The latest ICANN meeting (#38) that took place in Brussels definitely lived up to expectations — and not only in terms of beers and chocolates. Important steps were taken towards the introduction of new global top-level domains (gTLDs). The approval of IDN TLDs for China and Taiwan sent a positive signal to the millions of people who write in scripts other than Roman that the Internet really is for everyone. Also, the ICM Registry had reasons to be pleased, as the ongoing .xxx saga seems to be heading for a close.
It was also a special meeting for the dotMobi team. On June 21, we formally announced our brand-new product, goMobi, designed to give small and medium businesses easy, fast and complete access to the booming mobile market. goMobi has definitely generated a lot of interest, and kept us all very busy discussing opportunities with partners, both old and new.
goMobi also made a strong impression on the ICANN community via the brand-new ICANN.mobi site, which was built using goMobi. While ICANN has used a meeting-specific mobile site for its past few events, the use of ICANN.mobi at the Brussels meeting received a lot of positive feedback and also broke previous mobile site usage records. For instance, during the Brussels meeting, ICANN.mobi received 1,859 visits. A year earlier, at the ICANN Sydney meeting, the ICANN.mobi site received only 568 visits. And page views in Sydney were 2,227 while in Brussels that number jumped to 3,648.
Considering the ICANN crowd and its deep ties to technology, it’s not surprising that most mobile visitors were using an iPhone (44.9%) or a Blackberry (28.2%). Androids and Nokias were also used to access the site as was the occasional iPad.
The official schedule was the most popular area visited, with the ICANN event Twitter feed and the “Find the Conference Center” functions next in popularity. Since the meeting ran in parallel with the World Cup, we included a special “World Cup Planner” area which received 90 unique visits. While a good number, it certainly shows that ICANN attendees are more focused on the future of the Internet than anything else.
dotMobi’s next event presence will be at HostingCon 2010, July 19-21 in Austin, where we’ll be in booth #535 with our friends from Afilias — and where dotMobi is the official mobile partner of the event. Be sure to look out for hostingcon.mobi if you’re attending.
