The most popular three rumors answered

There are three rumors floating around the blogosphere about dotMobi right now. I feel compelled to give you the CEO view on them. You may choose to ignore what I say, but I have no problem answering the mail in a public forum. 

1.  dotMobi investors are doing nothing with .mobi and  created the company as a money making scam.

dotMobi's investors are  building new products and services utilizing the .mobi domain name, the new tools available at dev.mobi, and using dotMobi to push out new industry services like our upcoming mobile phone database and our content directory. You have to remember that we are talking about the biggest mobility companies in the world whose product life cycles are long ... and confidential. The investors behind dotMobi are no more going to publicly pre-announce their competitive services using dotMobi than Apple did with the iPhone.

I do know one thing for sure: dotMobi's investors are very active building their own .mobi services which range from using the domain or developer tools to launching mobile hosting services. The mobility industry is quickly going "open Internet" and they have chosen .mobi to be one of the anchor points for their work. The signs are publicly available through dotMobi's press releases, the Membership Advisory Group which now has more than 100 companies in its membership, and the visible use of dotMobi by the investors. 

For example, 3 (Hutchinson) had more traffic to their .mobi mobile site than they did to their PC-based web site last month. Telecom Italia sells a complete package to their small business customers in Italy based on .mobi. The list of examples go on and on. And that's not to mention the industry requirements for .mobi being mandatory in browsers: it will happen; it is not a matter of if, but when.

Like anything, making a new domain name for mobility integrated into the glue of the mobile web takes time, and it is occuring month by month.  The signs are visible everywhere and there will be no big bang announcements. But everyone will wake up one day and either have caught the dotMobi wave or been left behind.

On to rumors number 2 and 3 ...

2.  dotMobi will never release its premium names

I blogged last week that sex.mobi will go on sale very soon. It is not a joke. We will be releasing approximately 500 high value names for sale in the coming months. These names will be sold through three to four of the well know online and live auction venues from September to next January. You will see more public announcements about the sale of the dotMobi premium names in the coming weeks. 

There are many blog posts that we waited too long and killed the market need for dotMobi. I make no apology that dotMobi waited one year to start selling premium names. We are a well funded company who has a long term view on dotMobi. The content publishing tools were not available last year to build good mobile content sites. It was not in the best interest of the consumer or the company to release names for sale when buyers would have had no good way to produce content. The tools are now readily available for building good mobile sites through site.mobi, dev.mobi, and many of dotMobi's 100+ resellers such as GoDaddy, Network Solutions, HiChina, Beijing Innovative, KeySystems, and Schlund, to name a few.

In fact, dotMobi has a standing offer. If you ever buy a dotMobi name and have a problem building conent, contact us. We will either help you directly, provide you with a tool or connect you with firm who can help you.

3.  dotMobi put too much emphasis on live sites

The facts are that the industry needs proof points to see that dotMobi does work. When dotMobi launched, the industry naysayers said that we would split the web into mobile versus wired. dotMobi, in fact, has provided some of the best free tools to encourage the growth of a device independent web through products like ready.mobi and site.mobi. Companies choosing to put up content behind a dotMobi name are proof points that the device independent web is a reality and growing.

Three months ago, there were about one million pages indexed on Google behind .mobi. Today, there are more than five million pages indexed behind .mobi names. While parking pages exist, there are many deep sites and we see the parking pages converting daily to real sites. I was at dotCom from the late 90s and saw the same trend ... and it is happening much quicker on the mobi platform than it ever happened on dotCom. You have seen several blogs and press releases in the last month showing content examples going live.

Live sites are important because they show proof points that dotMobi is a booming success.

Comments

[Matthew Nelson]

awesome post, looking forward to more.

[Paul G]

Always good to hear from you Neil. Thanks for your comments. In an earlier blog post from August 21st you had mentioned regarding these upcoming premium auctions that; "You also need to know how to build mobile content or you will not be an eligible buyer."

How will mTLD be checking peoples skills to be an eligible buyer? Specifics on this would be useful so people can prepare. Thanks.

[Bill]

Neil, thanks for the updated inside look at just how much is happening with dotMobi in plain view and behind the scenes.

Those who have understood and believed in the great potential of .mobi from the start clearly see how much is happening with this fledgling domain extension. Corporations and small businesses are adopting .mobi on their own schedules - whether as new stand alone sites or as redirects to their existing mobile content to get going sooner. It is sadly apparent that those who do not understand this and your many well-explained positive points are either born skeptics or have other agendas that are threatened by the success of .mobi.

Keep up the great work and we all really appreciate the more frequent blog postings.

Best Regards

[Mike]

Awesome post.

One thing though and I can't emphasize this enough.

Do not auction off any premium names!

If there is an auction it must be an auction between developers. How many names auctioned at traffic are now live?

I think this post cleared many things up but I really don't want to see top quality names in the hands of people that will just park them.

Content is the key which you guys are clearly behind. I know your company needs money to grow and sustain itself but if that's the case I'd rather you find other areas of revenue.

[Richard Tenney]

Its good to see you are finally going to address your holding back "premium names" You are holding 5000 names if you auction them off in blocks of 500 as you are saying and it takes six months it will be five years before all the names are sold off. If its not a money making business then just auction all of them on ebay and get them out there. You mention the dot com model repeatedly, the registar of .com did not hold the names back but let the market get them. Also yahoo and google , ebay were not domain names that were wanted by anyone. The only reason your holding these names is to make money on them. Who cares if a guy buys a domain name "rabbit.mobi" and holds onto it. You have created a walled garden of domain names, you wont release them and are holding onto them for our own good. Thanks but we dont need you to hold onto them. In spite of your efforts .mobi will be driven by corporations like Bank of America bofa.mobi a site you fellows aren't showcasing or aware of. BofA should be given bank or any name they want free. Also Disney should be given movie or any name they want and then you would be doing .mobi some good. What if in your crystal ball you saw 50 million address's sold in 5 years. You remind me Neal of the Music Man. Maybe dotmobi is for real, release all the names dont hold them hostage. By the way my company has been working in mobile websites for 7 years starting in Japan in 1999 with domode. They also had a walled garden approach. Our company is developing over 225 dotmobi sites and has invested a lot in dotmobi. We dont need any generic names we want to be like google or ebay and make it on our content. Thanks RT

[Paul G]

Richard, mTLD is a company and they need to earn money to prosper. If the premiums are a vehicle to help this along then so be it. It would be ideal if most of these names end up being developed upon release but like you said, corporations and efforts of developers like you and me will push .mobi forward regardless. Please let me know about your 200+ domain project. Sounds very interesting.

[Shaun]

I think auctioning these names is a terrible idea. Nobody wants 500 clones of flowers.mobi.

Come on, mtld. Put these domains in the hands of developers.

[Michele]

Neil

Great post!

It's nice to see you and your team engaging with the public and really pushing development of services on the mobile platform

Michele

[cedric]

Hi,

When I search for .mobi google index (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3A.mobi), I get "2,340,000 for site:.mobi", not 5 million ...

[James Pearce]

We use the Google mobile (/xhtml) search for gauging the size of the index. Until recently it was the same as the main web search, but now there appear to be two separate counts of pages.

http://www.google.com/xhtml/search?mrestrict=xhtml&q=site%3A.mobi

The total does vary quite broadly on a day-to-day basis (today it's dropped down to 3.5M) - however, we use a ratcheted approach to track the highest figure seen each month.

It reached 5.6M on the 23rd August and was over 5M for at least 7 days this month.

[allan]

With phones accessing .com and other domain types what is the point of .mobi?

Lets face it, you can esily set a site up to detect if its a phone (and what type) and send suerfers to a web phone friendly page, or give them at least the option.

[Andrea Trasatti]

Allan, it is in fact all about the context and how users should be able to access contents the way they prefer. When a user accesses a site with the .mobi extension she is already making a statement, that she is on the move and that she wants a different content from the one she might want when sitting at home using a desktop PC.

With .mobi a company makes a commitment to support users that might be on a desktop PC, but will most likely be on a cab, on a bus or walking on the street. Companies are committing to provide relevant information in a manner that is suitable for mobiles.

If .com domains had fulfilled all the needs, there would not be .it, .de, .fr and so on. When I access example.com or example.it, as a user, I am already sending information to the remote server that I want the information in Italian or relevant to Italy. The same happens with .mobi.

[Tim]

As someone reviewing .mobi as an addition to my companies current web properties, it is important that development sites exist so that I can learn from them.

However, when I clicked on the developer links in your article (dev.mobi and site.mobi), I am sent in circles or receive the wonderful horrible "Sorry, Direct access to this page is not allowed" message.

I need links to development tools... links that work. Please email them to me if you can.

Further, I agree with the other posts; holding those domains and auctioning them piecemeal is a mistake and will backfire. You may not agree, but you would be smart to listen to the message if it remains consistent.

Don't be afraid to change horses mid-stream if it looks like the horse you're on is going to drown.

[Andrea Trasatti]

Tim,
developers' tools are available on dev.mobi. Most contents are readable by anyone, some resources such as the Mobile Web Developer’s Guide Part I is available for free after registration.

Just get on dev.mobi and you can access a lot of valuable information. I could replicate your issues with pages not accessible. Feel free to come to our forums to discuss this more.

[mobigurl]

The growth potential of any industry is a little healthy competition, if all of the premier names held in check by dotMOBI were released what happens to the other people who have a few good names to sell. So I agree with their approach, a little at a time. Doesn't this make for a more equitable playing field. I beleive that integrity is one of the cornerstones of dotMOBI and to borrow a phrase "I'm lovin' it"

[Your Site]

.mobi is actively being developed and very soon their is going to be a big .mobi domain only auction which should really raise the interest in .mobi. You just need the right people to own the domains and the rest falls into place. Already there are many major companies that are starting to use the .mobi extension.

[Wade]

I hope cell phones conform well to all of the new web standards. I remember surfing the net on my phone and it looked horrible. A simple javascript could detect if it is a cell phone or not. .mobi is just another thing to add to the ongoing list of dots out there. I am interested to see if it will take off.