As you may be noticing, the mobile Web is becoming a popular channel for many non-profits to trigger mobile giving. If you want to learn more about how the mobile channel is enabling "cause marketing" for some of the leading organizations and brands, we can point you to a free webinar, "The Future of Non-Profit Fund-Raising," hosted by iLoop Mobile and the Mobile Giving Foundation on Thursday, April 16 at 11 a.m. US Pacific / 2 p.m. US Eastern. For details and to sign up, please visit http://www.iloopmobile.com/mobilelabs/Seminarseries/invite-apr09/mlwebinar-april-09.htm.
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Saturday, April 11th, 2009It’s been busy, and now you’re seeing the results …
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009As I note in the headline, it's been a busy few months. The winter months may seem quiet, but the dotMobi team has been hard at work:
We've launched Instant Mobilizer, a tool that puts the mobile Web into practically everyone's hands. eNom just launched it for their many resellers, and many more .mobi registrars will be making it available over the coming weeks.
We've been at Domainfest, Parallels, Mobile World Congress and the DMA's Mobile Marketing Day, we're at ICANN Mexico and we're revving up for CTIA. You can keep track on our corporate Web site's events calendar.
We've announced the availability of one and two character .mobi domains … and now we've announced the first brand using one: Fifth Third Bank with http://53.mobi.
We've been social networking via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and now YouTube. And one thing we're especially exciting about on our YouTube channel is a commercial for .mobi — focusing on http://weather.mobi — that will be broadcast in 43 major US airports throughout March 2009.
We've been working on updating our branding elements for consistency across all of our Web properties. We still have some work to do and some elements that need cleaning up, but hopefully you're already enjoying the cleaner look. To help clarify one question that comes up sometimes, we're referring to the company as "dotMobi" and the domain as ".mobi" since we do a lot more things than just the .mobi domian — as evidenced by the many activites you see on http://mobiForge.com and http://mobiThinking.com.
And for everything that's here, I promise there's lots & lots more we're working on … Keep a look out — and thank you for your ongoing support of the .mobi domain and the mobile Web.
Android and the Open Handset Alliance
Friday, November 9th, 2007Unless you’ve been down a mine all week, you’ll have seen that Google, one of our investors, announced a new mobile software platform this week. It’s called Android and the announcement also revealed the creation of the Open Handset Alliance.
Since we at dotMobi also constitute a mobile consortium of sorts, we thought it would be worthwhile talking about it a little. Certainly there are many facets to making the mobile web experience the success it deserves to be, and so the OHA is very welcome to the party.
The most amazing thing about this announcement was that a 34-company deal was kept so secret. But to be honest, after months of speculation, the rest wasn’t as surprising. The project has even kept the Android name, that of company that Google acquired back in 2005 to start the project.
To dotMobi followers, the big question is how well Android will help the growth and acceptance of the mobile web. Certainly it is set, like the iPhone, to increase the industry buzz and interest around the making the internet a truly mobile medium.
It will be important to see how it will be welcomed by the developers and owners of content, and of course, whether it is set to be a platform that also hits mainstream consumer consciousness, as the iPhone has done.
Whilst OHA plays the "Open" card very strongly, the addition of any new platform into the mobile space creates waves of new diversity, which are not necessarily a good thing in the short term. Nothing becomes de-facto overnight.
Of course, in the longer term, if Android becomes a dominant platform, then diversity diminishes and user experience will increase. (Think of the operating system homogeneity in the PC world, and the relative ease that brings to developers). But that would have to come at the expense of other, dominant market players – many of whom are notably absent from the OHA, and to be fair already have fairly open platforms of their own.
While Google has been able to position itself as a leader in the Internet space – despite what many originally thought was coming to that party a bit too late – there’s too much at stake in the mobile world for ubiquity and uniformity to happen overnight, or even smoothly. This dynamic of device diversity is a very particular curse for the mobile space. And, incidentally, why we’ve been working so hard on mitigating it with our device database initiatives.
So the announcement was interesting and positive. We await further progress with great excitement.
Weather is #1 in USA
Wednesday, August 15th, 2007M:Metrics recently released a study that showed “weather” as the top genre of news and information accessed by mobile subscribers in the United States. And that was before the good news dotMobi issued this week about The Weather Channel becoming the first brand to secure rights to a premium .mobi domain via an RFP process. I’m sure that mobile users are now going to be visiting weather.mobi on a regular basis. The site is already live, looks terrific and works exactly as it should … it’s a pleasure to use. Soon, it will be advertised on TWC’s PC-based site, so be on the lookout.
Here is a photo of (left) Louis Gump, vice president of mobile at The Weather Channel Interactive (TWCi), and Neil Edwards, CEO of dotMobi, when the agreement was finalized.
By the way, another interesting part of that M:Metrics report is that sports information –- especially football / soccer -– is the number one choice of Europeans. Otherwise, the US and Europe are more or less on a par with what they visit; for example, “news” is in the number two spot in both the United States and Europe. As the mobile internet breaks outside of the walled gardens, I suspect you’ll be seeing more variety among the most visited mobile information. By the way, if you’re European, be sure to visit espn.mobi or kicker.mobi. The former is the well-known sports brand while the latter is a German-language site dedicated exclusively to football.
And before the questions come rolling in … the other names that dotMobi made available under this inaugural process –- ringtones, news and sports –- will not be awarded right now. Although proposals were submitted for these domains, the focus on how they would be developed for content was not as strong as these names deserve. Like all of the domains on the dotMobi Premium Names list, they will be made available once again through an equitable distribution process. But in the meantime, be sure to bookmark weather.mobi on your mobiles.
- Vance Hedderel, Dir. of PR & Communications
BTW – Did you notice our newest investor?
Wednesday, April 4th, 2007Last 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.
dotMobi Goes Back To China
Tuesday, December 19th, 2006Neil Edwards, the CEO of dotMobi, and I recently made another trip to China. If you recall, we made our first trip there to meet our partners China DNS and HiChina. We also did a press conference to introduce dotMobi to the market, not as yet another domain name, but rather a standards based approach to accelerate mobile content for the Chinese consumer. (Recall that China has over 100 million Internet subscribers and over 450 million mobile subscribers.)
We talked about the development tools that we plan to offer. The press conference was held on December 8 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Beijing and was attended, not only by our registrar partners, but also by more than 40 members of the press.
Stan Zhang, the CEO of HiChina spoke about the results of his campaign and especially about the fact that the focus is on content. (Btw, he practices what he preaches; he has his own company’s .mobi site up and running.)
Jiang Qun, the CEO of ChinaDNS also spoke in support of dotMobi and his company’s focus around mobile initiatives.
Edwards Sang — the CEO of 7234, whose company will soon be focusing on selling .mobi — reiterated the emphasis on mobile content and the value of dotMobi’s cooperation in providing open source tools to help the local market.
So what was the message that we delivered? Well this time we came back, having fulfilled some promises we had made the last time.
- For one thing, we have hired Adrian Lui in China to work directly with our partners on the ground, the dotMobi Developer Forum and the Mobile Ready Tool. The Mobile Ready Tool will be localized in Chinese by early part of this year, so developers and content managers all over China can determine how mobile ready their existing sites are.
- We unveiled the beta version of the Mobile Ready Tool
- We also announced that we will bring sponsor a contest to highlight and reward the best and most compelling Chinese language dotMobi sites.
- And last, we announced that there are working at least three additional registrar partners to be able to serve the market better.
We also held separate meetings with analysts and technical press to cover them in depth on the details of the announcements. It was a hectic week,punctuated by meetings with technical and development companies as well as our own registrar partners. The major news of that week was the annoucement that 3G licenses were going to be available for operators to bid on. I have heard figures as varied as 10 to 26% refering to the percentage of Chinese operator revenues derived from data sales. If true, its certainly higher than the average figure cited bu GSMA of 5% (strip out SMS, which accounts for 2-3%, and you are left with precious few). So undoubtedly the operators have to map out plans on how to make the money invested in the 3G license and infrastructure pay out. Naturally we had some interesting meetings around the very same subject with operators as well.
China is a long-term market, and a few trips and meetings will certainly not accomplish the aim of realizing the potential it has. So far, we have been consistent — listening and trying to understand the nuances of the market (culture, regulation, language, needs, mobile players, etc) and delivering solutions based on that input. Thankfully, so far at least we have made some headway.
All-you-can-eat Mobile Internet Access Comes to the UK
Friday, November 17th, 2006
Lots of press and commentary was generated today by 3′s X-Series announcement: 3 is moving to an all-you-can-eat mobile Internet access model. As they put it, "X-Series customers will only pay a flat access fee on top of their basic subscription and then what’s free to use on the internet should be free to use on mobile broadband." That’s terrific news. As Neil Edwards, dotMobi’s CEO, put it, "3 proved they’re a leader in the mobile Internet space when they co-founded the .mobi domain. I believe this pricing model will actively encourge the growth of the Internet on mobiles, which is a positive development for consumers because it will incent developers to bring more mobile content online. The all-you-can-eat mobile Internet access model is bound to prove itself successful in the UK, just as it did with PC-based broadband connections." I’m equally excited to see 3 leverage their high-speed network to bring the mobile Internet one step closer to general usage. Good show, 3!
General Registration Begins
Thursday, October 12th, 2006Today, dotMobi launched its general registration period and thousands of domains were purchased. But it’s not just about the numbers for us, it’s about seeing more and more people embracing the mobile internet. As you have may seen in this announcement (DOC), many of our registrars are making free tools available so that buyers can build .mobi-compliant sites, and those sites are coming online daily. Two of our favorites are businessweek.mobi and cnnmoney.mobi. Not only do these sites deliver what users have said they want — information that’s quick to download and easy to digest — but their owners are putting their marketing behind .mobi.
It’s great to see category leaders become thought leaders; they’ve done their homework and understand that the mobile internet is a new way to reach their audience. Being able to deliver news to the one device that people usually have with them at all times should be a “no brainer,” but it’s always a bit difficult to make the first step — and that’s why I find these two sites exciting. And I admit it’s cool to see the ads from BusinessWeek and CNNMoney in magazines because it shows that both of these media companies are ready to show their customers the way forward for communications.
