dotMobi

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.

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.

dotMobi's CEO says Opera is cool

If you have never used the Opera Mini-Browser, you should try it out.  It is a cool product developed by the smart and innovative people at Opera.  So who needs another browser?  Opera gives consumers choice and delivers competition to the other browser developers making all of the browsers better over time.  Everyone needs several browsers always raising the bar or our Internet experience will not progress. 

I must admit that it is surprising to read that dotMobi is "unnecessary" and" a complete waste of time." For starters, the thirteen innovative and smart mobility companies behind dotMobi -- like Google, Microsoft, Vodafone, Nokia -- did not think dotMobi was "unnecessary" and a "waste of time."  People are going to need to do some more research to learn dotMobi is not just another domain name for mobility.  dotMobi provides a whole host of technologies, standards, tools, and resources for content publishers and developers to make their content mobile friendly. You can check out dev.mobi which just opened for Alpha testing.  Great technologies like Opera solve one part of the consumer experience for mobile.  dotMobi is in the business of making content publishing easy for the individual or business who wants to go mobile. 

So tell me when you want to learn more about dotMobi and how it can actually help Opera's business?

Neil Edwards, CEO, dotMobi

WAP - or Industry-wide Accepted Standards?

Is WAP a four letter word? Seems like it could be depending on your definition of WAP.

Let me instead refashion it as (XHTML) the next generation Open Standard that has been agreed upon by a cross section of industry players - think Mobile Web Initiative of the W3C.  Once I have rephrased it in these terms in spirit I agree with Russel Buckley's post "Is the Wap Glass 1/4 Full, or 3/4 Empty?"

But why do I feel the need to rephrase and redefine what he calls WAP?  To most content providers, developers, operators and even end users mentions of WAP draws words like "fiasco" and "non-starter" shortly thereafter.  It was a closed standard that had limited adoption and still posed limitations and usability for the end user.

What the hostway survey confirms, is what we have been saying all along, namely usability.  Find ways to improve or fix the user experience and you will drive usage up.  Is it a total fix? no.  Data rates still have to become reasonable and affordable and enough content has to be available to justify continual use.  We aren't there yet.