dotMobi

dotMobi Grows Up

New week, new start, new office!

The dotMobi team, having outgrown its last space, has taken over some new digs in Dublin's IFSC (International Financial Services Centre) this morning ... just down the street from our previous address. The new accommodation is better equipped to handle our growing staff numbers and, having been around since we opened our first office, I can't help but feel proud that we've come so far (and sentimental at the same time).

Back in November 2005, a team of four dotMobi staff members met and introduced themselves over morning coffee at Café Sol before heading over to a temporary office on Dawson Street. We soon came to learn that we really were in a start-up situation as we headed off in pairs to buy pens and stationary, fax machines, phones etc. Morning journeys were planned with military precision since we had just one set of keys and the absence of a lift and presence of far, far too many stairs left staff and visitors gasping for water on arrival. It was, however, a fun and exciting time and what we lacked in facilities, we made up for in energy and enthusiasm.

Now in our third office, we have settled into rather more serious surroundings with our banking and trading neighbours. Let's hope they don't get too rattled when they hear the whoops of the developer's  daily Wii battles as the team lets off steam at the end of the day before settling into the evening shift. Starbucks is still comfortably close by, although rumor has it that a brand new coffee machine is set to replace the now battered gift offering that saw us through many bright and early starts in our old Exchange Place offices. And, better still, we're all the closer to our favourite "OK, just one drink before I head home" haunts.

Our door is always open for anyone passing by so be sure to drop in if you ever find yourself in Dublin: 2 La Touche House, IFSC, Dublin 1. (Phone numbers remain the same).

Onwards and upwards!

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.

No Mistaking It

You've been hearing us talk about "dotMobi Thinking" for months now. The ideas behind good mobile web sites are simple but the execution isn't always so easy. Many of us are still thinking of mobile web sites as small versions of their PC-counterparts. That's simply the wrong approach. We've reviewed this and other pitfalls in mobile web marketing to produce a new, free eBook called Ten Mistakes in Mobile Web Marketing.

In addition to highlighting some traps to avoid, we've shared great examples of best site practices from some of the mobile web's biggest brands including Bank of America, Smirnoff, Virgin Atlantic, BMW and Jaguar. Keep your eyes out for more from us on that on mobiThinking.com because we're just getting started. You can stay up to date by joining our mobiThinking email list.

A big day for dotMobi R&D

Last Wednesday marked a milestone for dotMobi's R&D team.

After crawling 100 million domains, running the http://ready.mobi report more than 80 million times and running 22,000 tests of the service in April, the team announced that find.mobi is ready for public scrutiny.

One thing to keep in mind is that find.mobi only displays results on content that wil work on a mobile phone. Since the mobile web is still young, some searches won't return many results. As one of the R&D team members put it, "If you're looking for information on llama farming in Ecuador, the mobile web still doesn't have answers; but for common, day-to-day information, there's a good chance you'll find something."

By the way, find.mobi displays all mobile-ready sites, not just .mobi ones; however, it certainly can the site crawler's job easier with a .mobi domain and can help it get into the search engine faster.

If you want to try find.mobi yourself, break out your mobile and try some of the following searches:

• Search for brands that have gone mobile: BusinessWeek, BMW, ESPN, etc.
• Use keywords to find mobile versions of your favorite sites: Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, BBC, etc.
• If you're travelling, try entering your flight number -- like aa100 or ei153 -- and find.mobi will tell you departure/arrival times, terminal number, etc.
• find.mobi does stock quotes, too. Just enter any NYSE/NASDAQ ticker symbol (e.g. aapl, goog, msft, etc.)
• Find.mobi can convert currencies. Try any of the following formats using any standard 3-letter currency codes: usd, "usd gbp," gbp, "100 cny usd," "convert 10 dollar in euro," "$10 EUR,"  etc. In each case, find.mobi will convert to USD & EUR if no other currency is mentioned, or to any other currency you specify (e.g., "10 cny gbp" converts 10 Chinese RMBs to UK pounds, using the latest rate).

In our press release on this, Paul Nerger, dotMobi's Vice President of Advanced Services and Applications, said, "find.mobi was built to serve as an example to the search industry to change the way that it should think about search when applied to mobile."

I hope you find it as compelling -- and as useful -- as I have. It's the start page on both of my mobiles and has quickly become indispensible. I'm willing to bet you're quickly going to think the same thing, too.

dotMobi goes to Disneyland!

We're getting ready to attend our fifth T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference which will take place 20-24 May in Orlando, Florida. At this event, dotMobi will make 16 of its valuable premium names available as part of the Moniker-sponsored auction (including a live auction segment on 23 May). The selection of generics for this auction is bound to attract a lot of attention: airlines.mobi, boats.mobi, company.mobi, computers.mobi, drugs.mobi, escort.mobi, forsale.mobi, films.mobi, men.mobi, mortgage.mobi, religion.mobi, records.mobi, ringtone.mobi, sales.mobi, show.mobi and strip.mobi.

dotMobi followers know the drill as regards content requirements attached to these premium names -- sites should initially consist of a dotMobi compliant parking page with a live web site containing relevant content to follow within a six-month period. In case you don't, we covered the basics in our auction press release this Monday past.

Anyone interested in participating in the auction should contact the event organizer for details on how to register. It is not necessary to attend the auction in person to bid ... but if anyone is planning to make the trip, be sure to look us up when you're there!

Webbys time again! Show your support for .mobi ...

Has it been a year already? The Webbys Awards are here again.

The Webbys are the Internet world's equivalent of the Oscars and they always attract a high caliber of entries. There are many categories, and many ways to award winners. There is a set of nominees which are voted on by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and that same set is also voted on by "the Public" via the People's Voice Awards.

Then are Honorees; these are runners up of merit who receive a certificate but aren't nominees.

2007 was the first year of awards for mobile web sites; .mobi sites made a small presence that year. But in 2008, there are quite a few .mobis scattered in there.

And now through May 1, 2008, you can show your support for .mobi by voting for:

"Radical Media for iPhone" in the Entertainment category and for ZAGAT.mobi in the Listings & Updates category.

I'd also like to send big congratulations to the following .mobi Honorees:

• High School Musical 2
• CommNexus San Diego Mobile
• http://peroniitaly.mobi
• moko.mobi

But there's always a downside ...

How small businesses are thinking really big

In case you didn't get the memo, April 21-25 is National Small Business Week in the U.S., sponsored by the Small Business Association. And while it's true that big brands with big budgets are most visibly promoting how they're using "dotMobi thinking," increasingly big numbers of small businesses are showing leadership in bringing innovative ideas to the mobile web. 

As I heard one panelist describe it at ad:tech last week, the mobile Internet is the "connective tissue" of our technology-driven and busy lives -- keeping us in tune with with the vital functions we need to thrive both personally and professionally. It's no wonder it's forecasted half the world's mobile phone subscribers will be browsing the web in just three years (Informa 2007) ... and 85% of iPhone users already do so. Now is the time for any business owner or marketer to seize the day.

The best mobile web sites acknowledge that we want utility -- usefulness -- out of our mobile web experiences that bring convenience to how we manage our day-to-day lives. Small conveniences immediately translate to customer satisfaction, and that means increased loyalty, and deeper & richer customer relationships. We all know it's far more efficient to keep a customer than to acquire a new one. And in this economic climate, retention needs to be foremost in any marketer's mind -- especially for small businesses who need to be even more judicious with their marketing spend.

And many small businesses are using "dotmobi thinking" to deliver satisfaction to their customers by providing utility - in simple and small ways that just make sense. For example, Heritage Texas Properties in Houston offers a mobile web site for out-and-about prospective property buyers. Accessing their site from your mobile device, you can view Houston listings, get contact information for any of their offices or agents, review local city information like news, weather and dining, and even calculate your estimated mortgage using their mobile-friendly calculator. When someone is in a car and viewing property, these kinds of simple features and useful applications really deliver.

Restaurants are also making small steps towards delivering great experiences. Nottingham's Restaurant & Tavern in popular ski resort Big Bear Lake, California uses their mobile web site to offer hours of operation, the menu, directions from local areas, a calendar of upcoming musical events and a quick link to call them; after all, a phone makes calls, too.  Nottingham's has obviously thought about what their customers want to access while in a boat on the lake, on the chair lift or strolling through town. The content is straightforward, but it's sure to result in lasting relationships with customers.

Both sites also use some best practices from both a technical and marketing perspective. First, they each score a perfect 5 out of 5 on http://ready.mobi for mobile performance, simply meaning the sites will work well on most phones. Second, they each advertise their respective.mobi sites on their desktop web sites! After all, how are your customers going to know you have a mobile web site if you don't tell them? It's important to differentiate yourself as a small business and show you provide this added convenience.

If you have a small business and are ready to establish a mobile web site, I have five tips to get you started:

What a Great Thing

We’ve always been big fans of zagat.mobi and now there’s a 30-second reason why we just love it.

Apple recently launched its "The Great Thing" TV commercial featuring some of the great things you can do with the Internet in your pocket. Featured along with viewing a trail map at a ski resort and changing your flight, is finding a good place to eat on Zagat.mobi.

The site looks really sharp within the iPhone and not to be ignored is the fact that the spot very clearly displays "zagat.mobi" in the address bar.

Take a look at the ad:

Like we said we months ago, we think the iPhone is simply awesome -- mostly because unlike anything else before, it has people talking about the mobile web. One year ago most people wouldn’t know mobile web from WiFi but now it’s becoming part of everyday parlance thanks to that little touch screen you can pinch and grab.

And what about some of the cynics that said .mobi had no place in an iPhone world? I love pointing to zagat.mobi as the perfect example of how even great technology cannot replace customer-focused thinking and smart branding. If you’ve had the pleasure of using the zagat.mobi site, you’ll know it’s not a shrunken-down, miniature version of its .com counterpart. It has unique attributes, content, and layout that cater to my specific needs while using a mobile phone. For example, the phone numbers are hyperlinked so I can directly call the restaurant and book a table. And when using it from the iPhone, it knows where I am and provides a map and directions. Now this is giving the people what they want!

And having a .mobi domain is like having bragging rights to say "Yes, I get the mobile web! I'm about to give you a very cool experience that's different from what you get at your PC." Now, thanks to these 30 seconds, millions of people are hearing that message from zagat.mobi.

Speaking of spreading the word ...

December Online Auction: Next Steps

dotMobi would like to update the community on our efforts to resolve the issues relating to the Sedo auction that took place last December. We recognise that some people have been frustrated by the pace at which things have been moving, but this has been an extremely complex and difficult issue with many moving parts. That said, we are happy to report that significant progress has been made in the last couple of weeks.

We have now reached out to all of the auction stakeholders -- both the high bidders in the extended auction and those who received a notice in error as a result of the crash. We put a compromise proposal on the table and asked for feedback. Fewer than 10 of the more than 70 stakeholders rejected our proposal; since the proposal appears to have the support of the community, we are now moving forward with it. In the small number of cases where competing claims remain, we will provide appropriate assurances to the bidder entitled to the name under our proposal.

We will be contacting each bidder individually over the next few days, but the next steps will be as follows:

1. We have already delivered the authorisation codes for the names to Sedo for release in accordance with the proposal.
2. Each stakeholder will receive a detailed Agreement that describes the settlement, states our mutual obligations and releases claims arising in connection with the auction.
3. Sedo will release the codes once the stakeholder has faxed a signed copy of the Agreement to Sedo and wired the necessary funds to their Sedo account.
4. We will then begin to release the declined and substitute names to those who have faxed the signed Agreements to Sedo.

Clearly, the sooner people fax the Agreements and wire the funds, the quicker they will be in a position to register the names. And to participate in the allocation of declined and substitute names, signed Agreements must also be faxed to Sedo.

As we reach these final stages, we would like to thank everyone involved for their patience and understanding throughout this entire process. It has certainly been a unique experience with valuable lessons learned on all sides. The passion and commitment demonstrated by the community for .mobi domains has been extraordinary  and that is what excites us most as we draw a line under this chapter and move on.

Online Auction Update: Postponed

As you're likely aware, dotMobi, for a number of reasons, chose to exercise its legal right to void the Sedo-hosted online auction of December 2007.

Since voiding the auction, our goal has been to identify a way forward that is fairest to all and that best facilitates the development of high-quality content for mobile web users. After further review, we have been able to identify some cases where it may be possible to allocate registration tokens without an auction (and without substantial controversy). The remaining names will be included in a new auction.

To resolve as many disputes as possible, dotMobi has postponed the auction previously announced for January 23, 2008. The rules for this new auction have not been fixed, and dotMobi will carefully consider any suggestions from the community with respect to the new auction’s structure. Please feel free to email your suggestions to premium@mtld.mobi.