but, if so, they've been doing it for much longer than .mobi has been available. The .mobi registrations aren't evidence of their progress, it is a (hopefully temporary) distraction from the path they've been on for a while.

[Ching CHIAO 喬敬]

Neil, Congrats with the good beginning of .mobi.

Ching Chiao from DotAsia (was with TWNIC)

[Alexa Raad]

Is .mobi another domain to register, and thus a "forced cost?" If you buy a .mobi name out of fear, neglect to do anything to build content and reach the mobile audience, then yes! In that scenario, it is much like any other unused or redirected domain. It becomes a cost.

However, the question remains: How to find the best mobile sites? Namely, If you were to type in any existing address, you are taking a chance that it does in fact have a redirect to a version of its site that is meant for mobile. It's easy to assume Google would, but many many other sites do not. For the mobile Internet to take off, you need more mobile optimized sites than just the top 100 brands, and you need to give the users an easy way to recognize the mobile friendly sites.

I have also heard the argument that .mobi is 4 letters and hence cumbersome to type. That argument would be valid if SMS never took off. After all don't they have to type messages longer than 7 keystrokes?

[Jean]

Hi

I believe .mobi's genuine intentions will become clear only, and i repeat only by 2008, if nokia, erricson, hutchison,vodafone etc, don't advertise/ promot anything then .mobi was just an idea, and they .mobi will justify that they wanted to do something for wifi, etc,

I hope they do do well, but the future is always blique, no one knows, critics are always good however, only Bill Gates can save us, by backing .mobi and making it the official content pusher for mobile devices as far as ecommerce/ the web is conerned.

Aurevouir

The Pierre de resistece