Ready.mobi Goes Gold

Some of you may be familiar with our Ready.mobi page checker (previously known as "MobiReady").

Well, hot on the heels of our exciting developer guide announcement, and after an extended period in beta, we're taking v1.0 of Ready.mobi to 'gold' status - meaning that this version of the tool is functionally complete, pretty much all of the bugs have been nailed, and we've reached our stability and performance goals.

What's Ready.mobi for? Well, as you know, the .mobi extension is partly about ensuring that the user is going to have a satisfactory experience when they access a site with a mobile handset.

If you're developing or deploying content, we want to help you easily test that your content meets a range of basic criteria that will make that more likely.

So the idea of Ready.mobi is to take a URL of your domain, site, or page, and simulates a real mobile device accessing that content. With the content that is returned, we check it over for .mobi compliance, size, adherence to W3C best practices (using the MobileOK tests), and so on. We also aggregate the results to produce a single "mobi-readiness" score - out of 5.

With the report, you're then able to identify issues, see what you need to do to improve the quality of the page, and even see an emulation of what the site looks like on a couple of common handsets.

I guess I should mention some nifty new features we added in the last few weeks:

• An 'advanced options' tab allows you to specify which device you'd like the checker to access. If you're performing content adaptation on your server, you'll be able to see how that affects the results.
• http://ready.mobi is now accessible on a mobile handset (as of course it should be), providing a summary of the testing in a way that is suitable for the mobile context.
• 'Fixit articles' tell you more detail about how to actually solve some of the common problems we detect. Click 'help me fix it' on any failing tests for more information on how to do so.

But there's much, much more in there too - so please take a look and see what you think. Also please let us know of any improvements or features you'd like to see in v1.1 - we're already starting to plan our next major release of the tool for the summer.

Comments

[Developing.mobi]

Very nice!

[AreaCodeFinder.mobi]

I agree, excellent work!

[Dennis Smith]

Very cool guys - now I've got a ready resource for all the .mobi's I've purchased! :)

Dennis

[vatsal desai]

Its a very nice tool and i have used it on number of occasions to fix my .mobi websites. At the risk of sounding repetitive I would like to know the marketing plans for .mobi domain name. Especially in India, which is one of the fastest growing mobile market in the world. According to industry estimates, India added around 6 million subscriber per month last year as opposed to 5 million by China. India already has more than 200 million mobile subscribers and it is estimated (The Diffusion Group) that the number will rocket to 350 million by 2010. This will make India number two in terms of mobile subscribers after China. Also the largest Indian mobile service provider (Airtel which has more than 30 percent market share) is offering unlimited internet access on mobile for as little as 2 Rs per day (less than 5 cents USD). Cell phones which are WAP enabled are also becoming very cheap (less than 75 USD) as more and more manufacturing is done in India.

But like I mentioned before, very few people are aware of dotMOBI in India. Very few businesses have launched a dotMOBI site, mostly because they are not aware of it. There have been marketing events in China which is definitely a very important market. India is also a very important market and it cant be ignored. Even the Indian government is pushing for mobile internet access, as computer penetration is much less compared to mobile penetration in India.

To sum it all up, I believe India is one of the most important mobile market, and I would like to know if dotMOBI has any marketing plans specifically for India.

Just my two cents.

[James Pearce]

Hi Vatsal,

I'm glad you like it!

These are all good questions. I believe we have a blog post in the works to talk a little bit about our plans for .mobi in India and China.

I hope that will give you some ideas of our ambitions there.

[Alexa Raad]

Dear Vastal
You make some great comments about the Indian market, namely that it cannot be ignored. You asked about our marketing plans for India. For one thing, we plan to focus on India in 2007 as one of the priority markets. This means raising awareness in India about dotMobi as well as providing some of the tools such as the dotMobi Site builder localized for the Indian market (probably Hindi and one other script) to make sure the consumers and small businesses have a means to create websites in language for free. On the awareness and education front we plan a personal visit and a PR campaign sometime in May. As part of this we would like to showcase not only forward thinking Indian companies in mobile (and mobile content) but also innovative uses (think content sites that are compelling, entertaining and or useful). This is in the planning stage now. But my aim in responding to you is to ensure that no thinks we are in any way ignoring India and infact believe it to be, as you do, a highly promising market.

your feedback is as always welcome!

[vatsal desai]

Thanks for all the information.

Providing dotMobi Site builder in Hindi will definitely be a good start.

[oneSearch.mobi]

I agree, Excellent Stuff

[visible.mobi]

Hello Alexa,

Any updates on India visit and the PR campaign ?

Thanks

[visible.mobi]

Interesting article...

Web surfers via mobiles double in India, grab 4th spot in the world

Some important points from the article...

* One in every 11 people logging on to the Web across the world through cellphones is an Indian, U.K.-based mobile Web technology company Bango Plc. said in its report.
* The report forecasts Indian mobile phone usage to exceed European levels within the next few years.
* The number of people entering Cyberspace via their cellphones has more than doubled in India in the past year, making the country home to the fourth largest population—behind the U.K., the U.S. and South Africa—browsing the Internet through mobile handsets, according to a study reported by the PTI.
* This year Indians account for 9 percent of the mobile Web users population globally, up from just 4 percent a year earllier.

[visible.mobi]

At the risk of sounding repetitive..any updates on India front ?

Thanks

[Vance Hedderel, Director of PR, dotMobi]

We're working now on our PR campaign / visit to India. At this moment, we're looking at launching after Diwali this year. That's not a promise, but it is where we've tentatively placed it on the corporate schedule.