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.

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.

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.

A little late but still pretty cool ...

Around the December holidays, ZAGAT released a short film about the company's adding shopping information to ZAGAT.mobi. And even though it's a little late, I thought you'd be interested in seeing it:

By the way, you'll see Russell Kern from Maxim magzine in the clip, talking about maxim.com. What he doesn't mention in the clip is that there is a very good maxim.mobi site as well.

Improved site building goodness: site.mobi goes 3.0

If you've purchased .mobi domains but haven't gotten around to putting content on them, I think you'll be interested in the just-released verison 3.0 of site.mobi.

site.mobi 3.0 has a batch of new features that will make building your sites even easier and will help you monetize those sites once they're live. Among the most interesting new features are Google AdSense and AdMob for mobile advertising, PayPal and Google Checkout for mobile commerce and mobile RSS for content syndication.

site.mobi also now has SMS and email invitations so you can tell your clients and customers, friends and family, that your .mobi site is live. And be sure to let us know about it, too, for consideration in the dotMobi site showcase.

Android and the Open Handset Alliance

Unless you've been down a mine all week, you'll have seen that Google, one of our investors, announced a new mobile software platform this week. It's called Android and the announcement also revealed the creation of the Open Handset Alliance.

Since we at dotMobi also constitute a mobile consortium of sorts, we thought it would be worthwhile talking about it a little. Certainly there are many facets to making the mobile web experience the success it deserves to be, and so the OHA is very welcome to the party.

The most amazing thing about this announcement was that a 34-company deal was kept so secret. But to be honest, after months of speculation, the rest wasn’t as surprising. The project has even kept the Android name, that of company that Google acquired back in 2005 to start the project.

To dotMobi followers, the big question is how well Android will help the growth and acceptance of the mobile web. Certainly it is set, like the iPhone, to increase the industry buzz and interest around the making the internet a truly mobile medium.

It will be important to see how it will be welcomed by the developers and owners of content, and of course, whether it is set to be a platform that also hits mainstream consumer consciousness, as the iPhone has done.

Whilst OHA plays the "Open" card very strongly, the addition of any new platform into the mobile space creates waves of new diversity, which are not necessarily a good thing in the short term. Nothing becomes de-facto overnight.

Of course, in the longer term, if Android becomes a dominant platform, then diversity diminishes and user experience will increase. (Think of the operating system homogeneity in the PC world, and the relative ease that brings to developers). But that would have to come at the expense of other, dominant market players - many of whom are notably absent from the OHA, and to be fair already have fairly open platforms of their own.

While Google has been able to position itself as a leader in the Internet space – despite what many originally thought was coming to that party a bit too late – there's too much at stake in the mobile world for ubiquity and uniformity to happen overnight, or even smoothly. This dynamic of device diversity is a very particular curse for the mobile space. And, incidentally, why we've been working so hard on mitigating it with our device database initiatives.

So the announcement was interesting and positive. We await further progress with great excitement.