dotMobi

They say, "It never rains in Southern California" ...

... but it was raining buckets last week during DOMAINfest Global 2008 in Hollywood. It was also raining domainers who are enthusiastic about dotMobi and that gravitated to our exhibit to try to win the totally cool new Nokia N95 we gave away just before the live auction. The lucky winner was Ken Bhullar, the Chief Idea Officer for Unlimited, Inc. in the greater Los Angeles area. Ken has registered 200-plus .mobi names, and it was a pleasure speaking with him and addressing the DOMAINfest audience on how we are reinvesting the dollars we earn from our Premium Name auction sales back into tools and resources such as site.mobi, dev.mobi and ready.mobi that will help Ken and others develop and monetize their .mobi assets.

For those of you that we missed at DOMAINfest, we hope to see you at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. West in Vegas in a few weeks.

Go West, dotMobi ... T.R.A.F.F.I.C. West Premium Name Auction, Las Vegas

We're prepping for February's T.R.A.F.F.I.C. West Conference in Las Vegas, and for our first 2008 premium name auction to be held there, hosted by Moniker.

We are super excited about the names we are offering this time round: banks.mobi, broadway.mobi, cards.mobi, doctor.mobi, floods.mobi, geneology.mobi, hollywood.mobi, lottery.mobi, naked.mobi, property.mobi, score.mobi, tickets.mobi and – appropriately enough given the venue – vegas.mobi. Oh ... and last, but definitely not least, the highly anticipated porn.mobi will be auctioned.

Our usual content obligations apply, and since these names provide some great development opportunities, I can't imagine anyone not wanting to develop these names.

See Moniker's auction site for details on participating in the auction and see the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. West Conference site for more information on the whole T.R.A.F.F.I.C. West event.

Hope to see you all there!

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.

T.R.A.F.F.I.C. EAST 2007

Continuing the news on our distribution of Premium Names ...

Pinky Brand, dotMobi's Director of New Markets, will speak at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. EAST 2007 on Friday, 12 October, during a luncheon that Ron Jackson of DNJournal is keynoting.

At the live auction which follows the luncheon, ten dotMobi names will be available:

• buy.mobi
• cash.mobi
• email.mobi
• news.mobi
• pda.mobi
• podcast.mobi
• poker.mobi
• ringtones.mobi
• shopping.mobi
• zipcodes.mobi

If you can't attend the auction in person but still want to bid, you can request special "Proxy" access. There will also be thirty-five additional names available via silent auction.

Like our online auctions, there are content requirements for winning bidders to ensure that relevant content continues to be added to the millions of existing pages of content behind the .mobi domain.

For those entering the auction, good bidding!

BTW - Did you notice our newest investor?

Last week at CTIA the CEO and President of Visa, John Philip Coghlan delivered the keynote.  Stating that the concept of turning the cell phone into a credit or debit card, is "inevitable", he announced Visa's investment in dotMobi.  Visa now joins thirteen other companies as the latest investor in dotMobi. 

If you glance at the names, Visa stands out as being the only one not traditionally associated with the mobile space.   And its a welcome addition! Why? it simply underlines that dotmobi is not just relevant to a select group of "mobile" companies, but rather to a larger base of companies, who see mobile as a the next iteration of the Internet and not simply as a technology.

At the same time that the announcement was made, the dotmobi team was split across the Atlantic. Part of our team, including our CTO and our development team were attending CTIA, while I attended ICANN in Lisbon along with the rest of the sales and operations team.  (That is, where we finally were able to watch the announcement on YouTube.)  Though we have been somewhat understated about this announcement and have simply posted the release on our site, we strongly believe this is huge news. 

As evidenced by the reaction of one of our channel partners at ICANN upon hearing the news: "With these level of (investors) companies ... mobile commerce is bound to happen".  We certainly hope so, and now we are well positioned thanks to our latest investor.   

SXSW Goes Mobile

We don't often blog about great .mobi sites that we come across, although we probably should.

But http://sxsw.mobi is one that seems totally worthy of coverage. (South by Southwest is a series of media, film, and music festivals)

As the site itself says, SXSW.mobi is "South by Southwest's new adventure in mobile content delivery". Being a Brit, I'm hoping the BBC gives it some coverage too.

The site itself is very easy to navigate, and stylistically consistent with the non-mobile site. (The only disappointment seems to be that the .mobi site is not promoted on the first page of the .com site, which is where it deserves to be!)

But what's really notable is how the site designers have clearly thought about what you'd want to access on your mobile device, rather than trying to cram in all the non-mobile site's content.

So, naturally, the focus is on breaking festival news, directories of other registrants (to find out who to meet up with), and - coolest of all - trailers of the movies (and clips of the bands) that are on at the festival.

Are you wondering why everyone is queuing outside a packed venue at the festival? Fire up your mobile, check out the trailer, and see what you're missing. Genius.

If you're going to the festival, have fun. And don't forget to give the site a try when you're there.

Webby Event at NYC

On Tuesday January 23rd, dotMobi sponsored a happy hour with the Webby's at the W Hotel in Union Square, NYC.  I was there with both Neil Edwards, CEO and Vance Hedderel, Dir. of PR and Communications and members of the Academy.  It was a relaxed and low-key networking event for the professionals from the creative and advertising agencies, and media who support the Webbys.  These pictures are curtesy of the Webby's. More pictures are posted here.

BTW dotMobi is the sponsor of the first ever Mobile Webby Awards.  (A little bit more here.) The deadline for submissions was today Jan 26th. I am looking forward to celebrating the achievement of this years winners, highlighting the prioneering talents of the best and brightest in mobile content.

dotMobi At CES

I am currently at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.  CES was first held in 1967 with 200 television and radio manufacturers showcasing their products.  What a long way it has come -- it's now the world's largest annual consumer technology event with over 2,700 exhibitors covering over 1.7 million square feet of space. You cannot get a sense of how big this show is without actually being here. 

CES used to be about consumer electronic gadgets of all kinds, but things have changed somewhat. The overriding theme is about the gadgets that deliver content, and gadgets that are integrated so that content traditionally meant to be delivered say by your PC is now on your mobile phone or TV.

This means mobile phones that can stream satellite radio, play MP3s, browse the Internet, and (oh, BTW) place a phone call.  Its about huge 108-inch flat panel TVs that can access movies, music, and photos from your PC.  There were TVs debuted from HP that can access your music library and photos direct from your PC as well as download movie clips. Samsung's huge booth, showcased a variety of mobile phones that could double as your music player, digital camera and Internet access. 

The only thing I missed was seeing the new Apple iPhone. Too bad since the theme of device and content integration would have suited them quite well. Of course, they were at the MacWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

We were represented by our CEO Neil yesterday at the CES Panel: "Mobile Commerce and Content: The Mobile Web, Off Deck Content, Mobile Search and Advertising Options."  The others on the panel were:

• Larry Shapiro, Executive Vice President, Business Development and Operations, Walt Disney Internet Group;
• Eric Harber, VP of Corporate and Business Development, Qpass;
• Brian Dunphy, Senior Director of Brand & Affinity Relations, QUALCOMM Internet Services (QIS);
• Lee Hancock, Chief Executive Officer and founder, go2; and
• Tammy Franklin, Vice President, Business Development, Turner Broadcasting System. 

One of the interesting issues that were brought up had to do with the difficulty for content providers who have to tailor "on deck" content for a variety of mobile operators, who each have a different set of "standards" for displaying the content.  This of course is exactly the issue that we solve, namely one set of interoperable standards that are industry-backed and which enable any content provider to go mobile.

Tammy Franklin made a particularly notable comment in response to the difficulties of monetizing content, namely advertising.  It was a quiet comment, but very wise: "Before we worry about monetizing, its important to grow the industry."

In other words, lets grow the available mobile content, make it compelling enough so warrant traffic from end users, then lets figure out how best to monetize it. 

Couldn't agree more...

dotMobi Goes Back To China

Neil Edwards, the CEO of dotMobi, and I recently made another trip to China.  If you recall, we made our first trip there to meet our partners China DNS and HiChina.  We also did a press conference to introduce dotMobi to the market, not as yet another domain name, but rather a standards based approach to accelerate mobile content for the Chinese consumer.  (Recall that China has over 100 million Internet subscribers and over 450 million mobile subscribers.) 

We talked about the development tools that we plan to offer.  The press conference was held on December 8 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Beijing and was attended, not only by our registrar partners,  but also by more than 40 members of the press.

Stan Zhang, the CEO of HiChina  spoke about the results of his campaign and especially about the fact that the focus is on content. (Btw, he practices what he preaches; he has his own company's .mobi site up and running.)

Jiang Qun, the CEO of ChinaDNS also spoke in support of dotMobi and his company's focus around mobile initiatives.

Edwards Sang -- the CEO of 7234, whose company will soon be focusing on selling .mobi -- reiterated the emphasis on mobile content and the value of dotMobi's cooperation in providing open source tools to help the local market.

So what was the message that we delivered? Well this time we came back, having fulfilled some promises we had made the last time.

1. For one thing, we have hired Adrian Lui in China to work directly with our partners on the ground, the dotMobi Developer Forum and the Mobile Ready Tool.  The Mobile Ready Tool will be localized in Chinese by early part of this year, so developers and content managers all over China can determine how mobile ready their existing sites are. 
2. We unveiled the beta version of the Mobile Ready Tool
3. We also announced that we will bring sponsor a contest to highlight and reward the best and most compelling Chinese language dotMobi sites.
4. And last, we announced that there are working at least three additional registrar partners to be able to serve the market better.

We also held separate meetings with analysts and technical press to cover them in depth on the details of the announcements.  It was a hectic week,punctuated by meetings with  technical and development companies as well as our own registrar partners.  The major news of that week was the annoucement that 3G licenses were going to be available for operators to bid on.  I have heard figures as varied as 10 to 26% refering to the percentage of Chinese operator revenues derived from data sales.  If true, its certainly higher than the average figure cited bu GSMA of 5% (strip out SMS, which accounts for 2-3%, and you are left with precious few).  So undoubtedly the operators have to map out plans on how to make the money invested in the 3G license and infrastructure pay out.  Naturally we had some interesting meetings around the very same subject with operators as well. 

China is a long-term market, and a few trips and meetings will certainly not accomplish the aim of realizing the potential it has. So far, we have been consistent -- listening and trying to understand the nuances of the market (culture, regulation, language, needs, mobile players, etc) and delivering solutions based on that input.  Thankfully, so far at least we have made some headway.

dev.mobi

At the Mobile2.0 conference a couple of weeks ago, we announced dev.mobi. Dev.mobi is an online developer forum serving creators of mobile content.The forum is designed to be a central location where developers can find tools and resources to help them build useful and compelling mobile services for their users. We realise that there are many other mobile-related developer sites out there already, but they tend to take a vendor- or technology-specific view of the problem. Dev.mobi, by comparison, tries to base everything on open standards (W3C, OMA) and open source code (LAMP etc.) We hope this is useful to developers out there.

Check it out at http://dev.mobi