dotMobi

The Mobile Internet ... Now in Book Form!

As you can probably guess, everyone at dotMobi loves the mobile web. And when we're not building new sites and services for the mobile web, we're often writing about it. Sometimes on this blog. Sometimes at mobiThinking.com or dev.mobi. And sometimes in a brand new book called Mobile Internet for Dummies.

dotMobi's VP of Technology, James Pearce, is a co-author of this new Dummies book, which is designed to help consumers best use their mobile phones to access made-for-mobile Internet content and services.

 

James is part of a top-notch author team that includes John Levine (author of Internet for Dummies), Jostein Algroy (industry adviser / journalist based out of Toronto), Daniel Appelquist (a mobile web thought-leader at Vodafone and Mobile Monday London co-founder) and Michael O'Farrell (Chair of the dotMobi Advisory Group).

The book covers a variety of subjects, including text messaging, email, blogging, games, music, pictures, shopping, banking and building mobile web sites. The book also includes tips on finding the best deals on phones and carrier network plans for mobile Internet use. The authors have started a blog at http://mifd.mobi to help users find more services in the mobile web space.

 

Mobile Internet for Dummies is in bookstores now and is also available for online ordering from Amazon or Barnes & Noble (USA) or Indigo/Chapters (Canada) or directly from the publisher.

Do you have the time for .mobi thinking?

I recently read a blog asking if a .mobi domain name is really needed and if we're somehow "splitting the internet." It got me thinking how deeply entrenched some are in ".com thinking" and how this just might be the perfect time to start using ".mobi thinking."

The basics of good marketing are no more sophisticated than recognizing your customers’ needs, delivering relevant goods and services, and using smart communications to build a relationship, thereby creating loyalty and repeat business.

So when BMW markets its cars to Irish drivers, it offers right-hand-drive vehicles, provides brochures in English in its Irish showrooms and delivers a portal at http://bmw.ie, providing localized car and dealer information. Likewise in Spain, the cars are left-hand-drive and their portal at http://bmw.es offers Spanish content. BMW recognizes the unique needs and languages in these individual markets and responds accordingly.

A good mobile web site similarly acknowledges the mobile population has a unique set of needs and -- in a sense -- speaks a different language. Mobile customers place higher value on convenience, speed and utility. A great mobile site targets those needs with agile content and uses a communications strategy that differentiates itself from its fixed-internet counterpart. This is the core of ".mobi thinking."

So while BMW markets its cars to its mobile customers, its mobile site at bmw.mobi offers quick links to view images of all its models, downloads for ringtones and wallpapers, and a contact number that’s linked so I can easily call it from my mobile phone since -- after all -- a phone can actually make calls.

dotMobi: "Visionary" Nominee

Here's a nice bit of news: dotMobi has been nominated for a 2007 "Mobile Internet Net Visionary" Award by the Irish Internet Association (IIA) and Enterprise Ireland.

For background, the IIA is the professional body for those conducting business via the internet from Ireland. Established in 1997, the IIA has a 400-plus membership (and that should give you some sense of the high growth of the technology community in Ireland).

Enterprise Ireland is the Irish state development agency focused on accelerating the development of Irish companies to achieve strong positions in global markets.

Do you want to vote?

If you're interested in voting, you simply need to visit the online voting ballot at http://www.netvisionary.ie/vote2007.html.

Voting closes on 19 October.

And good luck to our fellow nominees in the "Mobile Internet Net Visionary" category: RTÉ Publishing, Learnosity, ParkByPhone.ie, WildLight Film Channel and Phonovation.

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?

Mobile Web audience is growing...and some cool sites are proving how to build traffic

Someone forwarded me an article on a recent study in the UK that shows the mobile  web audience is growing in the UK and is now about one fifth the size of the PC Internet audience.  This is what caught my eye:

The Weather Channel in the US has a greater reach via the mobile web than it does via PC-based Internet, highlighting how the success of sites that provide content for people on the move by optimizing their content for the small screen.

That's is a real life use case of a major content brand building a mobile site and surpassing their audience reach on mobile because they designed their mobile site from the ground up, not only to look on a mobile phone, but also to be relevant content-wise when you are not sitting behind a big screen.  Kudos to the folks at TWC for getting it right.   

How A Tragedy Teaches Us How Dependent We Are On Mobile Communication

Many of you may know that dotMobi's US office is based near Washington DC in Virginia. Exactly a week ago, the residents of Virginia, and indeed the nation, were horrified to learn that a gunman had massacred 32 students and teachers on a rampage.  Our hearts go out to the families touched by the tragedy.

It’s fair to say that the "six degrees of separation" rule applies.  In other words, search long enough and someone here knows someone else who has a son or a daughter at Virginia Tech and was frantically trying to reach them, most often via their mobile phone.  It was no different here.

Many of us who are old enough remember having to find a public payphone (and having enough change), or having to wait until you found a land-line to make the call.  Thankfully times have changed and in the events of emergencies such as these, many were grateful to be able to make contact with their loved ones.

I know it is easy to play "Monday morning quarter back" and I am not intending to do that here.  But I have to believe that there are lessons learned in this tragedy for all of us.  I cannot help but wonder about the extent our schools, government, and public facilities take advantage of the mobile technology to deliver information.

An easy way to do this is to capture mobile phone numbers as key contact data for emergencies, and disseminate text messages as alerts and updates.  In fact, George Washington University has such a system as part of their upgraded alert plan, as recently discussed by the GWU president Joel Trachtenberg on NPR.

Further: What if the information was targeted, say, using the capabilities of the phone (such as those with built-in GPS) to alert only those affected and give them a specific information without causing unnecessary alarm and panic amongst the larger population?

Yes, I know there are a lot of issues to solve still (privacy, data protection, new phone technology), but think back 10 years ago.  A lot of what is possible today was but a dream.

All I am proposing is that we learn from tragedies such as this to understand how best to utilize the resources we already have and plan for how they should be used.

First Mobile Webbys Nominees Announced

Some good news to share: last week, the Webby Awards announced the nominees for their first mobile Webby awards. Three .mobi sites made the final list: Travelosa.mobi, Dada.mobi and Otto.mobi; that represents 20% of the nominees. And that means two of the first three mobile Webby awards could go to .mobi sites! (Two of the sites are in the same category).

In the interest of full disclosure, dotMobi is the Founding Mobile Sponsor of the 11th annual Webby Awards. Sponsorship aside, dotMobi had no influence in the nomination criteria or on which sites were chosen for the competition. The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences is a scrupulously impartial organization, which makes the nomination of these sites a happy surprise for us.

Two other .mobi sites -- Dir.mobi and eIndia.mobi -- were named as "official honorees" (That translates to "honorable mention" but it's still good to be recognized, I say).

All of this is more remarkable when you consider that developers have been working on the .mobi domain for only six months. Looking at it that way, it's impressive to see five .mobi sites recognized as examples of good mobile design against sites that have been around much longer.

You can vote for your favorite .mobi nominees in the Webbys' People's Voice competition until April 27. In fact, you should vote right now.

Generation Mobile Web

Those born between 1978 and 1997 are often collectively described as “Generation Y”. That’s 10-30 year olds.

Wikipedia cheerfully suggests the Y-ers also enjoy classifications like “the Net-”, “the i-”, “the Google-”, “the MySpace-”, and “the MyPod-Generation”. The preceding generation (mine!) is Generation X: those thirty-somethings born between 1965 and 1978.

But despite Wikipedia’s assertions, and assuming this is even a valid question, who’s generation actually lays claim to today’s web?

It’s got to be the latter.

Generation X’ers founded eBay, Yahoo, Google, Paypal, and no doubt thousands of the web sites that the world uses today without a second thought. Look around at all the A-list bloggers out there too; almost all in their 30’s I would say.

While the basis for the world’s networking infrastructure was probably a baby-boomer thing, it was undoubtedly my generation that developed the web as a mainstream medium.

And - wait a minute - that suddenly makes me part of the on-line establishment.

Start looking at it in these terms and it’s a bit of a shock (and certainly no help in helping me avoid an inevitable mid-life crisis!)

So this got me thinking. Each generation generally has a desire to overturn - or even revolt - against their established precedents.

And if we learn from the many times this has happened throughout human culture in the past, one can easily see that it’s going to happen again. Today’s web is undoubtedly due for such a shake up. And I’ve no doubt that mobile is going to be the significant factor in that coup.

The evolution of the web on to the mobile medium is completely inevitable.

(Look: take the really long view… can’t you see yourself reminiscing about those good old .com days? When folks used to have to sit down in front of a lonely screen to interact on-line with the rest of the world? How quaint.)

But what is dawning on me is this: that the coming revolution isn’t something that will be driven through the adoption or innovation of today’s establishment. Those lonely PC screens are Generation X’s comfort zone. We find ourselves struggling with small screens and small keys to even glimpse the potential of the next decade’s on-line experience.

So I’m looking to Generation Y. They’re the mobile generation. They’re the ones looking for a new angle. They’re looking for a paradigm that they can adopt, pioneer, and make their own. And they’re going to be the creators and the guardians of the web in the coming decades - the web that will finally call itself truly mobile.

(Oh, and they’re the ones with the small fingers)

Most importantly, they will do wonderful things with the mobile web. Darwinian things that the now-conservative institution of today’s web would probably never grasp, risk, or predict.

Should Generation X-ers be surprised? Should we react? Should we stifle?

No. Of course not. We should roll with it. We should encourage, guide, and then, when required, stand back and watch with awe. Don’t milk the calf. Yes, we can help to provide the the base technologies, the open ecosystems (and, of course, the domain names...), but the medium may never be ours.

We X-ers have played our part. Now it’s our responsibility to allow our successors to build their own legacy. Is that perhaps the real Web 2.0?

(A version of this article previously appeared on my personal blog)

It Isn't About ".Com Versus .Mobi" -- If you believe that, read on...

In my view, it's not about .com versus the world of TLDs or, for that matter .mobi versus .com/.net/.org etc. 

Take this post from Frank Shilling.

The downside with new TLDs which sell themselves based on a platform is that they are typically exclusive of others.  Don't have a .mobi?  “Well!! ~ You’re just not getting access to our suite of software or services then :-p.”  .Mobi could give away their domains and still wouldn’t get traction because the drawing card is just not big enough. Don’t get wowed by a bunch of Telco’s which have trouble even agreeing on foundational phone platforms. These folks are touting .mobi as much out of “fear of missing something”.  I have not seen what I would call a world changing plan..  .Mobi could give away tools that can turn straw into gold and yes, some folks will switch, but in my opinion .TV, .Mobi etc have “no chance” without such a world-beater of a plan. This plan would have to have such a "wow effect" that it would land on the cover of every paper in the world in order to rival .com.  Better to open your platform to .com holders.

Let me address this, by way of clarification:

1) "Well!! ~ You’re just not getting access to our suite of software or services then :-p.” Not true. Go to our developer forum, download the handbook (free), build a site (free), join the forum (free), or get training (free).  Our certification program, which you do pay for, offers value whether or not you use .mobi.

So you may ask, "why do we do this?" Which  brings me to...

2) "Don’t get wowed by a bunch of Telco’s which have trouble even agreeing on foundational phone platforms" Well... Our investors aren't just a "bunch of Telcos." They invested in dotMobi, not to take advantage of the money to be had in the domain registration business, but to help jump-start the expansion of Internet on mobile devices.  (Something that was lacking for a long time.)  And they did agree on a set of standards -- W3C's mobile web initiative -- If  that is what is meant by "foundational phone platforms."

3) ".Mobi could give away tools that can turn straw into gold and yes, some folks will switch.." We do give away tools and know-how, but it is not about switching from .com, co.uk or any of the others for that matter.  Have your .com, but if your customers are increasingly mobile -- and most of us are -- then you want to design and author a site that is specific to their needs during those times when they're not in front of a 17" screen with an all-you-can eat DSL plan and some time to spare.

4. "Better to open your platform to .com holders"  Goes back to my first point, really. We actually announced back in February that dotMobi is building the directory of all mobile optimized content, which uses .mobi as well as other TLDs, including .com.  To quote specifically:

"The dotMobi database is a catalog of all mobile content available on the Internet today and is quality-rated by location, category, relevance and suitability to download content easily on a mobile phone. The database will contain all mobile content in existence, including .mobi sites, country specific sites, .com sites, WAP sites and other mobile-optimised content."

.xxx vs. .mobi? An Informed View

I do not know how many of you recall the commercial by "Syms", a discount clothing store in the late 80's and 90's.  The ad was stark, with clearly un-media savvy execs s-l-o-w-l-y declaring that "At Syms, an educated consumer... is our best customer."  Although the ad was amateurish, there was a lot of wisdom in those words.

Which is why I take the time again and again to set the record straight.  To have an informed market, and therefore customers, one must presume that the sources of news and  information must be at a minimum factual and accurate.  This means undertaking a minimum level of due diligence and frankly homework. 

Case in point:

In an article reporting the demise of the .xxx domain, the writer accusses ICANN for practicing a bit of hypocrisy (emphasis mine):

"Compare the rejection of .xxx to the approval of .mobi. ...Several ICANN directors who voted to reject .xxx did so because they believed there were "credible scenarios" in which ICANN would be forced to answer for content regulation under .xxx, which is not its mission. Its mission is the technical stability of the DNS.  These same directors had no such concerns when unanimously approving .mobi, which proposed to regulate the content of a mobiles-only top-level domain. The .mobi domain was approved despite convincing arguments that it "broke" the spirit of the DNS by using top-level domains as protocol denominators."

Where do we say, or have we ever said, that we regulate the "content" of a mobile site?  The fact is that we enforce three mandatory rules (Is it in xhtml? Is it a second-level? Does it have frames?), all of which are automated and can be machine-tested without anyone ever knowing the content of the site.  To compare .mobi and .xxx using this criteria is ill-informed, and a disservice to the user.

The writer goes on further to draw a distinction between .xxx and .mobi in terms of the "sponsored community".  Here is an excerpt:

ICM's community would have consisted of pornographers. A pretty distinct group of folk. The .mobi community by contrast was "restricted" to everybody on the planet who owns a mobile phone -- a higher percentage of the population of Earth than those who own a PC. The gated community of .mobi ergo has a potentially broader audience than .com.

Ok - where to begin? First lets lay out the hierarchy: Sponsor, community, end users. The sponsor part is easy. The community we serve is any individual or business who would like to extend their reach into the mobile channel and do so cost-effectively. So we provide the domain name as well as a whole host of tools and resources -- free, BTW, and open to anyone regardless of whether they use .mobi or not.  We do this so that the end-users, anyone with a mobile phone, can easily and cost-effectively use the Internet.  This fits in nicely with ICANN's own definition.

There is confusion here between the definition of sponsors, the community it benefits (porno industry) ,and end users. I will not get into the merits of .xxx or ICANN's decision (later post perhaps) but the key point here is:  How does .mobi compare in any way with .xxx?

I urge any writer, blogger, pundit: Please... do a bit of fact checking.  Our website has a whole host of information on our policies, progress, initiatives etc.  Without such preliminary and much needed due diligence, opinions parade as facts, facts become blurred and submerged, and we end up with an uninformed public and, by definition, an uninformed market.