dotMobi

We really ARE mobile! dotMobi Road Show starting soon.

.mobi = mobile content on your phone ... and sometimes dotMobi = mobile content in your city. Well, content about mobile, at any rate.

Based on the success we had on the road with our "Happenings" earlier this year, dotMobi is heading to San Francisco, New York and London for three mobile developer mornings and three mobile marketing afternoons.

The developer mornings will be devoted to learning to build device-aware mobile content. dotMobi's Paul Nerger has a dev.mobi blog about the developer mornings, including dates and registration information.

The three mobile marketing afternoons are designed for brands, agencies and in-house marketing teams who are investigating a mobile approach and can benefit from learning best practices, so they can get started quickly and confidently in the mobile world.

The marketing events all begin at 4 p.m. local time and last until 8 p.m. (that's including cocktails and conversation after the session) and are scheduled as following:

• San Francisco: Thursday, May 29 at the Hotel Palomar. Tina Unterlaender from AKQA Mobile will be our special guest at this event. Click here to sign up
• New York: Thursday, June 12 at the Westin Times Square. Sign up info coming soon.
• London: Thursday, June 26 at the Hospital. Sign up info coming soon.

Space for these events is limited, so please register sooner than later if you are interested. I will post updated on this blog as registrations open for the New York and London events.

Left to Your Own Devices ...

... is the name of a free webinar that the dotMobi Advisory Group is hosting on 6 May 2008.

The webinar, subtitled,"Building Device Aware Content - new tools to simplify the process and increase your business," will be presented by Paul Nerger, Vice President of Advanced Services and Applications at dotMobi.I know that many followers of this blog have heard about DeviceAtlas, the dotMobi device database, but many be curious to learn more about it. If so, this will definitely be a good session to attend (and as I mentioned above, it's free).

Date:

• Tuesday, 6 May 2008

Time:

• 07:00 am PDT (USA, Canada – Pacific Coast)
• 10.00 am EDT (USA, Canada - Eastern Time)
• 15.00 pm UTC (United Kingdom, Ireland)
• 16.00 pm CET (Norway, Italy, Sweden, Germany, France)
• 17.00 pm EET (Finland)
• 19.30 pm IST (India)

To register for the session, please send an email to Wendy Holloway with your name, job title and an indication that you wish to attend. Once you have registered, she will send you details on how to join the presentation.

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.

dotMobi: One Year Later

First of all, hello to everyone. My first blog marks a special occasion in the life of dotMobi.

September 26 was the one-year anniversary of .mobi’s public availability. Although work started well before that date, that day was the public announcement that dotMobi was no longer a concept, idea or project. It was real. And one year later, there are 700,000 names registered with millions of pages of mobile content behind them, plus a slew of free tools for bringing content to the mobile web content like dev.mobi, ready.mobi, site.mobi and the dotMobi Web Developer Guide.  Much progress made, but much, much more to go!

Today, dotMobi’s challenge is to grow what was launched a year ago. Over the next two quarters, dotMobi will focus on growing mobile services for developers, designers and enterprises with the launch of key products like our device database and search services.

Another challenge for dotMobi is helping more and more brands bring their presence to the mobile web. Recently, we’ve seen strong brands like Wachovia, ESPN, Zagat and Disney bringing mobile properties to the .mobi domain. We’ve also seen innovative business models like MobilePropertySites.com, Zinadoo and dozens of other travel, automobile & media sites basing their services on the advantages of the .mobi domain.

I promise that there is much more to come.  This coming year is going to be an exciting one as we all help bring the mobile web to the mainstream … and I'm including every reader of this blog in that.

I know you have an interest in the success of the mobile web. If you have domains, use site.mobi to build content. Create mobile social networks with your friends using Zinadoo. If you have friends in businesses, introduce them to the benefits of the .mobi domain. Advertising works. PR works. But word of mouth will always be the most important way to reach a mass audience because it’s supported by your credibility and enthusiasm.  You have had and will have a big hand in impacting the growth of dotMobi, so thank you for your support in the past, and thank you for working beside us to build the future.

I'm already excited to think about a year from now, when we’ll be looking back at everything the dotMobi community has accomplished together over these next 12 months. I promise it will be exciting for you as well.

From Burger King to Building Mobile Sites

I came across some really comical blogs on the NamePros site during the past weeks commenting that "Edwards should be flipping burgers at Burger King" and "Edwards is that guy with the really bad red tie." I love flipping burgers on the grill, but I have to say that I do like my red tie. I love the good craic as we say here in Ireland, but I think the discussion needs to be more about how to build mobile content. You can buy all the names in the world that you want, but they are worthless without content and traffic to them. Content and traffic are important whether you are an individual, big brand, small brand or domain investor.

The big brands are doing it daily in the press. dotMobi is about helping the small and big brands alike to reach 1.6 billion internet-ready mobile phones around the world. This is where the future traffic lies for small businesses, big brands and pay-per-click sites. If you are not there today, then you are going to be late to the game in the next 12 months. I am often asked what are the minimum requirements for a dotMobi site and, more importantly, what makes a good dotMobi site.

The minimum requirements for any web site behind a mobi name are brain-dead simple. Most registrars and their tools implement these requirements today. We built the minimum mandatory rules with help from the W3C and dotMobi's investors so that consumers would get a mobile experience that works every time. You can run a Ready.mobi report to find out if your site meets the three simple rules. If you want to build a site with GOOD mobile content, then you need to do a little more work and read on past the rules below. 

The three rules are:

1.  XHTML Mobile Profile

XHTML mobile profile is simply a tag for your mobile landing page, signifying that your site does XHTML (the preferred language for mobile web browsers). It makes sense that your web site should tell the browser to select a mobile display. Mobile browsers will take on a number of behaviors, and your web site should signal what kind of behavior it wants the consumer to experience. This rule is mandatory and .mobi sites not implementing it will be turned off with due notice before the year end.

2.  No frames

The zero to nine keypad on mobile phones do not provide an easy way for a consumer to navigate around a mobile web site. Frames also tend to break mobile browsers in some cases. Hence, we have a mandatory rule that says no frames because it produces a bad mobile experience for the consumer. This rule is mandatory, and .mobi sites not implementing it will be turned off with due notice before the year end.

3.  myname.mobi must be the landing page

This is another practical rule guaranteeing consumers that they do not have to worry about what comes before the name. Was it "www" or "whatever 3rd level name"? Mobile consumers on the go do not have time to type lots of characters on a zero-to-nine key pad. dotMobi makes it simple for the mobile consumer to get to the site they want quickly and dependably. We did research on this mobile consumer behavior, by the way, and this is how we created the rule. This rule is mandatory, and .mobi sites not implementing it will be turned off with due notice before the year end.

The three rules are simple and practical, but they do not mean you will produce a mobile site with a great consumer experience. dotMobi and the investors (the guys with the real mobile web experience) have literally spent the last two years and several million dollars building information resources and tools for free to the global community. You should check out Dev.mobi today to learn about how to build a web site with a great mobile experience. 

I will summarize some of the highlights that will help you build a world class mobile site that will work on any phone or network in the world ...

.Mobi Advisory Group [MAG] - Get Involved

Dev.mobi  gets a frequent mention on this blog and I wanted to draw attention to another .mobi industry group which is rapidly gaining pace and doing great work to help build the .mobi ecosystem - the .mobi Advisory Group [MAG] .

Before I go any further, I should point out that MAG is completely independent of dotMobi - it is self-financing (MAG is a not-for-profit organization), self-organising and it sets its own agenda entirely. However, it is endorsed and accredited by dotMobi and naturally works closely with the dotMobi team.

MAG is a fantastic vehicle for dotMobi to gather feedback from the marketplace on the direction it is taking and any future plans. Members get early access to new products and play an important part in planning and development. Equally, MAG is able to pitch new ideas to dotMobi and suggest different initiatives.

MAG has a wider membership profile than the Developers Forum but like dev.mobi, MAG welcomes those who are passionate about the growth of the mobile internet and the .mobi TLD. Members include dotMobi registrars, companies involved in mobile commerce / content / advertising, web and domain developers, individuals and dotMobi investors. MAG has also reached out to  industry associations such as the CWTA  and  the MMA  to form global alliances.

MAG's various taskforces have been looking at issues such as mobile advertising, browsing, commerce, mobile email, PPC and mobile internet in developing countres. I believe domain compliance is on its agenda for the coming months as is illegal content / mobile web and mobile search.

I would encourage those of you who take an active interest in dotMobi and its activities to get involved in MAG. Further information on how to join is available on the MAG web-site.

sex.mobi To Go On Sale, And More

Have you seen the zagat.mobi or AAA.mobi going live this week? Weather.mobi's service is really cool and a testament to a major brand making a decision between m.myname.com (or myname.com/mobile or mobile.myname.com) and myname.mobi.

We are poised to break 700,000 names under management very soon. More significantly, both small and big brands are putting their content live on a daily basis. Check our the showcase page to see examples and case studies. 

Also, have you checked out the mobile site builder which recently went live with Network Solutions' BuildMyMobi.com?  Registrars everywhere are embracing the mobile hosting and content creation opportunity in a big way for the coming year.  Hopefully, your company will not miss out.

More after the jump...

Still not convinced that 2007 is "The Year of the Mobile Web"?

Any top-level domain is only as good as the sites that use it.

.mobi is no different. We're a very young domain registry, and we've made amazing progress with the domain uptake. But, like many registries, a large part of our mission is to stimulate the growth of content.

But what adds to dotMobi's responsibility in particular, I think, is an awareness that .mobi sites are, in a way, uniquely representative of a whole new medium: the mobile web.

That's certainly we take that responsibility very seriously. Our developer community, tools, publications and resources are all designed to help grow the mobile web. Over on http://dev.mobi, we service many thousands of signed-up mobile developers and their needs every day, even those that are not (yet! :-) ) running their sites on .mobi domains.

As a result I feel fairly confident that our domain uptake, the numbers of live sites - not to mention the success of the dev.mobi community itself - are valuable barometers for the sector as a whole.

So I thought I'd share some interesting statistics with you.

Just one of the things that we measure here at dotMobi is how .mobi sites are being picked up by search engines. That (at least in relative terms) shows us how fast content is going live, and how actively search providers' crawlers are indexing it.

You can tracking page index size on Google quite easily. The trick is the "site:" syntax, and the fact that the approximate number of matching pages is shown in the top right hand corner of the results. Enter "site:.mobi" into Google and you will see what I mean.

This is presented as a count of pages, not sites or domains. We've been recording this figure regularly for a selection of top-level domains since December. Although I have no way of knowing how accurate they are as absolute figures, they seem to be a fair measure of relative growth.

(Of course they fall sometimes too: presumably the removal of dead or poor sites from the index. But taking a ratcheted monthly peak accounts for that. The highest .mobi result count in July was just over 3 million pages.)

Anyway, normalise to December, plot the percentage growth for each top-level domain, and out comes...

Whoah! Well, I guess we were starting from a fairly low base... our top-level domain was only a few months old then. But nevertheless, the growth curve is astonishing. We have more than ten times as many pages being indexed today than we did back at the start of the year.

As proof of our confidence in this year's growth of the mobile web, and the .mobi domain in particular, this is fabulous.

Of course these figures aren't about us. They're all thanks to the hundreds of thousands of domain holders and site owners out there who are demonstrably living the mobile dream.

These individuals and organisations are already out there, realising the medium's opportunities, overcoming its challenges, and prototyping the future. Basically bootstrapping what is clearly now the web's inevitable evolution.

And, as you can see, they're doing it right now. Are you?

Flagship mobile tool grows up

I hope that many of you are familiar with ready.mobi, our page checker for mobile content.

Since we launched, we've helped test literally hundreds of thousands of web and mobile web pages - putting them under scrutiny to see how well they're likely to behave on mobile devices, how well they comply to industry Best Practices, and whether they are dotMobi compliant.

It's been a roaring success. Thanks for using it!

The current version is a very quick and efficient way of sanity checking a single page. But many of you (especially those that are developing mobile content yourselves) have asked us whether we can help you test whole sites.

Hmm. Well we thought about it. And then thought some more. And then wrote some software. And then we tested it. And now we can proudly reveal the beta of the new version, with our welcome note here.

The new version is a radically step up in terms of functionality of the tool. (In fact, although we're calling it v1.1, it's far more like a v2.0). Most noticable is the fact that you can test whole sites - the tool will follow links and crawl multiple pages - and of course report your "mobile readiness" for all of those it finds.

If you want to take part in the beta process, please sign up for a user account at dev.mobi, and check the box that says "ready.mobi v1.1 beta user". You'll then be able to sign in to beta.ready.mobi and get started.

It's not perfect yet, but we're pretty proud of this - hopefully another demonstration that we're  trying to help developers build compelling mobile content and that we're about a little more than just domains alone...

Have fun, and let us know how you like it. We'll be actively canvassing for final improvements that we can make before we unleash it properly on the world.

Building a mobile site has never been easier

dotMobi wants to de-mystify the process of developing a mobile presence, and one of the ways we are trying to make this happen is through a partnership with Akmin. They've developed an extremely easy-to-use mobile site builder called MobiSiteGalore.

Through the "Go Mobile" programme, this is something that our domain registrars offer to their customers, and it's proving a great way to get content live on new domains.

But if you want to find out what all the fuss is about and put it through its paces, feel free to try it out today at Site.mobi - after a very simple sign up process, you'll be led through a wizard that lets you design, structure, format and deploy your mobile site.

Your site then automatically gets tested against Ready.mobi

It really is easy. Please let us know how you get on!