dotMobi

In Las Vegas ...

In Las Vegas, a .mobi fan spotted this car -- branded for Millenia's .mobi site; Millenia is a Las Vegas fine art gallery.

NV.mobi Keeps On Going Strong

Our friends at the Nevada Commission on Tourism just sent us a cool group of photos, showing the promotion they're doing for http://nv.mobi in the Embarcadero BART station in San Francisco. (An earlier report of these photos as being in Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport were erroneous.)

You can see the full photostream on flickr.

It's been busy, and now you're seeing the results ...

As I note in the headline, it's been a busy few months. The winter months may seem quiet, but the dotMobi team has been hard at work:

We've launched Instant Mobilizer, a tool that puts the mobile Web into practically everyone's hands. eNom just launched it for their many resellers, and many more .mobi registrars will be making it available over the coming weeks.

We've been at Domainfest, Parallels, Mobile World Congress and the DMA's Mobile Marketing Day, we're at ICANN Mexico and we're revving up for CTIA. You can keep track on our corporate Web site's events calendar.

We've announced the availability of one and two character .mobi domains ... and now we've announced the first brand using one: Fifth Third Bank with http://53.mobi.

We've been social networking via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and now YouTube. And one thing we're especially exciting about on our YouTube channel is a commercial for .mobi -- focusing on http://weather.mobi -- that will be broadcast in 43 major US airports throughout March 2009.

We've been working on updating our branding elements for consistency across all of our Web properties. We still have some work to do and some elements that need cleaning up, but hopefully you're already enjoying the cleaner look. To help clarify one question that comes up sometimes, we're referring to the company as "dotMobi" and the domain as ".mobi" since we do a lot more things than just the .mobi domian -- as evidenced by the many activites you see on http://mobiForge.com and http://mobiThinking.com.

And for everything that's here, I promise there's lots & lots more we're working on ... Keep a look out -- and thank you for your ongoing support of the .mobi domain and the mobile Web.

Thumbs Up to the Nevada Commision on Tourism

Way back when, one of the first showcase sites dotMobi had to show people was for Las Vegas.

Now, Nevada is showing it still cares about .mobi. The Nevada Commission on Tourism owns and operates sites at http://nvroads.mobi and http://nvski.mobi. Not only did the Commission use dotMobi best practices when creating the sites, they've actually spent time and money promoting the sites.

Along with strongly featuring .mobi on their PC Web site (including education -- and a video -- on .mobi sites) and geo-targeted banner advertising on http://weather.mobi, the Commission has produced 3"x5" cards that are distributed at ski and sport shops. Here's a sample of the cards:

 
But my favorite thing? The Commission has put up NVski.mobi billboards on major highways ...

... Cool, huh?

New, free mobiThinking eBook is now available ...

There are some terrific mobile web sites out there, but there are just as many "not so good" ones. Looking at why the good ones are good and why some don't succeed is the subject of a new eBook from the team behind dotMobi's mobiThinking site. 

"The Best & Worst of the Mobile Web" takes you through the key principles behind mobile web success as defined by a distinguished panel of "mobi-gurus" (including contributions from the Yankee Group, Gartner, Yahoo! and top marketing agencies and service providers).

Download your free copy of "The Best & Worst of the Mobile Web" eBook and find out how to look more critically at your own mobile web presence and that of your favorite brands.

dotMobi drives mass market adoption of the mobile Web with Instant Mobilizer

On Tuesday, November 11, dotMobi issued a press release on the availability of Instant Mobilizer™, a patent-pending service created by dotMobi to help small and medium businesses around the world reach their customers quickly and affordably through the mobile Web. The following is an excerpt from that "very good news" press release:

With Instant Mobilizer and a .mobi domain, tens of millions of small and medium-sized businesses can effortlessly interact with the 1.3 billion of potential customers connected to the Internet through mobile phones.

Without any need for technical knowledge or development efforts, Instant Mobilizer automatically converts a small business's existing PC site to ensure the best customer experience regardless of phone model or mobile carrier. Unlike other solutions, Instant Mobilizer gives users a branded, mobile-friendly site for their on-the-go customers, instead of leaving their Web site to be randomly transcoded by unknown operators or devices.

And every customer benefits from dotMobi's award-winning DeviceAtlas™ device database, which optimizes Instant Mobilizer sites using dotMobi best practices, so that every phone receives eye-catching results.

dotMobi has designed Instant Mobilizer to meet the needs of small business owners globally with such features as: 

• Immediate, easy access to key Web site information such as phone number and address
• Automatic links to Google™ Maps
• Quick phone number links that call your business with one click
• Unique access to key features of your customers’ phones

dotMobi's Instant Mobilizer is being released via registrars basis across Europe and North America beginning in November 2008 and expanding to other markets thereafter.

We keep getting around ...

Where in the world was dotMobi this week?

Well, a pack of us were in Cairo for the most recent ICANN meetings (and I'm sure you'll here more about that soon), but one of us -- James Pearce, our VP of Technology -- was in Stockholm, Sweden. 
He was there to discuss the ways we're looking at using Sweden as a test bed for future innovations on both the domain and the technology front, since Sweden has such a high, tech-savvy population.

He also spoke at The Mobile Focus conference in Kista on November 6 in connection with this year’s Mobile Gala, a mobile awards program. dotMobi was the main partner for this year’s Mobile Focus, whose theme was "Mobile as a Media Channel." Mobile Focus and the Mobile Gala are the biggest annual event in mobility in the Nordic region.

Our friends in Sweden also issued the following press release on our behalf. Since we don't generally make our "in-country" releases globally available, I thought you might enjoy seeing one. For dotMobi followers, this information will be high level; but for the general Swedish public, a bit of basics never hurts.

 (And a side note, one of my favorite Swedish sites is weiwei.mobi for Chinese singer Wei Wei. Although created by Swedish team at Adimo and featuring Sweden-based singer Wei Wei, the site is designed for her Chinese fans, so it's pretty much unknown in Sweden.)

.mobi: serving the masses (at a store near you!)

You might have heard us talking lately about our plans to better serve the Small and Medium Sized business segment (SMBs). This group of (often times) locally run businesses has much to gain from the mobile Internet but faces time, money, and resource constraints -- preventing them from creating their own mobile web presence. And unfortunately their regular websites are likely not meeting their customers’ needs because they haven’t been specifically formatted for mobile use. But do you still think mobile-specific sites are just for the big brands?

Well, what if "locals" could access a mobile-friendly website for their favorite pizza place to view the menu to place their take out order while on the go? 

Or imagine someone commuting to work on the train and checking the gym’s schedule for that evening’s classes. 

Consider a family driving around looking for a new house on the weekend and being able to view interior photos of the home and its key specifications -- right from the mobile website advertised on the sign? 

And what if a visiting tourist looking for an emergency dentist could read patient testimonials and find the office from a map?  

All of these scenarios help consumers better manage their lives through utility and convenience which in turns helps to drive more business to these small and medium size business owners.

Once SMBs can deliver this kind of value to their customers and reap the rewards, the mobile web will be serving the mass market. And we’re not that far away.  

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.