dotMobi

autism.mobi

Today, dotMobi announced the launch of autism.mobi, the result of a project lead by Steve Edelson, Director of the Autism Research Institute in San Diego, in collaboration with dotMobi.

autism.mobi was a Premium Name and one which we were delighted to release as part of a closed Request for Proposals process.

The content which is being made available to end users ticks all the right boxes: it is practical, informative and helpful and the ARI, the oldest autism research institute in the world, has demonstrated that it understands the needs of today's market by adapting its information and making it accessible on mobile devices. It already does a fantastic job of disseminating information and research findings across various mediums, and it is now targeting the huge number of mobile phone users with features such as its Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist, which is designed to evaluate cognitive, communication, sensory, and social skills of individuals on the autism spectrum.

In other Premium Name news, dotMobi recently issued the Premium Name why.mobi via RFP to online forum Mobility.mobi who have since developed the domain as a educational site. dotMobi is also currently working with some other RFP candidates and hopes to announce some additional site launches shortly.

Horn Tooting

As you’ve heard many a time, "It’s an honor just to be nominated."

And while that’s true, winning is nice, too.

In that spirit, I wanted to take a minute and congratulation our friends at ZAGAT Survey, who -- earlier in June -- won the Best Listings & Updates site of the year for zagat.mobi in the Webby Awards' People's Voice Awards.

We’ve been talking up the zagat.mobi site since it launched because it’s an excellent example of adapting web-based content to a mobile user’s needs and ensuring those users can easily locate the content with a .mobi domain.

While the other .mobi nominated entries didn’t win, it’s still great that they were recognized. The folks at The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences -- the people behind the Webbys –- are stringent judges, so it is indeed an honor just to be nominated.

But they’re not the only winners this month ...

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.

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:

.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.)

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.

Something's in the Air

I don’t know why these things always come in waves, but I've seen a small hangerful of .mobi airline sites go live over the past week or so. KLM.mobi is live. Aerlingus.mobi is now live (and I'm happy about that even if there's an "aerlingus.com" on the mobile home page.) airfrance.mobi is up but it's currently redirecting to another mobile address and doesn't seem to be redirecting consistently yet.

In the US only, Virgin Atlantic -- one of my personal heroes of an airline -- has launched the stylish lovefromabove.mobi, a promotional web site for a series of Virgin Atlantic events going on in Chicago and NYC.

And speaking of travel ... dotMobi is hitting the road hard next week. Part of the crew is heading to the next ICANN meeting in New Delhi, which marks dotMobi's first formal visit to India. And some of us will be at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We're working with the dotMobi Advisory Group at a booth in Hall 7 (7H49). If you're attending, please stop by and let us know what cool .mobi sites you've been working on.

Dublin scores with .mobi ...

The planned launch of Dublin.mobi took place last week in time for the first Six Nations Rugby match hosted by the city. This has been the result of several months work with Dublin Tourism who will now be actively promoting the site both locally and abroad. The Rubgy weekends are a high point in Dublin's sporting (and social!) calendar and thousands of tourists pouring into the city will now be able to find their way around Dublin using some of the cool features on the site. Hopefully this was of some consolation to the unlucky Italians!

Check out the recently launched Frankfurt.mobi as well, and look out for some more city.mobi site launches in the coming weeks (including one next week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona). And we have some exciting news regarding the City Names Process up our sleeves. Stay tuned!

.mobi: Changing the Course of Politics

The title of this post is (playfully) overblown but it is interesting to see the recent Australian election results in which incumbent John Howard lost to Kevin Rudd. Among the many differences between the two candidates, the one that interests me is that one had a .mobi site and one didn't. Which one? The winner: Kevin Rudd with kevin07.mobi.

Over the past thirty-five years, it's been interesting to note that shifts in content delivery have often been heralded by two "verticals": politics and pornography. Aside from any obvious jokes, the one thing both have in common is the sprit of trying all means available to get their messages out there.

Some of the first .mobi sites I saw last year after the .mobi domain was generally available were ones for the 2006 U.S. gubernatorial elections; I think these came too late in the election cycle to be noticed, much less move any needles. So it was exciting to see a .mobi site used as a part of an overall communications strategy for a winning candidate in 2007 ... and I suspect you'll be seeing candidates using .mobi in that same way as the 2008 US presidential election heats up.