dotMobi

.mobi sites = iPhone web apps = sites for all phones

With Steve Jobs' recent software announcements that will bring the iPhone into direct competition with the Blackberry, I think it's time to give a shout-out to some of the existing .mobi iPhone web apps that are currently featured by Apple.

By this point, everyone likely knows that ZAGAT.mobi is a featured web app for the iPhone as well as being a star of an iPhone commercial.

But there are several others, including marine.mobi (marine weather), mywx.mobi (local weather), kanada.mobi (a mobile travel guide for Canada), suedafrika.mobi (South Africa travel guide), iSchools.mobi (directory of more than 135,000 schools and colleges in the USA) and iTeams.mobi (mobile sports web sites).

What I really like, though, is that -- if you're a developer -- building a great .mobi site means you're also building a great iPhone web app. (And great .mobi sites will work on all phones, not just iPhones.) If you're building cool .mobi sites, you can submit them for consideration as web apps to Apple. And you can use DeviceAtlas to be sure your site works well on the widest number of phones.

As dotMobi predicted when it launched, the iPhone has accelerated interest in the possibilities of the mobile web. A recent statistic noted that 70% of US mobile web browsing traffic is coming directly from iPhones.

If you're a developer, that's a hunk of traffic you'd like coming to your .mobi.

And if you're a user, you'll likely agree that a .mobi is still an optimal experience for the iPhone. While I think it's technically cool that I can shrink and resize standard PC-based web pages on an iPhone or an iPod Touch, it doesn't make the getting of information particularly easy. (Yet another reason why I'm not just a dotMobi employee, I'm a .mobi fan.)

dotMobi Happenings: They're happening.

You may recall about three weeks ago I wrote about our desire to meet in various cities around the world with domainers and others with an interest in dotMobi who are unable attend the major conferences because of logistics or cost. We asked the community to vote for preferred cities and to send in your suggestions. I’m happy to report the response was excellent and thus we are pleased to announce our first set of dotMobi Happenings that will be in North America. If you'd like to attend, please send me an email with your full name and let me know which city works for you.

Los Angeles, CA - Wed., March 19th, 7 PM – Limited seats.

La Jolla, CA - Thu., March 20th, 7 PM – Limited seats.

Toronto, ON - Wed., April 9th – Details coming soon.

Boca Raton, FL - Mon., April 28th - Details coming soon.

Atlanta, GA - Date and details coming soon.

New York, NY - Date and details coming soon.

Request invitation.

The Happenings will be free, casual and very conversational and always at a cool place. It’s your opportunity to meet dotMobi executives and speak freely about what’s on your mind and what’s on ours. And of course it’s a great way to network and meet others who are interested in dotMobi. Stay tuned for updates on Toronto, Boca, Atlanta and New York. We hope to see you at one of them!

Say hello to world.mobi

You may remember -- exactly one month ago -- that Caroline Greer mentioned on this blog we'd have exciting news about our portfolio of reserved "cityname.mobi" domains. Well, it's here: say hello to world.mobi, a business partnership between UK-based web-design firm Fortune Cookie and dotMobi.

This partnership lets us bring together the travel-industry expertise of Fortune Cookie and the mobility expertise of dotMobi to create more than 600 sites, utilizing dotMobi's "cityname.mobi" domains for tourists around the world. Fortune Cookie is a heavy hitter in the travel industry with huge marketing reach and impressive resources -- and we are very excited to partner with them in this venture.

world.mobi is an extension of the City Names Application Process. Government entities are still entitled to apply for their city names but, in the absence of any application, world.mobi will provide the relevant city site. This is a major content roll-out, and one that should seal the deal in showing the value of a cityname.mobi site.

The partnership was discussed during part of a World Travel Awards event happening currently in Berlin, but the formal announcement and outreach is planned for a bit later in the spring because the partnership is still finalizing some of the work around world.mobi. In the meantime, Internet Travel News just published an article that will give you a bit more information about the JV and its plans.

If you have an existing or planned cityname.mobi site and would like to discuss becoming part of the world.mobi network of cityname.mobi sites in some way, you can contact world.mobi's general manager, David Ryder, via email.

What a difference a year makes ...

This year in Barcelona, the Mobile World Congress -- formerly known as 3GSM -- proved to be an interesting place for seeing the acceptance and growth of the .mobi domain. So many people sought us out to ask about developing their sites, advertising their sites or to debate us about different mobile devices.

A year ago, people who stopped by asked us “What’s a .mobi?” or “Why would I want to go mobile?” or -- as happened several times -- “Can I access the web on my phone? How?”

What brought the most people to us this year was the announcement of DeviceAtlas.