**Fortune Magazine runs featured story on CNN about increasing dotMobi popularity **

[Vision]

Here is the article link at CNNMoney.mobi:

http://cnnmoney.mobi/money/small_bus...7B55DFFF32617A

Here is the article snippet:

Websites for cell phones

November 16 2007: 9:17 AM EST

Brett Dewey's business, WickedCoolStuff, got an instant sales boost from its new dot-mobi site - which costs him just $100 a month to build and maintain.

Current Issue

Brett Dewey's company thrives on spur-of-the-moment purchases. His North Hollywood, Calif., web business, WickedCoolStuff, collects $1 million a year for nostalgic merchandise such as Captain Picard action figures, Underdog lunch boxes, and toys based on Monty Python movies. His customers, mainly men in their late 20s, are more tech savvy than most online shoppers, but they aren't chained to their computers. Even Star Trek fans venture outdoors.

So when Dewey heard about a new kind of website tailored to conduct e-commerce over cellphones, he jumped at the chance to make himself accessible to clients during virtually all their waking hours. "If someone sees an advertisement, he may not remember it by the time he gets back to his computer," he says. "But his phone is always on hand for an impulse buy."

If the first wave of online business was all about getting a dot-com, the next may be about adding a dot-mobi. The new web address became available for the first time in May and is administered by Mobile Top Level Domain (mTLD; mtld.mobi), a private company based in Dublin. Sign up for a dot-mobi address and you'll be required to stick to a list of best practices, such as using the xhtml language. Complex design elements such as frames are banished. "When a site is built that way," says mTLD marketing director Vance Hedderel, "it's guaranteed to work well on every cellphone in the world."

Nearly all new cellphones are set up to browse the web, but what users often see is a site designed for viewing on a PC that is being squeezed onto a matchbook-sized screen. A better browsing experience could provide a much-needed boost for mobile commerce in the U.S. Unlike their counterparts in Asia and Europe, Americans seldom use their phones to access the Internet. Telephia, a communications research firm in San Francisco, says that just 13% of Americans with Internet-capable cellphones go online - and a paltry 1% have bought a product via mobile browsers, compared with 28% in Japan. "Consumers are paying for Internet on their phones, but they're not using it," says David Gill, a Telephia analyst.

Is dot-mobi the answer? Plenty of businesses seem to think so. In its first five months of operation, the mTLD sold 700,000 domain names. In October it started auctioning off premium domain names, such as poker.mobi, which netted $150,000, and ringtones.mobi, which went for $145,000. (A typical dot-mobi address sells for about $10 a year.) A supply chain of roughly 300 domain registrars has sprung up to resell dot-mobi domains - and 135 of the registrars are based in the U.S.

Designing and Hosting a dot-mobi site can be relatively cheap. MyDomain, a company based in Vancouver, Wash., that has registered and designed dot-coms since 1998, launched a dot-mobi application this summer. It charges a one-time fee of $199 for registration and design, and $15 a year for hosting (compare that with dot-com hosts such as Yahoo Merchant, which charges $40 a month).

mTLD offers a free tool that evaluates, on a scale of one to five, how close your website is to becoming a dot-mobi. A free site builder will help you take it all the way. Still, Hedderel doesn't dissuade companies from hiring services such as MyDomain. "If you're a gunslinger who wants to save a few bucks, then buy a site from a cheap registrar and build it for free," he says. "But if you hire help, you don't have to toy with it on a daily basis."

MyDomain CEO Clint Page says the key is making dot-mobi sites as bare bones as possible. "On the mobile web, you have about 20 seconds of the user's attention," he says. "Sites don't have to be pretty - they just need to be efficient."

[WEBecri]

Posted the same at the same time... http://www.dnforum.com/f408/first-wa...ad-260355.html

[hugegrowth]

Excellent for .mobi - getting into the minds of the masses with articles like this, making people think:

Mobile = .mobi

[CureCancer]

great news for all of us who invested in .mobi

[hugegrowth]

It's starting to look like the mobile internet wave is going to lift .mobi along with it, like many thought it might. Have to say I feel good about owning some keyword .mobi's

[CureCancer]

i agree, there was a group of domainers who tought dot mobi was a bad investment... i always said its the next big opportunity for new domainers to make money in 5-10 years... dot mobi is the king extension for mobile phones... no matter what other extensions are released for the mobile world. .mobi will be the KING just like .com is the KING for desktops...

[peekaboo]

i agree, there was a group of domainers who tought dot mobi was a bad investment... i always said its the next big opportunity for new domainers to make money in 5-10 years... dot mobi is the king extension for mobile phones... no matter what other extensions are released for the mobile world. .mobi will be the KING just like .com is the KING for desktops...

i dunno man. iphone has .com key preprogrammed on it. also, on iphone u can view full-fledged real html pages on a push of a button, you can zoom and shrink and resize them anyway u want with the touch of your finger so there's no need whatsoever to access those tiny optimized text sites. my feeling is that pretty soon iphone will be dominant in that aspect (at least in the u.s. market), and anybody who wants to access the real web via phone will use iphone, much like anyone who listens to music on the go these days is doing it on ipod.

[Acro]

i dunno man. iphone has .com key preprogrammed on it. also, on iphone u can view full-fledged real html pages on a push of a button, you can zoom and shrink and resize them anyway u want with the touch of your finger so there's no need whatsoever to access those tiny optimized text sites. my feeling is that pretty soon iphone will be dominant in that aspect (at least in the u.s. market), and anybody who wants to access the real web via phone will use iphone, much like anyone who listens to music on the go these days is doing it on ipod.

Finally some voice of reason in the den of the mobi lemmings

[NameYourself]

It's tough to say what will ultimately become of the mobile TLD. The fact that so much money from so many big name companies, especially Google and big name cell phone carriers were backing it, made the fact that even though .mobi wasn't "essential" to making mobile internet work (ie: you could just make a subdomain on your existing site: mobile.version.com) it still does have the potential to grow into being "the way it's done" when it comes to mobile internet. Google, being a backer, may realize it would be easier for them to rank a site ending in .mobi higher in their algorithms for its mobile web search results. When powerful and influential enough conglomerates back something, it can just become "the way".

More people than not would probably agree that solar and wind power would be a more preferable way for us to generate energy, so why do you have to use oil and gas to heat your home and power your car? When big enough conglomerates decide to guide something in a new direction, their influence is usually successful. I'm still skeptical on whether it will ever be considered a "complete success", but I think it will be more used for fun mobile content sites than most originally thought and not a complete failure. Likely, one of the mix among mostly .COMs in mobile web search results in years to come. .Biz, .Info, .Whatever, never had that kind of corporate push, and were not aligned with solving a web problem (even though its neccessity and effectiveness as part of a solution is debatable).

[hugegrowth]

As far as I can see it's been one positive after another - companies using .mobi for their mobile sites, ads with .mobi urls, repeated high auction prices for .mobi, now this Fortune article about .mobi investing.

The only negatives seem to come from domainers who didn't like .mobi from the start. But outside this forum I don't see any negatives.

[3dGEEK]

Picked up an iPhone A fantastic all round gadget indeed.

Internet on the iphone cool too, I loved the Novility but it soon wore off. After a while it gets very fustrating zooming in and out, dragging here and there - it was the same reaction from my family and friends once they all had a go too -

the popular conclusion was and the bottom line is the fact that why would you want to waste time trying to look at full page internet on a mobile when you have a larger laptop/pc to view them? For Mobiles, everyone simply wants simple mobile-friendly websites Quick and easy to navigate - this is when I introduced some mobi sites on the iphone & the reaction has been an eyeopener to all They all loved it !!


BTW, the CNN Article makes complete sense

the dot Mobi..."it's guaranteed to work well on every cellphone in the world."

The only negatives seem to come from domainers who didn't like .mobi from the start. But outside this forum I don't see any negatives.

Nice Touch Hugegrowth

[peekaboo]

why would you want to waste time trying to look at full page internet on a mobile when you have a larger laptop/pc to view them? For Mobiles, everyone simply wants simple mobile-friendly websites Quick and easy to navigate:

it's all about the options.

u can have sex with a flat-chested narrow-hipped KEIRA KNIGHTLEY

or u can have sex with a sultry momma BEYONCE whose hips don't lie.

[3dGEEK]

it's all about the options.

u can have sex with a flat-chested narrow-hipped KEIRA KNIGHTLEY

or u can have sex with a sultry momma BEYONCE whose hips don't lie.

I like it.

[Vision]

it's all about the options.

u can have sex with a flat-chested narrow-hipped KEIRA KNIGHTLEY

or u can have sex with a sultry momma BEYONCE whose hips don't lie.

I dig the analogy Peekaboo.

Beyonce is like www.ESPN.com. One has the time to explore all the meat of the site. You'll be there for hours exploring all the many intricacies/feel of the site.

Knightley is like www.ESPN.mobi. Need a real quick fix while on the run. In & out, you got headline and score fast & easy.

So it makes a lot of sense to have the choice between both ESPN.com and ESPN.mobi

ESPN.com is still available to all - including those mobile users (presumably with time to kill) who really *do* want to read about Brett Favre's favorite pregame meal, learn about the childhood memories of Randy Moss or see video of Shaq's south Beach mansion.

But ESPN.mobi provides a slick, efficient, well-crafted set of just scores and headlines relevant to the user's very specific mobile usage context.

-Michael

[Gerry]

i dunno man. iphone has .com key preprogrammed on it.

Keep up to speed. Will retool for other markets that don't value the .com as much as their own. Think .de, .cn (to come). In other words, .com will not be the default.

also, on iphone u can view full-fledged real html pages on a push of a button,

I can do the same thing with the helio ocean. But full html pages don't give you all the content you need, right? Even on the iPhone, you see an entire website in miniature like the NYTimes right? So what do you have to do. Use your fingers to "you can zoom and shrink and resize them anyway u want with the touch of your finger so there's no need whatsoever to access those tiny optimized text sites."

Whoa, did you just access a tiny site to cause you to do all that scrolling? Sounds to me like it's scrolling. What do you call it?

I call it a nuisance to access a full HTML site on a mobile device, like a dot com, .net, .de...anything, and have to scroll everywhere to find what you're looking for.

my feeling is that pretty soon iphone will be dominant in that aspect (at least in the u.s. market), and anybody who wants to access the real web via phone will use iphone, much like anyone who listens to music on the go these days is doing it on ipod.

Seriously, do you think the US market is going to be dominated by the iPhone? Is Apple going to give these away to all the US cellular subscribers? Simply turn my Helio Ocean in and I am handed an iPhone that does not work every where, utilizes a slower network?

Do tell me iPhone v.2.0 is better. And they are still going to give it to me? And match the price I am paying now for unlimited talk time, browsing, GPS enabled, no limits on the web, texting, and countless other features for $99 a month?

Helio says "Don't call us a phone company". That's tough. Incredible quality sharing Sprint networks.

Okay, done with the commercial.

Back to mobi. Try a mobi on the iPhone. Even the folks at the AT&T store got a big kick out of it (the .mobi sites). And they LOVED the Ocean.

Finally some voice of reason in the den of the mobi lemmings

Thank you for protecting us. Hail, Acro!

http://www.kent.ac.uk/careers/pics/lemmings.gif

[namewaiter]

I dig the analogy Peekaboo.

Beyonce is like www.ESPN.com. One has the time to explore all the meat of the site. You'll be there for hours exploring all the many intricacies/feel of the site.

Knightley is like www.ESPN.mobi. Need a real quick fix while on the run. In & out, you got headline and score fast & easy.

So it makes a lot of sense to have the choice between both ESPN.com and ESPN.mobi

ESPN.com is still available to all - including those mobile users (presumably with time to kill) who really *do* want to read about Brett Favre's favorite pregame meal, learn about the childhood memories of Randy Moss or see video of Shaq's south Beach mansion.

But ESPN.mobi provides a slick, efficient, well-crafted set of just scores and headlines relevant to the user's very specific mobile usage context.

-Michael

well said

[Nova]

And what of WickedCoolStuff? After researching his options, Dewey also hired mPoria. Just two days later wickedcool-stuff.mobi launched

wickedcool-stuff.mobi:

URL not found
Go to mPoria Mall

Figures - here we go: http://wickedcoolstuff.mobi/

[gemsergio]

Well when I type in google.com in my mobile phone it goes to the mobile version for default.
It makes zero business sense to market .mobi. Some company did it and good for them but in the long run I see very limited market. It is a step backward in technology, it is like hey look how cool I can type bankofamerica.mobi and get this crappy site instead than typein bankofamerica.com with my full browser supported cellphone.
I get pretty pissed actually that gmail sends me to the mobile version, I always click on see it on html to have the feeling of my homecomputer on my cellpohone.
Now if the technology will go backward than you will have made the best investment ever but as far as I am concerned I see cellphone more like small laptops. The .mobi version sucks. When I look at dnforum from my cellphone I personally hate it.
I have a nokia (don't know what model) with a pretty big screen and I love a lot better the feeling of a normal site than a mobile one.

[xero]

I think it is good to have the choice.
Some sites are far easier to use in a mobile version. Banking , news etc.
It can get pretty tiresome scrolling about a full size site.

This is why redirecting sucks. The user should be able to choose and bookmark their preferred mobile site.

And if there is to be a choice, then it does provide an argument for .mobi.
As a standard way to advertise the mobile version, from all the alternative formats.

[namewaiter]

This is why redirecting sucks. The user should be able to choose and bookmark their preferred mobile site.

And if there is to be a choice, then it does provide an argument for .mobi.
As a standard way to advertise the mobile version, from all the alternative formats.

exactly - no redirection needed when a company makes the choice to use both .com/.net/.org and .mobi, giving the users the choice of preferred access.