The "Go Mobile" Program -- What, How, And Why

Today we announced the "Go Mobile!" program for our channel partners.  This program is the culmination of months of work aimed at helping businesses and individuals create mobile optimized content, easily and cost effectively. 

Here is how:

1) Any individual or business can now use the Mobile Ready Tool to see just how optimized for mobile their site content is.  If you are the CEO of a big company, you might want to know what is the overall score and what are the costs you impose on your customers, if they were to access your site via a mobile phone.  On the other hand, your in house web development team would be interested in knowing exactly how the site performed in each of the 28 separate tests done.  Let me emphasize that this is free to use and in the public domain for all content owners.  Go ahead and test a few of the dotMobi showcase sites as a comparison.

2) Web developers now have one centralized forum; http://dev.mobi -- again, free to join and use -- to share information, participate in forums/blogs/polls, have access to open source tools and get FREE on-line training.  Up to now, there has been some excellent developer forums available, however, their focus has been quite specialized, e.g. development issues related to a specific mobile phone manufacturer or for a specific application suite.  Again this is what dotMobi is about: proposing an open, standards-based platform, sharing knowledge across the mobile eco-system and making available valuable resources for free in the public domain.

3) Many businesses already have access via their registrar to a tool that helps them create a mobile optimized site that is already .mobi compliant.  GoDaddy, the largest provider in the US for example has a tool called "Website Tonight®".  As of last count more than 15 separate well-known resellers had announced a tool of this kind all based on the dotMobi content development style guide.  To ensure all resellers have access to these tools, we will soon announce a free tool that enables anyone to create a mobile optimized site that is guaranteed to be .mobi compliant.  No coding experience of any kind required!  If you can upload a picture, or copy and paste... you will be able to use it. 

We have long maintained that the growth of the Internet on Mobile is highly dependant on how easily content providers of any kind ( large and small) are able to create and update relevant local content.  Availability, ease of use and cost of content creation tools (in this case, FREE) is a key motivator in convincing the majority, not just the early minority.

4) Lastly, we have provided our channel partners marketing incentives to push out to these tools to their customer base.

The "Go Mobile!" program is another step in continuing to deliver on the promises of an open and mobile Internet.