dotMobi

dotMobi: One Year Later

First of all, hello to everyone. My first blog marks a special occasion in the life of dotMobi.

September 26 was the one-year anniversary of .mobi’s public availability. Although work started well before that date, that day was the public announcement that dotMobi was no longer a concept, idea or project. It was real. And one year later, there are 700,000 names registered with millions of pages of mobile content behind them, plus a slew of free tools for bringing content to the mobile web content like dev.mobi, ready.mobi, site.mobi and the dotMobi Web Developer Guide.  Much progress made, but much, much more to go!

Today, dotMobi’s challenge is to grow what was launched a year ago. Over the next two quarters, dotMobi will focus on growing mobile services for developers, designers and enterprises with the launch of key products like our device database and search services.

Another challenge for dotMobi is helping more and more brands bring their presence to the mobile web. Recently, we’ve seen strong brands like Wachovia, ESPN, Zagat and Disney bringing mobile properties to the .mobi domain. We’ve also seen innovative business models like MobilePropertySites.com, Zinadoo and dozens of other travel, automobile & media sites basing their services on the advantages of the .mobi domain.

I promise that there is much more to come.  This coming year is going to be an exciting one as we all help bring the mobile web to the mainstream … and I'm including every reader of this blog in that.

I know you have an interest in the success of the mobile web. If you have domains, use site.mobi to build content. Create mobile social networks with your friends using Zinadoo. If you have friends in businesses, introduce them to the benefits of the .mobi domain. Advertising works. PR works. But word of mouth will always be the most important way to reach a mass audience because it’s supported by your credibility and enthusiasm.  You have had and will have a big hand in impacting the growth of dotMobi, so thank you for your support in the past, and thank you for working beside us to build the future.

I'm already excited to think about a year from now, when we’ll be looking back at everything the dotMobi community has accomplished together over these next 12 months. I promise it will be exciting for you as well.

sex.mobi To Go On Sale, And More

Have you seen the zagat.mobi or AAA.mobi going live this week? Weather.mobi's service is really cool and a testament to a major brand making a decision between m.myname.com (or myname.com/mobile or mobile.myname.com) and myname.mobi.

We are poised to break 700,000 names under management very soon. More significantly, both small and big brands are putting their content live on a daily basis. Check our the showcase page to see examples and case studies. 

Also, have you checked out the mobile site builder which recently went live with Network Solutions' BuildMyMobi.com?  Registrars everywhere are embracing the mobile hosting and content creation opportunity in a big way for the coming year.  Hopefully, your company will not miss out.

More after the jump...

Flagship mobile tool grows up

I hope that many of you are familiar with ready.mobi, our page checker for mobile content.

Since we launched, we've helped test literally hundreds of thousands of web and mobile web pages - putting them under scrutiny to see how well they're likely to behave on mobile devices, how well they comply to industry Best Practices, and whether they are dotMobi compliant.

It's been a roaring success. Thanks for using it!

The current version is a very quick and efficient way of sanity checking a single page. But many of you (especially those that are developing mobile content yourselves) have asked us whether we can help you test whole sites.

Hmm. Well we thought about it. And then thought some more. And then wrote some software. And then we tested it. And now we can proudly reveal the beta of the new version, with our welcome note here.

The new version is a radically step up in terms of functionality of the tool. (In fact, although we're calling it v1.1, it's far more like a v2.0). Most noticable is the fact that you can test whole sites - the tool will follow links and crawl multiple pages - and of course report your "mobile readiness" for all of those it finds.

If you want to take part in the beta process, please sign up for a user account at dev.mobi, and check the box that says "ready.mobi v1.1 beta user". You'll then be able to sign in to beta.ready.mobi and get started.

It's not perfect yet, but we're pretty proud of this - hopefully another demonstration that we're  trying to help developers build compelling mobile content and that we're about a little more than just domains alone...

Have fun, and let us know how you like it. We'll be actively canvassing for final improvements that we can make before we unleash it properly on the world.

Building a mobile site has never been easier

dotMobi wants to de-mystify the process of developing a mobile presence, and one of the ways we are trying to make this happen is through a partnership with Akmin. They've developed an extremely easy-to-use mobile site builder called MobiSiteGalore.

Through the "Go Mobile" programme, this is something that our domain registrars offer to their customers, and it's proving a great way to get content live on new domains.

But if you want to find out what all the fuss is about and put it through its paces, feel free to try it out today at Site.mobi - after a very simple sign up process, you'll be led through a wizard that lets you design, structure, format and deploy your mobile site.

Your site then automatically gets tested against Ready.mobi

It really is easy. Please let us know how you get on!

Ready.mobi Goes Gold

Some of you may be familiar with our Ready.mobi page checker (previously known as "MobiReady").

Well, hot on the heels of our exciting developer guide announcement, and after an extended period in beta, we're taking v1.0 of Ready.mobi to 'gold' status - meaning that this version of the tool is functionally complete, pretty much all of the bugs have been nailed, and we've reached our stability and performance goals.

What's Ready.mobi for? Well, as you know, the .mobi extension is partly about ensuring that the user is going to have a satisfactory experience when they access a site with a mobile handset.

If you're developing or deploying content, we want to help you easily test that your content meets a range of basic criteria that will make that more likely.

So the idea of Ready.mobi is to take a URL of your domain, site, or page, and simulates a real mobile device accessing that content. With the content that is returned, we check it over for .mobi compliance, size, adherence to W3C best practices (using the MobileOK tests), and so on. We also aggregate the results to produce a single "mobi-readiness" score - out of 5.

With the report, you're then able to identify issues, see what you need to do to improve the quality of the page, and even see an emulation of what the site looks like on a couple of common handsets.

I guess I should mention some nifty new features we added in the last few weeks:

• An 'advanced options' tab allows you to specify which device you'd like the checker to access. If you're performing content adaptation on your server, you'll be able to see how that affects the results.
• http://ready.mobi is now accessible on a mobile handset (as of course it should be), providing a summary of the testing in a way that is suitable for the mobile context.
• 'Fixit articles' tell you more detail about how to actually solve some of the common problems we detect. Click 'help me fix it' on any failing tests for more information on how to do so.

But there's much, much more in there too - so please take a look and see what you think. Also please let us know of any improvements or features you'd like to see in v1.1 - we're already starting to plan our next major release of the tool for the summer.

The world's finest collection of mobile content

As you will no doubt read elsewhere in the next few days, we've got some very exciting plans coming up here at the dotMobi company. Already, you'll have seen we've launched the ready.mobi mobile readiness checker (at http://ready.mobi) and that we're continuing to build out our developer community at http://dev.mobi. And you'll be pleased to know that there's plenty more to come in terms of development resources.

But as well as all these great tools for mobile developers, we've realised on important thing: that we can also really help in bringing the mobile medium to consumers themselves by making it easier for them to find great quality content.

In one respect, this is a pretty unusual step for a domain registry to take. But we've also realised that we need to take on some of the responsibility for helping connect supply with demand. In other words, ensuring that the creation of great content and services is rewarded with interest and uptake from the mobile subscriber base.

So we're announcing that we've started work to build a global directory of mobile Internet content, from which we'll be able to offer white-label directory, research and database licensing services. This directory is a natural evolution of our registry business, combined with the expertise we've built up around rating the quality of mobile content. (For example, we've already produced research reports detailing the mobile-readiness of various telecoms companies and governmental reports on the state of mobile content in-country).

We intend this to be the world's finest collection of mobile content.

Stay tuned, as they say, for more details. But you'll start to see us getting more and more involved in discovering fantastic mobile content. And, over the coming months, we'll be helping operators, vendors, and partners to locate and promote it to their users - who are ultimately, of course, the key to making the whole medium become successful.

I hope you'll join us for the ride :-)

The "Go Mobile" Program -- What, How, And Why

Today we announced the "Go Mobile!" program for our channel partners.  This program is the culmination of months of work aimed at helping businesses and individuals create mobile optimized content, easily and cost effectively. 

Here is how:

1) Any individual or business can now use the Mobile Ready Tool to see just how optimized for mobile their site content is.  If you are the CEO of a big company, you might want to know what is the overall score and what are the costs you impose on your customers, if they were to access your site via a mobile phone.  On the other hand, your in house web development team would be interested in knowing exactly how the site performed in each of the 28 separate tests done.  Let me emphasize that this is free to use and in the public domain for all content owners.  Go ahead and test a few of the dotMobi showcase sites as a comparison.

2) Web developers now have one centralized forum; http://dev.mobi -- again, free to join and use -- to share information, participate in forums/blogs/polls, have access to open source tools and get FREE on-line training.  Up to now, there has been some excellent developer forums available, however, their focus has been quite specialized, e.g. development issues related to a specific mobile phone manufacturer or for a specific application suite.  Again this is what dotMobi is about: proposing an open, standards-based platform, sharing knowledge across the mobile eco-system and making available valuable resources for free in the public domain.

3) Many businesses already have access via their registrar to a tool that helps them create a mobile optimized site that is already .mobi compliant.  GoDaddy, the largest provider in the US for example has a tool called "Website Tonight®".  As of last count more than 15 separate well-known resellers had announced a tool of this kind all based on the dotMobi content development style guide.  To ensure all resellers have access to these tools, we will soon announce a free tool that enables anyone to create a mobile optimized site that is guaranteed to be .mobi compliant.  No coding experience of any kind required!  If you can upload a picture, or copy and paste... you will be able to use it. 

We have long maintained that the growth of the Internet on Mobile is highly dependant on how easily content providers of any kind ( large and small) are able to create and update relevant local content.  Availability, ease of use and cost of content creation tools (in this case, FREE) is a key motivator in convincing the majority, not just the early minority.

4) Lastly, we have provided our channel partners marketing incentives to push out to these tools to their customer base.

The "Go Mobile!" program is another step in continuing to deliver on the promises of an open and mobile Internet.

dotMobi Goes Back To China

Neil Edwards, the CEO of dotMobi, and I recently made another trip to China.  If you recall, we made our first trip there to meet our partners China DNS and HiChina.  We also did a press conference to introduce dotMobi to the market, not as yet another domain name, but rather a standards based approach to accelerate mobile content for the Chinese consumer.  (Recall that China has over 100 million Internet subscribers and over 450 million mobile subscribers.) 

We talked about the development tools that we plan to offer.  The press conference was held on December 8 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Beijing and was attended, not only by our registrar partners,  but also by more than 40 members of the press.

Stan Zhang, the CEO of HiChina  spoke about the results of his campaign and especially about the fact that the focus is on content. (Btw, he practices what he preaches; he has his own company's .mobi site up and running.)

Jiang Qun, the CEO of ChinaDNS also spoke in support of dotMobi and his company's focus around mobile initiatives.

Edwards Sang -- the CEO of 7234, whose company will soon be focusing on selling .mobi -- reiterated the emphasis on mobile content and the value of dotMobi's cooperation in providing open source tools to help the local market.

So what was the message that we delivered? Well this time we came back, having fulfilled some promises we had made the last time.

1. For one thing, we have hired Adrian Lui in China to work directly with our partners on the ground, the dotMobi Developer Forum and the Mobile Ready Tool.  The Mobile Ready Tool will be localized in Chinese by early part of this year, so developers and content managers all over China can determine how mobile ready their existing sites are. 
2. We unveiled the beta version of the Mobile Ready Tool
3. We also announced that we will bring sponsor a contest to highlight and reward the best and most compelling Chinese language dotMobi sites.
4. And last, we announced that there are working at least three additional registrar partners to be able to serve the market better.

We also held separate meetings with analysts and technical press to cover them in depth on the details of the announcements.  It was a hectic week,punctuated by meetings with  technical and development companies as well as our own registrar partners.  The major news of that week was the annoucement that 3G licenses were going to be available for operators to bid on.  I have heard figures as varied as 10 to 26% refering to the percentage of Chinese operator revenues derived from data sales.  If true, its certainly higher than the average figure cited bu GSMA of 5% (strip out SMS, which accounts for 2-3%, and you are left with precious few).  So undoubtedly the operators have to map out plans on how to make the money invested in the 3G license and infrastructure pay out.  Naturally we had some interesting meetings around the very same subject with operators as well. 

China is a long-term market, and a few trips and meetings will certainly not accomplish the aim of realizing the potential it has. So far, we have been consistent -- listening and trying to understand the nuances of the market (culture, regulation, language, needs, mobile players, etc) and delivering solutions based on that input.  Thankfully, so far at least we have made some headway.

The MobiReady report

DotMobi recently launched a beta version of our MobiReady report. The MobiReady Report is a tool for site owners and developers that helps them determine how well their website will work on a mobile phone.

The MobiReady Report performs an analysis of the site by testing over 30 separate characteristics of the site. These tests are combined to give an overall score that indicates how well a site will work on a real phone. The MobiReady report also includes some key indicators about the site including how much it would cost to view it in different territories around the world, and how long it would take to download on various network types. Rather than merely describing the problems with a particular site, the MobiReady Report also offers advice on addressing the problems it finds.

The report is built on a combination of open industry standards (the W3C's mobileOK work in particular) combined with key industry knowledge of networks and devices.

While this a developer tool, we also hope that it will raise awareness of the mobile web amongst brand managers and site owners. With this awareness-raising in mind we were giving these t-shirts out at Mobile2.0 and the recent W3C event in Paris.

Anyway, check it out for yourself at http://mr.dev.mobi. We hope you find it useful.