dotMobi

DeviceAtlas and mobiReady Updates

While the .mobi domain is the centerpiece of everything we do as a company, we offer many other services and tools to help drive the growth of mobile content. (Because without good mobile content, there's not much for the .mobi domain to do.) So to that end, on Thursday, August 27, dotMobi launched significant enhancements to both our DeviceAtlas and mobiReady product sites.

DeviceAtlas
For Device Atlas -- our market-leading, award-winning device detection database, we:

• Created DeviceAtlas "use cases" to help developers and content providers generate ideas on different ways to use DeviceAtlas
• Added a case study / testimonials section 
• Developed a new, dedicated product page with an easy-to follow matrix, including more details on our Enterprise offering 
• Redesigned the back-end for more responsive pages.  

mobiReady
Users can now post markup directly, which means users whose sites are still under development and/or which are not on a publicly accessible server can use mobiReady. And that means more sites can launch pre-tested to work with the widest possible variety of handsets,
 
Other new features include an updated interface, improved user-friendliness of mobiReady's site testing capability and the addition of HTTP response headers along with test results.

Even if you're only interested in one aspect of what dotMobi does, I hope seeing the full range of what we do helps shed a little light on the burgeoning -- but still young --  mobile Web.

dotMobi's WordPress Mobile Pack Now Live

This past week, dotMobi released a new, free product: the WordPress Mobile Pack -- a plug-in for WordPress users to automatically generate a mobile version of their WordPress site.

We've had requests for this for a long time and we're very happy that we're finally able to make it available. 

Approximately 2% of all Web sites are run on WordPress. There have been more than 4.5 million downloads of the software in the last six months alone. As you can see, the need for a WordPress mobile solution is a big one.

What does the WordPress Mobile Pack contain?:

•  Mobile switcher to detect mobile visitors and provide an appropriate experience
•  Base mobile theme for quick-and-easy XHTML-Mobile Profile compliance
•  Extended mobile themes so you can unleash your mobile creativity
•  Integration with the award-wining DeviceAtlas(TM) for world-class mobile adaptation
•  Mobile administration panel for when posts can't wait
•  Mobile ad widget to make you some money
•  Barcode widget to help users bookmark your blog

If you run a WordPress site, you'll likely find this pack worthwhile. Critics think so, too.

Full information on the WordPress Mobile Pack is on mobiForge.com.

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.

A mobile site builder that's finally where it belongs -- on a mobile

Yesterday, dotMobi's friends at mobiSiteGalore introduced a new product that I think is just great: a mobile site builder for use on mobiles. The team at mobiSiteGalore have taken the guts of their PC-based mobile site builder -- the same site builder that powers http://site.mobi -- and put them into a mobile-accessible site at http://mobisitegalore.mobi so that anyone can build a .mobi-compliant mobile site on a standard mobile phone.

On a daily basis, I hear lots of items -- both positive and negative -- about mobility and the mobile web, but one thing I don't hear enough is how the mobile web is quickly transforming lives in developing countries where little traditional broadband infrastructure exists. In many places, the mobile web is the web, pure and simple. Just a few weeks ago, Vint Cerf reiterated a point that Microsoft's Eric Rudder made a while back, "In areas where wireline or WiFi access barely exists, many new users will first experience the internet through a mobile phone." (In fact, Cerf's complete editorial is well worth reading.)

The downside I've had with this argument has been that the power of the internet is its dialogue-based nature rather than the simpler one-way "conversation" that earlier media offered. Without a way to build a presence on the web, it's a one-sided experience. So, to that end, the ability of someone to build a web site on a mobile -- and not just look at one -- is a powerful tool.

I like even more that it was built by India-based mobiSiteGalore. In a country like India with wildly divergent technical infrastructure, mobiSiteGalore is acutely aware of what end-users need to do to build a site while knowing the limitations that come with building a site on a standard mobile. A high-end smart phone that might make the job easier is likely out of reach for many of the people whom this technology will best support. 

So then, a big hurrah to mobiSiteGalore and to all the other developers who are making the mobile space the space for extending the power of the internet.

A new era of easy mobilization is coming

In case you haven't seen the press release, today dotMobi announced that it has acquired the IP assets of Mowser, which is a content adaptation engine created by two Bay Area mobile pioneers, Russell Beattie and Mike Rowehl.

Everyone in dotMobi is very excited because having access to this technology will give us ways to let owners of existing PC-based sites quickly and easily utilize those existing assets to create .mobi-compliant sites designed specifically for the needs of mobile web users.

One question I've already heard is, "But won't having a tool that can convert a PC site to a mobile one mean there's no need for a .mobi domain?"

Hertz doesn't think so. Hilton doesn't think so. Amtrak doesn't think so. 1-800-Flowers doesn't think so. And I certainly don't think so.

Those brands (among many others) use similar tools to create .mobi web sites that address the needs of on-the-go users. They've thought about the mobile context and want to assure their users that their sites will work on a mobile phone and that they won't encounter a frustrating desktop PC site (poorly) transferred to a phone.

That's one reason I think that bringing user-controlled content adaptation to "the masses" will be a significant accelerator for .mobi domain usage.

Another reason is that I don’t think businesses will want to hide their mobile sites. Even with all the cool technology we have, it can take a bit of effort to think through and create a great mobile site.

The Nielsen top ten web mobile sites use multiple URL conventions, but .mobi is the one most frequently used to ensure that their sites can be found because brand.mobi is the most easily guessable convention.

So welcome to a new age of easy mobilization ... and more .mobi domains than ever.

Left to Your Own Devices ...

... is the name of a free webinar that the dotMobi Advisory Group is hosting on 6 May 2008.

The webinar, subtitled,"Building Device Aware Content - new tools to simplify the process and increase your business," will be presented by Paul Nerger, Vice President of Advanced Services and Applications at dotMobi.I know that many followers of this blog have heard about DeviceAtlas, the dotMobi device database, but many be curious to learn more about it. If so, this will definitely be a good session to attend (and as I mentioned above, it's free).

Date:

• Tuesday, 6 May 2008

Time:

• 07:00 am PDT (USA, Canada – Pacific Coast)
• 10.00 am EDT (USA, Canada - Eastern Time)
• 15.00 pm UTC (United Kingdom, Ireland)
• 16.00 pm CET (Norway, Italy, Sweden, Germany, France)
• 17.00 pm EET (Finland)
• 19.30 pm IST (India)

To register for the session, please send an email to Wendy Holloway with your name, job title and an indication that you wish to attend. Once you have registered, she will send you details on how to join the presentation.

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.

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?

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.

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.