dotMobi

The most popular three rumors answered

There are three rumors floating around the blogosphere about dotMobi right now. I feel compelled to give you the CEO view on them. You may choose to ignore what I say, but I have no problem answering the mail in a public forum. 

1.  dotMobi investors are doing nothing with .mobi and  created the company as a money making scam.

dotMobi's investors are  building new products and services utilizing the .mobi domain name, the new tools available at dev.mobi, and using dotMobi to push out new industry services like our upcoming mobile phone database and our content directory. You have to remember that we are talking about the biggest mobility companies in the world whose product life cycles are long ... and confidential. The investors behind dotMobi are no more going to publicly pre-announce their competitive services using dotMobi than Apple did with the iPhone.

I do know one thing for sure: dotMobi's investors are very active building their own .mobi services which range from using the domain or developer tools to launching mobile hosting services. The mobility industry is quickly going "open Internet" and they have chosen .mobi to be one of the anchor points for their work. The signs are publicly available through dotMobi's press releases, the Membership Advisory Group which now has more than 100 companies in its membership, and the visible use of dotMobi by the investors. 

For example, 3 (Hutchinson) had more traffic to their .mobi mobile site than they did to their PC-based web site last month. Telecom Italia sells a complete package to their small business customers in Italy based on .mobi. The list of examples go on and on. And that's not to mention the industry requirements for .mobi being mandatory in browsers: it will happen; it is not a matter of if, but when.

Like anything, making a new domain name for mobility integrated into the glue of the mobile web takes time, and it is occuring month by month.  The signs are visible everywhere and there will be no big bang announcements. But everyone will wake up one day and either have caught the dotMobi wave or been left behind.

On to rumors number 2 and 3 ...

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.

.Tel and .Mobi - let's get the facts right

A couple of days ago, someone forwarded me a blog entry trying to compare .tel and .mobi.  The conclusion the author drew was that .tel is similar to dotMobi and hence a "threat."  Happily, when I looked at the comments, many had chided the author for not checking the facts behind his stated opinion. I am glad the Internet is a "self governing" body. 

Fact: Look at our site and the .Tel application , they are entirely different. 

Tel is a "universal text based communications identifier".  Keep in mind a URL is a text-based identifier for an IP address -- hence easier to remember.  They want to take advantage of the IP infrastructure and emerging VOIP to link various contact data to an easy to remember .tel name.  They say that this allows individual and organizations to manage their various contact info as well. The example they use is hertz.tel.  Hertz can potentially route the calls to any of of their call centers based on what may be most appropriate for the customer. 

.mobi is a discovery method and a set of open-source tools for mobile content that ensures the mobile site you are accessing works on your mobile.

What about these two services (or even companies) sound remotely similar?

I wish Telnic and the smart and capable people behind .tel  (some of whom I know) all the success.  I am sure they are eager as well to make sure the market and the public get the right idea about their offering.  Bloggers who wish to stir up controversy are doing a disservice not only to us but more importantly to their readers. 

Or did you mean .mobii ?

Ajit Jaokar's got a great blog, but I never seem to get my comments to his posts approved (whole articles, no problem though!)

In particular, I take small issue with this one. The insinuation is not veiled enough for me to resist responding to.

I have to say that relaxing on my sofa using Opera on a Wii is a pretty similar experience to relaxing on my sofa using IE7 on a media PC. So yup: no point in having a .wii top level domain (or .console, or .couch or whatever).

But walking down a street in a strange city in the rain, looking for somewhere you can can get a taxi home safely? Sounds like a totally different context to me. One that .mobi serves well (for example in the form of http://cabbies.mobi/)

Yes, that's right. Top-level extensions are about context, not the way markup is rendered. (The latter is something that browser manufacturers rightly obsess about).

So here are my two thought experiments I always keep in mind...

a) You're walking down a street. You (somehow) have a full-blown version of Firefox on your mobile phone. You need to access some pertinent information urgently on it, and know the relevant publisher runs both a .mobi and a .com site. Which would you enter into your phone's address bar?

b) Opera develops a client-side language translator for their browser. It can turn English web sites into French. You're in France. Do you access ebay.fr or ebay.co.uk?

Hopefully the former in both cases: .fr is about the French context, not French markup. And .mobi is about the mobile context, not mobile markup.

(Although dotMobi still has a role to play with the markup too, because not every phone is yet blessed with Mr Jon von Tetzchner's rendering magic)

Bottom line... It's all about the context, baby.

What does the iPhone mean for dotMobi?

A quick word of introduction: I'm James Pearce, the new dotMobi CTO. I've been working with the mobile web for over seven years now, and I'm excited about this. 2007 feels like it really could be the year that the mobile web starts to build up momentum.

A number of people have discussed the impact of Apple's iPhone announcement on the purpose of the .mobi top-level domain. For my first post, I thought it would be an intriguing topic to tackle.

In short, the iPhone can only be good for all of us - the .mobi domain included.

Firstly, the launch. Steve Jobs is the ultimate technology showman, and with his keynote, he showed that he can bring glamour, excitement, and design credibility - not to mention sheer consumer glee - to the mobile phone industry. The column inches the iPhone has garnered in a few days must surely have been a wake up call to every other handset manufacturer. Many of them have brands that you would hardly call weak, and yet the buzz from this one manufacturer about this one device has been enviable in almost all respects.

The device itself is certainly exciting, and exactly the sort of gadget you'd expect from Apple. I won't run through the lengthy specifications here ;-) but it's clearly designed with more than plain voice telephony in mind. The device appears to have a very balanced approach to its three main functions: phone, internet device and wide-screen iPod. (Indeed Jobs teased his audience by suggesting he was going to be announcing three separate products).

For all us mobile web fans, one area of particular interest is the browser. The phone runs a limited variant of Apple's desktop operating system, OS X, and hence the iPhone will be shipped with the platform's Safari browser. Jobs really played this up at the show, showing how rich web sites could be accessed, and positioning the browser's support for AJAX: "we've got Google Maps!".

But wait a second... Safari is based on the WebKit browser project. And so is the S60 browser. And the S60 browser appears on many Symbian handsets today, and has done for almost a year. Can it really be true that Steve Jobs' fully-fledged-browser-on-a-phone story is not so innovative after all?

Well, yes. I've been a fan of the S60 browser (on the Nokia N80 phone) since last spring. I've been able to access rich, complex web sites on it. And yes, I've been using Google Maps too! So a glib answer to the question about how the iPhone affects dotMobi is... that it affects it in exactly the same way as many of today's phones do.

And that way, I believe, is positive.

How so? Well, if one believes that dotMobi is only concerned about ensuring bijou web pages for limited devices, then my position may be hard to understand. Why access a lightweight .mobi site when your browser (S60, Safari, whatever) supports arbitrary, heavy-weight .com sites? (Although there's currently an easy answer to that too - at least if you're not on a flat-rate data tariff :-) )

But here's the thing. I believe .mobi is about so much more than just small, compliant markup that will reliably work on all handsets. It's also about the context of mobility: it's about a web user inferring that the provider of the site has thought through what he or she, on the move, wants to do on that site.

Or to put it another way, with an acid test: if I was on the move, was running Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 on my phone, and I knew that the site I want has both .com and .mobi addresses, which would I choose?

It's easy: device and browser regardless, I still want to go to the site that targets my particular context (a human on the move). And that would be the .mobi address.

Which might suggest that the iPhone makes no difference to dotMobi! But that's not true either. Don't forget the marketing power of the Apple brand - coupled with the extent to which many anticipate they will be promoting the iPhone as a mobile web device. That will undoubtedly give the meme of accessing data services from a mobile greater and greater mass market acceptance. Everyone who thought they were simply upgrading their iPod (or just upgraded their mobile subscription to get an elegant new phone) will in fact be signing up to Apple's vision of mobile web access.

Suddenly the mobile web will be default. Suddenly the mobile web will be accessible. Suddenly the mobile web will be cool.

And for that reason alone, the iPhone is great for dotMobi - and of course great for the mobile web as a whole.

Mobile browser advances do not remove the the need for mobile-friendly sites

I hear this argument all the time: phones are becoming more capable all the time and already some high end phones can render existing desktop-focused sites without a problem. So why is a mobile-friendly site necessary?

The argument is true up to a point—some of the more recent  smart phones (e.g. the Nokia N90 and N70 series) are being shipped with the Web Kit browser that can render normal desktop sites such as Amazon without any problems. However, there are 4 major problems with this approach:

1. These advanced phones represent a tiny percentage of the phones in use around the world. We should concern ourselves more with the ~2.5 billion other “normal” phones. Yes, these advanced cabilities will likely trickle down to other phones, but this will take a long time.
2. Phones will always be less capable than PCs due to the physical size limitations. You simply can’t fit a big screen and keyboard in a small phone. There will always be a capabilities gap, regardless of how good the phones get.
3. Just because you can visit a PC site on a phone, it doesn’t mean you necessarily want to. Mobile is different. Mobile browsing is much less about random surfing than it is about targetted, time & location-specific tasks. Experience has shown that you can’t simply miniaturize a site for mobile—to be truely mobile-friendly and useful, a site needs to be designed for mobile, not just squeezed into a smaller space. Some people argue that mobile should be considered another channel entirely, and that it is a mistake to think about it in the same way.
4. Viewing a PC site on a phone can be very expensive because of all the graphics that need to be downloaded. The cost issue alone is enough to make this unfeasible for many users. Example: the cnn.com homepage would cost as much as €7 to view on a phone based on some data plans in Europe.

To summarize, the advanced browsing capabilities of more recent phones are very nice to have, but do not really solve the core problems with mobile browsing.

Ok - I'll Bite

Every once in a while I come across a post with a tantalizing/inflammatory title and I have to decide whether to weigh in or not.  And do not get me wrong, I love a healthy debate. Look through our blog’s "Misconceptions" category and you will see that we’re pretty good at addressing our critics. 

But on another late night of browsing the Internet to keep my finger on the dotMobi pulse, I came across this post from Christoph Burgdorfer.

A lot of what is mentioned here is discussed in the aforementioned Misconceptions category but… OK, I’ll bite.

I do take issue with the accusation that we are "Some supposingly clever guys (who) came up with the idea of introducing a new tld called .mobi" and have done nothing else... hence dotMobi is a "rip-off."

For the record, the "clever guys" who came up with the idea are thirteen of the biggest and most well known mobile phone operators, handset manufacturers, infrastructure providers, and application/content developers in the world today . 

Now to the concept that we have simply done nothing but sell dotMobi.  Bottom-line: We have worked on, promoted and adopted a set of standards and best practices that were developed by W3C.  You do not have to have a .mobi site to use these developer handbook and tools, it’s freely available from our site.  We have also invested resources (money, time and people) to kickstart mobile content development -- see our Mobile Advisory Group and Development Forum.

If our position was short-term and hence driven to make lots of cash up-front, there is a simple formula which we could have easily followed -- disregard the IP and trademark community and encourage cybersquatting and speculation by setting the "trademark sunrise" bar very low. This would attract the cybersquatters who would buy a vast array of names, leading to high volumes and lots of short-term cash. However, even a cursory look at our site as well as our IP and trademark outreach efforts would prove this theory wrong.

In the end the market always decides.  But in the meantime, the best way we can be "clever" is to be forthright, take a longer term view and keep the end-user as the focal point of all of our efforts.

Mobile-Only Domain Shows Its True Color: Helping the Consumer

Carlo over at TechDirt makes a few inaccurate statements about dotMobi in this week's post.  One is entitled to his opinion, of course, but the facts do need to be set straight about dotMobi. 

First, there's the notion that dotMobi is forcing content owners to adhere to rules that could do more harm that good.

dotMobi's "rules" were created in partnership with the W3C's Mobile Web Initiative.  dotMobi is simply making it mandatory that content owners follow the specifications created by the W3C.  dotMobi, more importantly, provides training, documentation, software developer tools for free to the developer community to illustrate proper mobile content development.  dotMobi is the only internet address recommends to content owners that the open standards created by the W3C are the way to build a better mobile experience.  The end result is that the consumer will most likely have a predicatable experience on their mobile device. 

ALso, dotMobi has never said that other Internet addresses will not or should not be mobile-friendly -- another misconception that presumes mutual exclusivity where none exists.  We have only accurately stated that dotMobi provides a consistent experience the consumer on the mobile device that other Internet addresses cannot enforce and do not have as their charter.  In that sense, dotMobi is just as much a service mark as it is a TLD. Try your favorite dot-whatever your your mobile -- and not a high end smart phone -- and see what your mobile experience is for yourself.  Then, try names like bmw.mobi, amf.mobi, weather.mobi, google.mobi, and so on.  You will have a better experience.

The main thrust Carlo's post, though, is the idea that dotMobi's premium names are nothing more than money-grab.

Here's the story: dotMobi held back around 5,000 commonly used words and phrases.  These 5,000 words and phrases will be allocated on an equitable and objective basis either by request for proposal or auction in the coming months.  Our goal is to make sure that words like weather.mobi, search.mobi, travel.mobi, and many others get into the hands of content owners who will actually build a weather, search, or travel application.  If dotMobi did not hold back this small list, then the names would be purchased and held by parties who would only sell them on the aftermarket. 

If we were going for the so-called "money grab," then dotMobi would have held back the hundreds of thousands of well-known commonly used words and phrases.

It seems that there's a bit of education that needs to go on in the domainer space. Domainers are currently driving growth in dot-com today, owning about 25% of the dot-com names for example.  dotMobi has worked to create a more equitable process for allocating dotMobi names as we go live.

Misconception #5: dotMobi requires web site with name registration

One question that pops up every now and then is: "Does my site need to be live once I register a .mobi name?" or "Are you guys going to cancel our domain name registration because it does not resolve?"

In short the answers to both questions is "no." While we do have three very simple rules about what your site must do once it is live in order to ensure a consistent end-user experience (see our Switch On! Guide), there is no requirement that your registered .mobi name resolve to any page, parked or otherwise, upon registration. You are allowed to immediately begin using your registered names by resolving to a web page, but again it is not a requirement of registration.