dotMobi

Talking mobile with African developers

A week has now passed since the end of the ICANN Nairobi meeting. The amazing friendliness of the Kenyans and the great effort of local organizers and ICANN staff made the stay in Nairobi particularly pleasant. Aside from interesting discussions and grilled crocodile at the gala dinner, I am particularly happy to have had the chance to meet some local developers and tech entrepreneurs and talk about dotMobi and mobile Web in Africa.

I was invited to speak at the iHub, an interesting space for technologists, investors, tech companies and even hackers that opened very recently in Nairobi. After a talk by the W3C's Thomas Roessler on mobile Web standards, I had the chance to give an overview on dotMobi. It was good to go beyond the .mobi domain and talk about all the cool services that dotMobi offers to developers and content owners interested in extending their reach onto the mobile Web. From our marketing sourcebook mobiThinking and our developer community mobiForge, to our testing tool mobiReady, our award-winning DeviceAtlas and Instant Mobilizer products, and the very cool Wordpress Mobile Pack, dotMobi's suite of products received very positive feedback and a lot of questions from the audience.

Finally, in leaving the stage I asked the audience what can Europeans and North Americans learn from Kenya's experience with mobile Web. The response: Get down to business and focus on what is really important for the mobile users, rather than on the special effects ... in mobile, less is more!

Karibu Mobile People!

The 37th ICANN Meeting officially opened this morning at the Kenyatta International Conference Center in Nairobi. Despite all the fears and discussions about security, Kenya has proven to be a beautiful and very hospitable country for the people that traveled here to attend the meeting in person. When they say "Karibu!" ("Welcome!" in Swahili), Kenyans definitely do mean it from the bottom of their heart.

dotMobi has once again put together a mobile site at http://icann.mobi which we hope will help attendees keep themselves more easily on top of things in Nairobi, and really make the best out of this great opportunity.
The site is built and maintained in partnership with our friends at mobiManage, who we wish to thank once again for the amazing support they provide us with this project.
As usual, we appreciate the comments and suggestions of the community to keep improving the site for the future.

Beyond the interesting discussions around key industry topics like new TLDs and IDNs, being in a country like Kenya has a special meaning for me as a member of the dotMobi team. It is here that mobile technologies have overwhelmingly proven their disruptive power and contributed significantly to improve people's living conditions and stimulate new services and businesses. Kenya has for instance been a pioneer in effective mobile payment and money transfers systems, something with which Europe and North America have ironically been struggling with for years with very poor results. I hope this meeting will give me the chance to learn more about Mobile web in Africa and gather useful inspiration to keep promoting the dotMobi message to the rest of the world.

To the whole ICANN community, dotMobi wishes all the best for a very fruitful meeting!

p.s. don't forget to check out our special icann.mobi flier here ;)

Limited-time promotion: free domain names from Gandi

You may have heard about this elsewhere but just in case ...

To celebrate its tenth anniversary, Gandi is giving away 55,000 domain vouchers. That means you can get a free domain name for one year. And yes, that includes .mobi domains. 

To claim your domain name, visit Gandi's special anniversary site and choose your .mobi domain of interest. Then, when checking out, enter your voucher code. Yes, it's that simple. 

This promotion ends on March 10, 2010, so be sure to visit now. (By the way, there are a limited number of vouchers available each day. And like most promotions, other limitations apply and are outlined on Gandi's special anniversary site.)

Announcement re: dotMobi Ownership

In case you haven't seen the good news elsewhere, the dotMobi company has been acquired by Afilias. 

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Afilias, it's a leading and well-established registry company that's been providing registry operation services for the .mobi domain since it launched in 2006. Afilias is also the registry for .info and .aero, and provides technical services in support of 15 top-level domains, including .org (under contract to Public Interest Registry), .asia, and ccTLDs. In all, Afilias supports about 15 million registrations across these TLDs. In short, Afilias is an expert at supporting and growing new TLDs. For them, this acquisition is an opportunity to capitalize on a high growth area of the internet — mobile usage.

The ownership change will be invisible from an operations perspective. The change you will likely see, though, is an increased emphasis on the .mobi domain itself, along with dotMobi's award-winning services like Instant Mobilizer and DeviceAtlas.  

While we have an extensive FAQ, there is one question many of you probably have, "How does this impact dotMobi’s relationship with its 14 founders?" 

The founders of dotMobi remain committed to the mobile Web and support dotMobi's central role in helping consumers find made-for-mobile content. They will continue to provide their expertise, background and support via a revitalized .mobi Advisory Group (MAG), along with individual working relationships that are in place. dotMobi's founders have contributed greatly to the success of the .mobi domain so far. Their oversight and input has been helpful in achieving .mobi’s status as the 6th largest gTLD. 

Early on, the value proposition of .mobi domains needed the vision -- and voice -- of key players in the mobile industry to ensure that the domain was embraced in a way that would advance the mobile Web. In 2010, the mobile Web has become a part of our daily lives, and an organization with proven expertise in the domain industry is needed to take the domain to the next level of growth. 

Since Afilias already has the industry experience and currently serves as the technical operator for the .mobi domain, the synergy between the companies for this acquisition was a perfect fit. And since Afilias is already providing registry and DNS services for .mobi, Afilias’ acquisition of dotMobi will be smooth and uneventful -- likely invisible -- for .mobi registrants, registrars and site visitors.

Well, **is** the iPad a mobile device ... ?

Right after Apple's big iPad announcement on January 27, the thoughtful MobileTech blog asked, "Is the iPad a mobile device like any other mobile phone in terms of browsing?" ... meaning, of course, is there still a need for mobile-optimized sites? 

Well, yes. (Did you expect me to say otherwise?)

No matter how sophisticated the device -- iPad or otherwise -- .mobi and mobile-optimized sites are about the mobile context, not about the device calling for the content. For those of you on an iPhone or an Android device or a Blackberry, you know that the best apps present information in a way that makes sense for how you use the input mechanisms (e.g., touchscreen vs. mouse & keyboard) and is relevant for you on the go (e.g., Target's mobile gift card and not Target's share price or corporate governance). That won't (and shouldn't) change if I'm on an iPod Touch, an iPhone or an iPad ... or my low-end Sony Ericsson or old, but still Internet ready, Motorola Razr. Or if I have a device-specific app on my phone or if I'm looking at a mobile-optimized site.

Specific to the iPad, though, I think its reason for being is for Apple to own the digital book space the way it owns the digital music space. I doubt it's meant to be thought of as a mobile device, well not anymore so than a physical book is a mobile device. Sure you can bring it with you, but can you make a phone call or take a photo on it?

One of the more interesting thoughts I saw about the iPad was to position it as a micro-computer for senior citizens who might need email or a way to see photos of the grandkids, but not a whole lot more. In short, the exact opposite of an intentionally mobile device. 

What I think will be most interesting is to watch the evolution of the iPhone once we see how the iPad is received in the marketplace. I'm also very excited to see how it changes the idea of publishing. For many years, we've heard about interactive books. Now there's a platform that will likely have a large enough audience to make that idea a reality. Or with magazines, now they can affordably publish one-off articles rather than being bound (literally) to publishing heavy monthly volumes.

Of course, this is all speculation. We'll see in 2Q10 how the iPad is received once it's in users' hands.

FoxNews.mobi Screen Capture

Followers of .mobi who aren't in America may not know that the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News regularly advertises their FoxNews.mobi site. So to remedy that, here's a screen shot, taken by dotMobi's Chris Campbell, that shows US senator John McCain responding to President Obama's "State of the Union" speech on Wednesday, January 27. (Look at the lower left of the picture.)

 

Pinky Brand, dotMobi’s Director of Global Sales, was in Germany last week and took advantage of the visit to talk to Thorsten Smeets, COO of Key-Systems. In this video, Thorsten discusses what Key-Systems does and how they see the mobile internet and mobile Web sites emerging in the marketplace.

Welcome to 2010!

It's a new year with new challenges but also some surprises ... like subwayfreshbuzz.mobi, the mobile site of Subway sandwiches (USA). Here's a photo from their PC Web site promoting it:

  

The site has a restaurant locator with map as well as a menu ... and, after all, what else do you need from Subway?

By the way, Trey Harvin -- dotMobi's CEO -- wrote an interesting piece on the importance of content in the mobile ecosystem that was just published by Tech News World. I hope you'll find it interesting as well.

More M-Government on mobiThinking

The second article in our series on Mobile Government is now available on mobiThinking.

In this article, Andrea Volpini of Interact SpA looks at trends in the internet and mobile development and the potential they have for improving the quality of the services provided by the Public Administration.

Next week the final article will then present the study that Interact SpA has conducted together with the University of Salerno on the usage of mobile technologies in the Italian Public Administration, giving us some interesting insights in best practices and common mistakes.

dotMobi is now a member of the LACTLD

As you'll see in this announcement, dotMobi has been admitted as a member of LACTLD -- a long acronym for the longer "Latin American and Caribbean ccTLDs Organization." The LACTLD is a not-for-profit organization of the ccTLD managers in Latin America and the Caribbean.It's the regional equivalent to Europe's CENTR (of which dotMobi is also a member.)

Over the past three years since the launch of .mobi, we've been to a lot of places -- that's meant both figuratively and literally. However, we've barely touched down in Latin America ... until now. The market there is quickly becoming receptive to the mobile Web. As Trey Harvin, dotMobi's CEO, noted in the announcement, "Latin America is ... showing a year-over-year increase of mobile Web use of 0.6%, second only to North America's 1.1% increase." That information was from an interesting AdMob report. And more importantly, it shows how the mobile Web has quickly become a go-to tool for on-the-go folks.

A side-note statistic I saw recently: the iPhone only represents 13.3% of the global smartphone market, and that global smartphone market is in turn only 14.3 percent of the mobile phone market in 2Q09 — meaning that many, many people are using the mobile Web without an iPhone, or any smartphone at all. (See the report information here.)

I'm reading these numbers as: the iPhone may be driving interest in the mobile Web but people aren't waiting for an iPhone to access it -- while apps may be cool, I agree with Google who say apps are ultimately limiting and the mobile Web will be accessed directly via type-in traffic or via search -- both of which bear well for .mobi, everywhere in the world.