blog.mobi

goMobi gets better

September 1st, 2010

goMobi, our flagship mobile site builder and content management tool, is now even better.

While we designed it to be as easy as possible for small business owners to use, we also added features for what in the old days we would have called “power users” — Web developers and designers. And as power users are wont to do, they let us know as soon as we launched in June what they wanted to see added. We listened. And here it is: new transcoding options plus “Quick Site Copy” and “Add Pages” features.

The transcoding options now include full control of existing website content transformation into mobile-friendly content along with automatic transcoding of subpages within a desktop site for a seamless mobile user experience. The goMobi “Quick Site Copy” feature lets developers rapidly reproduce goMobi sites for similar business types without having to recreate work. This means developers can save time and money by creating templates for clients with like needs, such as nightclubs or law offices. The “Add Pages” feature makes it easy to create an unlimited number of additional goMobi pages for flexibility in creating unique mobile websites.

While these are all solid features, what’s especially striking for me is how quickly we’re able to roll out features on the goMobi platform. dotMobi’s engineering team, lead by Ronan Cremin, did a terrific job in building goMobi from the ground up as a tool that would easily expand to meet user needs … as this release proves.

If you’re part of our Web developer and designer audience, enjoy the new features. And if you have ideas for others, just let us know via contact@dotmobi.mobi.

Posted in Software, dotMobi, goMobi | No Comments »

The goMobi Challenge is on!

July 30th, 2010

We’ve got a prize-winning contest for you: The goMobi Challenge is on now!

By now, you’ve heard us talk about goMobi, our new mobile site building and content management tool. While we’ve discussed it mainly as an easy way for non-tech folks to quickly build mobile sites, we designed it so that Web developer and designer pros can use it as a base for building top-notch mobile sites as personalized and unique as you — or your clients — want.

We want to see just how personalized and unique you can make a goMobi site. And that’s why we’ve created a special contest: the goMobi Challenge. The basics are simple. Register for a free test site at http://cp.gomobi.info/gomobi_challenge. Then check out our mobiForge article on using the many developer-specific tools included with each goMobi account. And build away! Build a site for a business — even your own — or a band or club or … Well, you get the idea. We want to see your creativity in using goMobi to create unique sites.

When you’re done, just visit our goMobi Facebook page (http://facebook.com/gomobi) to submit your entry.

“What do I win?”

If you’re the winner, you’ll receive a first-prize package consisting of 100 one-year subscriptions to the goMobi product plus we’ll highlight you and your winning entry via an international press release to help you gain more clients.

Contest submissions will be accepted through 15 September 2010. You can see the full list of rules and disclaimers at http://facebook.com/gomobi.

Now, get going and goMobi!

Tags: Content, contests, goMobi
Posted in Content, Contests, goMobi | No Comments »

HostingCon 2010 welcomes dotMobi as its official mobile partner

July 15th, 2010

HostingCon 2010 runs July 19-21 in Austin, Texas

Just a quick note on a special blog entry from HostingCon 2010 — the premier conference and trade show for the hosted services industry — welcoming dotMobi as the show’s official mobile partner.

The event runs July 19-21, 2010, in Austin, Texas. dotMobi will feature our new goMobi product, but the dotMobi team will be glad to answer any questions you may have about dotMobi, the .mobi domain or the mobile Web. dotMobi is sharing a booth with our friends at Afilias, who will feature their Managed DNS service.

And since we know July in Texas is hot, we’ll have something in the booth to help keep you cool. Just drop by and ask.

See you in Austin!

Posted in Events, Partners, dotMobi, goMobi | No Comments »

ICANN #38: a very special event for goMobi and the .mobi domain

July 6th, 2010

The latest ICANN meeting (#38) that took place in Brussels definitely lived up to expectations — and not only in terms of beers and chocolates. Important steps were taken towards the introduction of new global top-level domains (gTLDs). The approval of IDN TLDs for China and Taiwan sent a positive signal to the millions of people who write in scripts other than Roman that the Internet really is for everyone. Also, the ICM Registry had reasons to be pleased, as the ongoing .xxx saga seems to be heading for a close.

It was also a special meeting for the dotMobi team. On June 21, we formally announced our brand-new product, goMobi, designed to give small and medium businesses easy, fast and complete access to the booming mobile market. goMobi has definitely generated a lot of interest, and kept us all very busy discussing opportunities with partners, both old and new.

goMobi also made a strong impression on the ICANN community via the brand-new ICANN.mobi site, which was built using goMobi. While ICANN has used a meeting-specific mobile site for its past few events, the use of ICANN.mobi at the Brussels meeting received a lot of positive feedback and also broke previous mobile site usage records. For instance, during the Brussels meeting, ICANN.mobi received 1,859 visits. A year earlier, at the ICANN Sydney meeting, the ICANN.mobi site received only 568 visits. And page views in Sydney were 2,227 while in Brussels that number jumped to 3,648.

Considering the ICANN crowd and its deep ties to technology, it’s not surprising that most mobile visitors were using an iPhone (44.9%) or a Blackberry (28.2%). Androids and Nokias were also used to access the site as was the occasional iPad.

The official schedule was the most popular area visited, with the ICANN event Twitter feed and the “Find the Conference Center” functions next in popularity. Since the meeting ran in parallel with the World Cup, we included a special “World Cup Planner” area which received 90 unique visits. While a good number, it certainly shows that ICANN attendees are more focused on the future of the Internet than anything else.

dotMobi’s next event presence will be at HostingCon 2010, July 19-21 in Austin, where we’ll be in booth #535 with our friends from Afilias — and where dotMobi is the official mobile partner of the event. Be sure to look out for hostingcon.mobi if you’re attending.

Posted in Events, Featured Sites, ICANN, goMobi | No Comments »

dotMobi Joins President of Ireland for China Visit

June 28th, 2010

Photo of dotMobi CEO Trey Harvin with Irish President Mary McAlees in China

dotMobi continues to support its presence in China by joining the President of Ireland for an in-country visit.

On 16 June 2010, dotMobi’s CEO, Trey Harvin, demonstrated the company’s commitment to China during an in-country visit from the Irish President. From left to right: Kevin Sherry, Director of International Sales & Partnering, Enterprise Ireland; Trey Harvin, dotMobi CEO; Liu Duo, Director of Communications, Standard Research Institute, MII; Dr. Martin McAleese; Irish President Mary McAleese; Yang Zemin, President of CATR, MIIT; and Declan Kelleher, Irish Ambassador to China.

Tags: .mobi, China, dotMobi, Enterprise Ireland, Ireland
Posted in Events, Partners, dotMobi | No Comments »

Meet goMobi, our new product for SMBs, Web designers and developers

June 21st, 2010

As you likely saw earlier today, dotMobi has launched a new product: goMobi. While our Instant Mobilizer product served a specific niche in transforming existing content, goMobi is a major leap in capabilities — and possibilities.

goMobi is more than a mobile site builder or content management system. It’s a hybrid of the two that addresses the content gap on the mobile Web.

Content gap?

In the past few years, there’s been significant progress in mobile technology, particularly with smarter handsets and faster networks. Content, the third leg of the “mobile stool” — along with handsets and networks — has not kept up with innovations. goMobi addresses this gap by understanding that good content is about experience. A good experience is about relevance. Most mobile sites currently mistake “Mobile Relevance” for the same as “Desktop Relevance,” only smaller. goMobi corrects that assumption.

As we’ve often said, dotMobi believes that the mobile Web is nothing like the desktop Web, and should not be modeled after it. In that way, for instance, we have a similar attitude as Apple does towards the iPad and its standard Macintosh computers.

goMobi Mobile Site, built using dotMobi's new goMobi product.

The mobile interface should be about what the mobile user may want to do, and should be individualized to achieve the best possible experience for each customer.

goMobi meets those needs by delivering the first truly usable content mobilization platform. goMobi is:

A hybrid between a traditional content management system and a mobile Web site builder,
A hybrid between the desktop Web experience and the client-side smartphone experience,
A hybrid of a rich set of mobile capabilities with a practically automatic, “non-techie” interface.

The end result for an SMB is the opportunity to create and grow a mobile presence without needing to be knowledgeable about latest trends or technology. goMobi takes care of that.

The end result for the mobile Web user is accessing a Web site that gives you the ability to do exactly what you want to do — quickly, easily and completely.

One of the things I’m especially excited about is that the goMobi platform has been designed for quick extensibility, meaning that new features and options will be coming on a regular basis as users find new ways for goMobi to promote their businesses. It also means goMobi is “future proof” as a platform.

If you’ve been waiting to build you mobile website, now’s the time to jump in. The control panel you use to build your mobile site is easy — and, dare I say, fun — to use. The site you create will look terrific, no matter what phone you’re using to access it; goMobi sites make every phone act like a smartphone with clean icons and text indicators … and all with no special effort on your part.

We have a raft of information on our new product Web site, and even a new Facebook page so you can give goMobi your own “Thumbs Up!”

Tags: Apple, Content, goMobi, iPad, products
Posted in Content, Instant Mobilizer, Marketing, SMB, goMobi | No Comments »

New ICANN.mobi Site for ICANN No. 38 in Brussels

June 18th, 2010

New Mobile Site for ICANN No. 38

With just a couple of days to go before the 38th ICANN Meeting officially starts in Brussels, dotMobi is very proud to announce a brand new ICANN.mobi site.

After all the appreciation and great feedback that the four previous versions have received from the ICANN community, we have now completely redesigned the site to be even more pleasant to the eye and easy to navigate, ensuring that you can make the best of your ICANN Brussels experience.

One of the most appreciated features of the past sites has definitely been the “What´s on now” section, allowing attendees to get an immediate overview of the sessions happening at any given moment: we have now merged this function into the main “Schedule” display and made it the default view, while still allowing to easily display the full list of sessions for a specific day with one simple click. On top of that, the search function has been improved, and it now allows full text search to find just the session you need.

The site also includes a very handy Google Maps integration which allows to get turn by turn direction from anywhere in Brussels: considering how the attendees are spread around different hotels, we expect this feature to prove quite useful.

Although I am sure we all agree that ICANN Brussels is one of the key events of this year and many important decisions are expected to be made at this meeting, we do realize that many people will have their heads somewhere else: to make sure you can plan properly and avoid nasty schedule conflicts, we have also added a handy “World Cup Planner” with the schedule of all the matches in South Africa (after a long debate, we decided that merging this section with the meeting´s official schedule and highlighting the session-match conflicts would have probably been going a bit too far).

We hope you will enjoy ICANN.mobi and that you will find it useful: if you are in Brussels (and even if you are not) we´d love to hear what you think, and how we can keep improving it.

Posted in Featured Sites, ICANN | No Comments »

Talking mobile with African developers

March 22nd, 2010

Icann_meeting_nbo_logo
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!

Tags: ICANN, Nairobi
Posted in Events | No Comments »

Karibu Mobile People!

March 8th, 2010

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

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Limited-time promotion: free domain names from Gandi

March 5th, 2010

Logo_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.)

Tags: domains, Gandi, promotions
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