the automated mobile internet platform

The .mobi top level domain has been in the news lately, as the company who owns the .mobi domain, mTLD, was recently sold. Because of the press, we’ve received some questions concerning the .mobi domain. I decided it was time to discuss the history of .mobi and our recommendations.

The history of .mobi
Just as .gov indicates government sites, .edu indicates educational institutions, and .mil indicated military sites, .mobi was created to indicate sites that were optimized for viewing on mobile phones. The .mobi domain was approved as a top level domain in July, 2005, by ICANN, the official overseer and approver of top level domain names. Its inception was financed and backed by a number of major companies, including Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Ericsson, Vodafone, T-mobile and others. Registration of domain names using .mobi became available in September, 2006.

According to dotMobi, close to one million sites have been registered using the .mobi top level domain since its inception, but the .mobi domain has never really taken off amongst consumers. Most of the problem is timing related, as very few mobile consumers were accessing the web using their mobile devices in 2006. All of that changed with the release of the iPhone in 2007. The iPhone and subsequent smartphone platforms made the web usable on mobile devices. People bypassed .mobi sites because they were either not aware of a .mobi domain or not happy with the reduced functionality of the .mobi sites, which were built for the most basic mobile devices and did not take advantage of the improved functionality and touchscreen capabilities of the latest devices. 

The issues with .mobi
Using .mobi is not free and comes with many issues that you need to be aware of before jumping in.

1. Increased Cost
Costs for .mobi domains are usually more than 2x the cost of regular domains. A regular domain registration usually runs less than $10/mo. whereas a .mobi domain can run $20/mo. or more. Plus, while a standard domain can service both desktop and mobile clients, a .mobi domain exists only to serve mobile devices resulting in additional domain registration costs.

2. Maintenance Overhead
Since the .mobi domain is an additional domain on top of your regular site, you need to invest additional resources to maintain the content and site.

3. Lack of Awareness
The general public is not aware of the existence of the .mobi domain. In order to get the most out of a .mobi site, you need to spend additional resources and money marketing and promoting it.

4. Poor Functionality
.mobi sites need to be designed for the most basic web-enabled phones resulting in a sub-optimal experience for smartphone users. Since smartphone users are the overwhelming majority of mobile web traffic, your .mobi site ends up service an extremely small, if not non-existent, segment of the market.

A .mobi domain is unecessary
Given the tremendous advances in mobile over the last five years, there is no reason to secure a .mobi domain. When creating an on-line presence and mobile website, you are best advised to use a “OneURL” strategy. A OneURL strategy is easily implemented using device detection code on your existing web presence and allows you to simplify your marketing by promoting one domain for desktop and mobile and by saving money through reduced maintenance and domain registration costs.

So when considering your mobile presence, don’t  use a .mobi domain – you don’t need it. If you already have a .mobi domain, drop it and start using your existing url and device detection code to service mobile visitors.

By the way. if you’re considering mobile or have an existing .mobi site and would like help or advice on your mobile presence, feel free to contact us. We’d be more than happy to help.

There was non-stop news coming out of Barcelona last week regarding the Mobile World Congress event. I have to admit that I am still digesting all of the announcements and their implications. Here’s a look at what I found interesting from last week.

Most noteworty announcement: Microsoft Windows Phone Series 7 was the biggest announcement of the show. They unveiled an OS architecture and UI based off the ZuneHD interface and talked a good game around mobile. The design of the OS is a winner, but the availability of late 2010 is a killer. It is all about execution now for Microsoft who can’t afford to fall any further behind Apple and Android for mobile mindshare.

Best handset announcements: HTC continues to design the best looking handsets. They unveiled three new handsets at the show: Desire, Legend and HD mini. I can’t wait to get my hands on these to try them out.

Attack of the OEMs: A new trend appears to be hardware OEMs making handsets. Acer, Dell, Huawei and ZTE all introduced or discussed handsets at the show. More consumer choice is always a good thing, but I wonder if these manufacturers can break the stranglehold that carriers have over handset manufacturers here in the US.

Most interesting phone announcement: Puma, yes the show company, announced a phone at the show. My first reaction was who cares, but after seeing the reviews, Puma may be onto something. Instead of trying to build a universal device, Puma has focused the phone on sports and leisure activites and included some fun and neat features, like a solar cell back for charging. I doubt the Puma phone will rival the iPhone, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it gain some traction among sporting enthusiasts. That’s the beauty of a market with billions of users, there are plenty of niches you can attack.

Most interesting product: SK Telecom has created a SIM card that holds a processor, memory, 1GB of flash storage, and the Android OS on it. Why do you care? You can store your entire mobile environment on the SIM card (contacts, customizations and OS) allowing you to switch phones as often as you like without having to set-up the phone each time you switch.

“I could have been a contender” product: The Samsung Wave received great reviews for its design, particularly its display which uses a new AMOLED technology from Samsung. Most AMOLED screens are unusable in outdoor lighting, but the Wave appears to fix that problem. Unfortunately, the Wave uses Samsung’s Bada operating system. Don’t be surprised if you don’t know what Bada is because I don’t either, except to tell you it will require you to learn a whole new operating system and hope that all of your favorite app developers are willing to support yet another platform.

Most hollow keynote: People expecting big things from Google’s keynote were severly disappointed. Outside of Eric Schmidt announcing a “mobile first” strategy and the fact that Android was shipping 60,000 units per day, nothing else was interesting.

“What took you so long” announcement: RIM finally demonstrated a usable browser for their loyal BlackBerry users. Unfortunately, it’s not available immediately, but for BlackBerry mobile web sufferers users, the new browser can’t come soon enough.

Most interesting mobile strategy: Facebook had an interesting announcement with their Mobile Zero web strategy. It is a stripped down mobile web version of the Facebook interface. It provides the advantage of offloading the strain on carriers networks and keeping costs down for people who pay by bit for mobile web surfing. It’s refreshing to see a company recognize that people do use the mobile internet on their phones and then spend the effort to optimize the experience.

“Maybe we should have done the Google phone” announcement: Sony Ericsson announced an impressive lineup of new phones (X10, X10 mini, Vivaz, Vivaz Pro) that are very consumer-oriented. The features are focused on camera quality and social networking integration with very little enterprise support. Personally, I don’t get Sony Ericsson’s strategy. If the rumor that they turned down the opportunity to build the first Android 2.1 phone is true, then they missed a huge opportunity. I can’t help but wonder how much longer these companies will continue to invest in this money losing venture.

“We had to announce something” announcement: Nokia and Intel made waves by announcing that they are going to combine their mobile OS efforts, Maemo and Moblin, into MeeGo. Nokia obviously needs to do something to head off the juggernaut that Apple and Android have become, and Intel needs to figure out a way to stem ARM’s microprocessor dominance in the mobile space. The announcement wasn’t meaty enough for me to decide if they have any chance of succeeding, but these two companies have access to way too many resources to count them out.

“What were they thinking” announcement: 24 wireless companies announced plans to create the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), an open platform that lets developers build an application once, and then deploy it to work on any carrier, device and OS. A lofty goal, but as Jason Kincaid pointed out on Techcrunch, isn’t that the purpose of the mobile internet and web apps? The WAC is doomed (or whack), and I don’t expect we will see much of anything out of this group.

“Where’s Waldo” award: Apple continues to thumb its nose at the rest of the mobile industry and was noticeably absent from MWC, even though Steve Jobs won the GSMA award for mobile personality of the year. I could go off on my own personal rant, but Devesh took care of that for me earlier this week.

From 5,000+ miles away, MWC looked like a fun event to be at. Hopefully, I’ll get to go to it one of these days. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on the big announcements out of MWC last week, or if there was anything I missed.