dotMobi

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.

drugs.mobi

An interesting .mobi site that's recently launched is drugs.mobi. While simple in concept -- a consumer-level version (plus a "professionals" version) of the type of information historically covered by the venerable Physicians' Desk Reference -- the multiple ways the comprehensive site can be used is what makes it a site of note.

As we all know, doctors do their best to make sure you understand what you're prescribed and why -- but it certainly is good to have a resource to refresh your memory (especially a resource written for the lay person).

Second, given the sad world of celebrity deaths that are drug related (e.g., Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson), having a resource that can explain what the effects are of the drugs in question can help put the tragedies into perspective. In fact, the drugs.mobi PC "sister" site -- drugs.com -- reported a 20,900% increase in searches for the prescription medication Demerol after the death of Michael Jackson.

And for emergency purposes, there is a pill identification wizard. If you ever been with a child who thought she was swallowing candy or with an acquaintance who is suddenly woozy after taking medication, you can easily imagine how useful it is to be able to figure out what a medication is, even if you only have a pill and not a bottle and / or label.

Also, the site scores 4/5 on the mobiReady.com report and it works on my lower-end Sony Ericsson TM506 as well as it does on my Blackberry 8800.

I can't ask more from a mobile site than utility, speed and relevant content.

J.C. Penney Goes .mobi

Just to share ... today, I ran across this story, "JCPenney Launches Schooled in Style Back-to-School Marketing Campaign," and was very pleased to see that the campaign is based around a teen-centric site at jcp.mobi.

The site scores 3/5 on the mobiReady.com report but it loads OK on my lower-end Sony Ericsson (and looks great on my iPhone.) 

While it's part of a larger integrated campaign (and jcp.com/teen will be the "hub" of the campaign), it's great that mobile was not overlooked (and that the ad agencies involved chose jcp.mobi as the obvious mobile complement to jcp.com).

In Las Vegas ...

In Las Vegas, a .mobi fan spotted this car -- branded for Millenia's .mobi site; Millenia is a Las Vegas fine art gallery.

NV.mobi Keeps On Going Strong

Our friends at the Nevada Commission on Tourism just sent us a cool group of photos, showing the promotion they're doing for http://nv.mobi in the Embarcadero BART station in San Francisco. (An earlier report of these photos as being in Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport were erroneous.)

You can see the full photostream on flickr.

A couple of interesting sites

1. icann.mobi -- If you're heading down to ICANN's meeting in Sydney, Australia, next week, you'll want to bookmark icann.mobi. The site has the complete meeting schedule for the event as well as information on how to get around Sydney and where you can have dinner and drinks. All phone numbers are click-to-call links, so it's easy to make reservations or call a taxi.

2. lacandy.mobi -- Even if you've never watched Laguna Beach or The Hills, you've likely heard the name Lauren Conrad (a/k/a/ "LC"). On 16 June, she's releasing a book called L.A. Candy and -- as part of the launch -- she's also launching a .mobi site: lacandy.mobi. You can find out plenty -- maybe more than you wanted -- about L.A. Candy at the site. And if you haven't yet "met" Lauren, you can catch up with what you've missed at the site.  

13th Annual Webby Awards: more .mobi than ever.

This week, the winners of the 13th annual Webby Awards were announced. In the mobile division -- of which dotMobi was the founding sponsor way back at the dawn of the mobile Web revolution -- there were several .mobi winners:

The Best Use of GPS or Location Technology award went to Adidas Marathon Run Tracker at http://marathon.marvellous.mobi. The Mobile Entertainment award went to Discovery Mobile at http://discovery.mlogic.mobi. The Mobile Sports award winner and People's Voice award winner went to ESPN Mobile at http://espn.mobi.

Also nominated for Integrated Mobile Experience was Virgin Atlantic's Love from Above campaign (now retired but formerly at lovefromabove.mobi) and for Listings & Updates was previous award winner ZAGAT.mobi (which you can easily find at http://zagat.mobi). 

Several other .mobi sites were named as honorees, including:

• http://arrivedok.mobi (ArrivedOK, the personal arrival tracker) 
  
• http://muslim.mobi (daily prayer times for the global Muslim community with city locator)
• http://dolcegabbana.mobi (D&G Fashion Channel)
• http://radiodisney.mobi (Radio Disney)
• http://tinkfairies.mobi (Disney Interactive Media Group)
• http://udrapartments.mobi (UDR’s mobile apartment search)
• http://blackberry.mobi (Blackberry)

An application we've previously mentioned from mobiSiteGalore.mobi, which allows mobile users to build a mobile-ready site directly from their phones, was also cited as one of the Webby Awards' honorees.

In all, this represents a very strong showing from .mobi users as well as representing a broad swath of uses of the .mobi domain -- and is definitely a big step forward from the minimal number of mobile categories (and sites) that we saw only three years ago.

If you're interested, you can see the full list of mobile nominees and winners at the Webby Awards Web site.

ICANN meeting goes mobile

The 34th ICANN meeting is now in progress, and things are a little easier than usual this time around. There aren't less meetings, and we're all still carrying around backpacks and laptop bags and running all over the place, but at least everything you need to know about what's going on is finally on a mobile at http://mex.icann.mobi. Finally, no digging around for program logs and maps; it's all in your hand. The mobile version of the Mexico meeting site contains useful information, like:

• A map of the venue
• A Twitter feed so attendees can interact using text messages
• Security advice
• Taxi numbers
• Hotel information
• Restaurant and bar reviews
• A weather forecast

All good stuff that is relevant to a mobile user attending a meeting such as this one. And the content loads really fast because it is specifically designed for someone browsing from a mobile phone.

In particular we’d like to tip our hat to the folks at mobiManage for their support and expertise in developing this site -- and a nod to my talented colleague, Francesco Cetraro, for his creativity and coordination.

Thumbs Up to the Nevada Commision on Tourism

Way back when, one of the first showcase sites dotMobi had to show people was for Las Vegas.

Now, Nevada is showing it still cares about .mobi. The Nevada Commission on Tourism owns and operates sites at http://nvroads.mobi and http://nvski.mobi. Not only did the Commission use dotMobi best practices when creating the sites, they've actually spent time and money promoting the sites.

Along with strongly featuring .mobi on their PC Web site (including education -- and a video -- on .mobi sites) and geo-targeted banner advertising on http://weather.mobi, the Commission has produced 3"x5" cards that are distributed at ski and sport shops. Here's a sample of the cards:

 
But my favorite thing? The Commission has put up NVski.mobi billboards on major highways ...

... Cool, huh?

Banking: The Surprise Mobile Vertical

Over the past two years of the .mobi domain, many of the first "verticals" that went mobile have not been a surprise because of the nature of their industries: travel (priceline.mobi), hotels (hilton.mobi), transportation (amtrak.mobi, sas.mobi, thalys.mobi) and dining (zagat.mobi).

However, the one industry that caught me unawares in terms of popularity has been banking and finance. Bank of America (bofa.mobi) is the probably the most active in promoting its .mobi site, but there are dozens of others around the world from lacaixa.mobi to deutsche-bank.mobi to usaa.mobi. It proves out a point that we discovered in the study we conducted with AKQA earlier this year: people are most interested in utility in their mobile sites. They're not against entertainment like games and ringtones, but rather that they see a mobile phone primarily as an way to help simplify the day-to-day administration of their lives.

The reason I'm mentioning this because of a press release dotMobi issued yesterday saying that California-based ClairMail has added DeviceAtlas to their service offerings.

ClairMail is a business-to-business company that builds mobile versions of existing banking sites, giving banks “transactional” mobile sites that tie into their back-end systems. Their customers include Alerus Financial, City Bank (Texas), 1st National Bank of Scotia, and Cascade Bank (Washington State). Now with the addition of DeviceAtlas to their platform, they can offer “device aware” mobile sites to their customers. And with that, we're sure to see the banking market continue to flourish as a prime space for mobile users.

Are there verticals you've seen going .mobi that have been a surprise to you? Let us know in the comments section.