An Industry Overview Of Mobile Domain Names
By Barry Fenning
.mobi (commonly known as dotMobi) was approved by ICANN as a top-level domain in July 2005. “.mobi domain is managed by mTLD global registry, having the sole purpose of providing internet to mobile devices through Mobile Web. This domain is sponsored by industry giants as follows: Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefonica Moviles, Telecom Italia Mobile, orascom Telecom, GSM Association, Hutchison Whampoa, Syniverse Technologies, and, Visa
Executive of each company has a seat in mTLD’s Board of Directors.
.mobi domain names were opened for public registration in the latter half of 2006. Before the start of next year, domain sales already crossed the 100k dollars mark which indicated the confidence of developers in this new extension.
Dotmobi domain names also received criticism because of violating the principles of device independence with developers arguing to devise different ways of promoting Mobile Internet through existing domains.
Some developers also pointed out that typing the characters “mobi” on handheld devices required 9-10 keystrokes while the “com” requiring 7 and “wap” requiring only 3 keystrokes. Hence terming this new inventions as an “unfortunate choice”. This was handled by having an inbuilt predictive text entry for the “mobi” domains.
Dotmobi had engaged with the W3CMWI (Mobile Web Initiative) to formulate the efficient practices and protocols for mobile content. These outlined good number of ways to make the Mobile Content fun at the user end and implementing the same.
mTLD had released a testing website (ready.mobi) to check the compatibility of a handheld device with a .mobi domain name or as they say -to analyze mobile readiness of a particular website. This website generated a detailed report of the shortcomings of compatibility of a website with a .mobi ready score of 1 to 5.
There are many free authoring tools which can be used to create mobi compatible site. One of such website builder tool is Site.mobi (by mobiSiteGalore) which offers may tools to develop a .mobi-ready website. mTLD also offers ebooks and free training material about .mobi at the mobiForge website. It also provides a free mobile emulator tool to test and view mobile webpages on a computer.
Now, talking about the advantages of .mobi domains, since all the .mobi sites are optimized for hand-held devices or mobile phones, they provide a guarantee of usage on the move. . This includes hard factors such as device input/output options, device form/size, smaller screens, existence of embedded sensors (light/darkness, location, acceleration, touch, ambient noise), and soft factors such as : context awareness within a short span of attention and expectation of immediate results. In fact, other domains can also apply these optimizations but it is a necessary condition for websites specifically designed for mobile devices.
The Dotmobi invention also suffers from a few disadvantages. First one being, dividing the world wide web in two parts, one being for the general users and other for the mobile users. This has a major drawback of generating redundant data on the world wide web. Also the companies or individuals have to register and maintain two domain names instead of one which further adds to their costs.
Barry Fenning is the Marketing Manager of ICANN accredited domain registrar http://www.LCN.com, one of the top UK providers of domain names and web hosting. Please visit LCN for more information on .mobi domains.
