dotMobi

Sedo Auction - Third and Final Round!

The last in our series of three premium name auctions held in partnership with Sedo opens on 28 November and follows the same seven-day format as before. For this final round, we are putting up some of our best names yet to ensure that we end 2007 on a high note.

The names selected for this auction centre mainly around the leisure and sports verticals, and there is also a selection of flower-related names that may be of interest to some (flowers.mobi remains our highest premium name sale to date at $200,000). Given the festive season that is upon us, we are offering a few alcohol related names such as vodka.mobi, tequila.mobi and wine.mobi. Readers may recall that Sedo sold vodka.com sold for $3 million last December, and we were very excited to see smirnoff.mobi go live recently and to be featured as a case study at last week's MMA Mobile Marketing Foum event in Los Angeles.

This is likely to be our last online auction for a while, so if you are interested in securing a premium name, be sure to visit our web page for full auction details.

forumWeb.mobi: Sei pronto?

One of the things that's always interesting -- in a good way! -- for us at dotMobi is when we're able to bring together our investors to work on specific projects.

And as you might guess from the headline of this post, one project that I've got at the top of my mind right now involves our good friends from Italy, TIM. The project is forumWeb.mobi: a special, one-day event we're hosting with TIM and with Ericsson to help tech pros and marketing pros become better acquainted with the mobile web in general ... and .mobi specifically.

It's a completely free day with lunch and post-events cocktails included, but even better is the variety of speakers. As you might suspect, the roster includes TIM, Ericsson and dotMobi speakers, but it also includes representatives from companies like Future Platforms, Dada and M:Metrics.

So if you're going to be in Rome on 29 November 2007 -- and you have a good grasp on the Italian language -- don't be shy about signing up to attend.

Android and the Open Handset Alliance

Unless you've been down a mine all week, you'll have seen that Google, one of our investors, announced a new mobile software platform this week. It's called Android and the announcement also revealed the creation of the Open Handset Alliance.

Since we at dotMobi also constitute a mobile consortium of sorts, we thought it would be worthwhile talking about it a little. Certainly there are many facets to making the mobile web experience the success it deserves to be, and so the OHA is very welcome to the party.

The most amazing thing about this announcement was that a 34-company deal was kept so secret. But to be honest, after months of speculation, the rest wasn’t as surprising. The project has even kept the Android name, that of company that Google acquired back in 2005 to start the project.

To dotMobi followers, the big question is how well Android will help the growth and acceptance of the mobile web. Certainly it is set, like the iPhone, to increase the industry buzz and interest around the making the internet a truly mobile medium.

It will be important to see how it will be welcomed by the developers and owners of content, and of course, whether it is set to be a platform that also hits mainstream consumer consciousness, as the iPhone has done.

Whilst OHA plays the "Open" card very strongly, the addition of any new platform into the mobile space creates waves of new diversity, which are not necessarily a good thing in the short term. Nothing becomes de-facto overnight.

Of course, in the longer term, if Android becomes a dominant platform, then diversity diminishes and user experience will increase. (Think of the operating system homogeneity in the PC world, and the relative ease that brings to developers). But that would have to come at the expense of other, dominant market players - many of whom are notably absent from the OHA, and to be fair already have fairly open platforms of their own.

While Google has been able to position itself as a leader in the Internet space – despite what many originally thought was coming to that party a bit too late – there's too much at stake in the mobile world for ubiquity and uniformity to happen overnight, or even smoothly. This dynamic of device diversity is a very particular curse for the mobile space. And, incidentally, why we've been working so hard on mitigating it with our device database initiatives.

So the announcement was interesting and positive. We await further progress with great excitement.