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.

Mobile Browsing: Why isn't the customer in the driver's seat?

We've always pointed out that with over 3,000 types of devices in the market at any one time, it's very hard to build content that works across a good cross-section. 

But why get so technical as that?  If you have switched or upgraded mobile phones in the last 12 months--I have used 4--you know that initially you spend the first day or so, just "fiddling" with your phone, trying to re-learn functions that by now should be innate. 

Why? Because nothing is standardized.  On the same model phone you can have the browser buried 4-5 clicks away from the "start" menu or just as an option off of the pre-programmed bookmarks, depending on what operator you have and what they negotiated with the device manufacturer.  So you re-learn how to use the phone from scratch. 

Last February at 3GSM it was quite entertaining to see people "fiddle" with the new phones just being introduced and praise some functions (e.g., "Nice camera!" or "It's got a built-in MP3 player!") and damn the others (e.g. "Where is the browser?" and "What is this button for?").  Hardly anyone predicts that the Internet will grow via the PC paradigm; nearly everyone agrees the future is mobile. 

So I ask you - "Whatever happened to making things easier for us on the hardware itself?"  Why not make it easier to find and access the browser... or a search function for that matter? 

How about voice guided navigation? (Yes....I know kinks have to be worked out.  But if we put the man on the moon in the 60's, I have faith we can tinker with voice recognition in the 21st century to make it better). 

Did you know there are companies that are founded simply to help content providers navigate and test the  anarchy of the device/navigation/operator paradigm? 

Why is it that what the operators think we ought to see (pre-programmed bookmarks, "walled gardens", etc.) is right there, while functions and apps that could make our lives a lot easier are so much harder to find?  What happened to consumer choice and convenience driving these decisions?  Why is it that the latest and most lucrative deals (say, between operators and application providers) dictate what we ought to see and use?  Is consumer choice and ease of use such a radical concept after all?

I hope not....

It's Not Content, It's Distribution

I recently came back from the ICANN meeting in Lisbon, Portugal.  During the course of three days, we met with no fewer than 25 different registrars. 

Many of you who are familiar with this channel know that the term "registrar" nowadays is an oft-used term that doesn't capture the real business model of the many enterprising companies who are "ICANN accredited registrars." Many of those we talked to would consider themselves web hosting providers that enable businesses large and small to develop an identity and a footprint by providing hosting, site creation, certs, e-commerce platforms, and yes an identity in the form of a Top Level Domain (TLD) or a Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) to base it on. 

For these companies, a domain is often the commodity piece in the range of offerings.  The real margins are in the "value adds" like certs, e-commerce tools, and hosting.  That said, the industry as a whole is looking for ways to differentiate itself, given that the whole context or presumption behind all of the services they provide is PC tailored content and access.

Now, let's look at mobile hosting: The average size of site done for mobile (if done right) is a fraction of the size of a site created to be accessed via PC.  It doesn't require a different set of hardware, so no new investment.  The tough part is to create the sites so it works well and rates at least a 4 out of 5 on the Mobile ready Report.  That problem we have solved by offering the dotMobi Site Builder free of use!   

Now, let's take a look at what's happening on the "content" side.  Recall the rallying cry in the late nineties "Content is king."  Well everyone seems to have heard that call.  Everyone it seems is a content publisher; witness the rise of blogs (such as this one) and individuals who self-publish. 

The new rallying cry ought to be "it's not about content, its about distribution."  Namely, "How do you take all the content that is now vying for our attention, and build a new more targeted and expanded distribution channel?"  With mobiles outstripping PCs four to one, and Internet access always-on and available to many of these devices, mobile is the new distribution channel.

So why do I go to great lengths to lay out the arguments above? Because the "aha! moment", as one of my colleagues calls it, is when people see they are able to use .mobi and all the openly available tools and resources to offer a new distribution channel to their customers.  (And BTW build a differentiated and profitable business for themselves.)

They also know that if they do not provide the tools and the means for businesses to establish a mobile distribution channel, someone else will. 

No revelation here, as that is exactly how they themselves got started in the early days of the Web, and provided services to large and small businesses where the established telcos were too slow or encumbered to offer their toll-free and yellow-pages services for the then-new distribution channel... the Internet.

BTW - Did you notice our newest investor?

Last week at CTIA the CEO and President of Visa, John Philip Coghlan delivered the keynote.  Stating that the concept of turning the cell phone into a credit or debit card, is "inevitable", he announced Visa's investment in dotMobi.  Visa now joins thirteen other companies as the latest investor in dotMobi. 

If you glance at the names, Visa stands out as being the only one not traditionally associated with the mobile space.   And its a welcome addition! Why? it simply underlines that dotmobi is not just relevant to a select group of "mobile" companies, but rather to a larger base of companies, who see mobile as a the next iteration of the Internet and not simply as a technology.

At the same time that the announcement was made, the dotmobi team was split across the Atlantic. Part of our team, including our CTO and our development team were attending CTIA, while I attended ICANN in Lisbon along with the rest of the sales and operations team.  (That is, where we finally were able to watch the announcement on YouTube.)  Though we have been somewhat understated about this announcement and have simply posted the release on our site, we strongly believe this is huge news. 

As evidenced by the reaction of one of our channel partners at ICANN upon hearing the news: "With these level of (investors) companies ... mobile commerce is bound to happen".  We certainly hope so, and now we are well positioned thanks to our latest investor.   

Mobile ad space heats up with the entrance of Nokia!

The mobile ad space is heating up. Nokia's entrance is significant, as they enter the fray with traditional players such as Google, MS, and Yahoo as well as smaller but nimble start-ups such as Admob.

It also confirms some of the predictions about the promise of mobile advertising.  It shows they recognize the opportunity and want to build on their brand and leverage their market power building services connecting operators, advertisers and publishers.  And they figure they are at the nexus of it all.

What they announced yesterday was two services. First, the Nokia Ad Service: a fully managed service for advertisers to do targeted advertising on mobile services and applications. The second was the Nokia Advertising Connector, which is a private label service.  What is cool about the connector is that it selects and then feeds to the device text, visual, audio or video ads -- depending on the user's context.

The services have already had some favorable pilots but will not be commercially available till later on this year.  The question is will operators see them as a good alternative to the traditional players, or will they see this as a potential threat long term given the power of the brand. 

Overall though, this is a great sign.  More competition from players small and large will mean content providers will increasingly have a means to monetize their content.  We are working to get tools in their hands to help them build that content.  After all, without enough good content, there won't be much out there to "monetize."

Hat-tip: Mobile Entertainment.

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.

WSJ On Mobile Advertising

Every day, it seems, there is news in the trade press about innovations taking place around mobile technology.  There’s no doubt that momentum continues to build around mainstream adoption of a host of new services that are being offered over mobile devices.         

In fact, this week The Wall Street Journal featured a front page article on mobile advertising. (Free to non-subscribers as I write this.)  The article entitled "Companies Vie for Ad Dollars on Mobile Web" described mobile advertising as the next Internet gold rush.

That may be true, but, in my opinion, not in the near-term.

Although mobile advertising shows promise as a new channel to reach consumers, there are still significant challenges in place to stymie its wide-scale acceptance by mobile subscribers. 

First, there are the cultural challenges. Consumers have shown a propensity to protect their privacy when it comes to their mobile devices.  Studies indicate that consumers in general feel a personal connection to their phones that limit their willingness to provide open access to potentially invasive advertising.

For those that have opened the doors, there are stories of consumers being bombarded by ads they can’t stop but continue to pay for.  The mobile operators claim they can control this problem by promoting only advertisers that appear on their decks. There may be truth to that. However, the “lingering doubts” that consumer’s have about “mobile spam” must first be overcome before you’ll see the kind of growth in mobile advertising that is being hyped in the trade press these days.

The next challenge is legislation.  As usual, technology has advanced well ahead of the legislation that is designed to protect consumers. Although the technology exists to support mobile advertising, legislation lags around content quality and privacy concerns that are sure to become key issues as mobile advertising becomes more prevalent.  In the past, mobile operators have been primarily responsible for monitoring content that is carried over their networks.  But as we continue to move toward an “open mobile web” where more advertising dollars are involved, the likelihood that content quality will deteriorate seems quite high. 

Of course, there are many other challenges (e.g., device limitations, revenue models, on-deck/off-decks issues, etc.) that seem likely to slow mainstream adoption of mobile advertising over the next few years.  However, there is no doubt that mobile technology has huge market potential for advertisers to interact with consumers in new and different ways.

Is it the start of the next Internet gold rush?  I guess that remains to be seen.

My Predictions For 2007

The new year is here and, as always, this is a time for reflections...and predictions.  I will leave the prediction of market size, mergers and acquisitions to the analysts.  But based on this years news and trends, here are my predictions for 2007:

First: 2007 will see the growth of off-portal mobile content, as well as pressures on carriers to open up the "walled gardens." My prediction is based on the following data points:

• Increased penetration of devices which support WAP 2.0 delivers the wireless web to the device owners.
  • Early WAP experiments were correctly criticized for delivering a bad user- experience for browsing Internet content on mobile devices, However the increased availability handsets with color screens that support WAP 2.0 (xHTML) deliver the elusive wireless web to the hands of the users.  According to MMetrics "owners of devices that support WAP 2 are more than 63% more likely to use the browser feature on their handset than subscribers with handsets that support earlier versions of the protocol. In 2005 the installed base of WAP 2 phones has expanded significantly from about 33% of all WAP phones in January to about 48% in August. Over the same period the installed base of devices that support WAP has expanded to about 124 million devices in August from 118 million in January".
• Increased availability of high-bandwidth infrastructure such as 3G worldwide will remove one barrier (slow access for users ) while putting pressure on carriers to increase data ARPU from their subscriber base via other means than just SMS and limited browsing on their walled gardens
• 3's recent announcement of a flat rate data plan will up the competitive ante for other carriers to consider the same.  Note that in their announcement, 3's Christian Salbaing, Managing Director of European telecom at 3 noted "The mobile internet has now developed to such a degree that we can now leave the 'walled garden' behind and let our customers access and enjoy the very best of what the converged internet and media worlds can offer."
• Industry wide efforts, such as ours, that will enable content providers and developers large and small to create their own mobile content site that is available regardless of handset or operator limitations, thus lowering the cost of entry.
• Major brands will look to mobile as a new marketing channel, as a direct to consumer model looks increasingly attractive.According to an independent survey of 50 brands commissioned by Airwide: "By 2008, 89% of brands will use text and multimedia messaging to reach their audience, with nearly one-third planning to spend in excess of 10% of marketing budgets on the medium. In five years over half of brands (52%) expect to spend between 5% and 25% of total marketing budget on mobile marketing."
• Issues such as "net neutrality" and control of content are debated not just in the PC context, but also increasingly in the mobile world as operators will face scrutiny of their content control via a walled garden strategy.
   

As these factors begin to converge, operators (particularly US ones who have been lagging behind the European and Asian counterparts), will need to reconsider the longevity of walled gardens as a strategy, not only to respond to consumer demand, but also to bolster their own business case of avoiding becoming just a data pipe long term.

The above is actually a few predictions summed up into one. But, while we are on the subject of predictions, lets add some more. In no particular order after the jump:

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.