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Archive for the ‘ICANN’ Category

Welcome to the new .mobi Advisory Group!

Thursday, November 4th, 2010

It’s now five years since ICANN granted dotMobi the rights to administer and market the .mobi domain. Being a “sponsored” Top Level Domain, .mobi represents a community — in this case, the mobile Internet community — and the dotMobi company has sought out ways to provide opportunities for its community members to let their views be known on its policies, procedures, and practices. Ongoing community outreach activities include dotMobi’s developer forum, mobiForge, and our marketing portal, mobiThinking. dotMobi also makes concerted efforts to engage with members of other community forums, such as Mobility.mobi.

In recent months, dotMobi has been working to revamp its existing.mobi Advisory Group (MAG), which acted as an independent trade association for several years. One new change is that MAG is no longer a dues-paying organization, something which should go some way to attracting new members. MAG is now an online-based community and, by signing up to become a MAG member, you receive a regular newsletter with updates and information on dotMobi’s products, initiatives and upcoming projects. And as a member, you are able to send us feedback on any of dotMobi’s initiatives, both domain and mobile Web related. And in turn, dotMobi can relay messages to and share information with the MAG community.

How do you know if you should be a member of the MAG?
The MAG community is made up of stakeholders who are involved in any way with the mobile Web and dotMobi ecosystem, whether you’re a developer, a mobile handset manufacturer, a content provider or simply a mobile end-user. Examples of MAG community members include:

Individual and business consumers of mobile devices, services and applications
Mobile content and service providers
Mobile operators
Mobile device manufacturers and vendors
IT technology and software vendors serving the mobile community
.mobi domain name registrants
dotMobi-accredited registrars

So make sure your opinions and ideas are heard: join the .mobi Advisory Group today.

Posted in dotMobi, ICANN, Messages from dotMobi, mobiForge, mobiThinking | No Comments »

.mobi Premium Names Update

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

.mobi Logo

Early in 2006, there was a friendly woman sitting in a small office in Reston, Virginia. Every day, she poured over thousands of Web searches and lead dozens of calls with representatives from a dozen different companies.

Later in 2006, that woman emerged, tired but still smiling, with the first draft of the .mobi Premium Name list. And several drafts later, the official .mobi Premium Name list was released.

When dotMobi was granted its contract by ICANN to sell the .mobi domain, ICANN was aware that the dotMobi company would have a unique role in helping to bring the mobile Web to life. To that end, ICANN allowed dotMobi to hold back approximately 5,000 domains, to be called “Premium Names,” that could be allocated via auctions and requests for proposals. The hope was that these frequently searched terms would be used to create unique mobile content rather than simply being purchased and converted into “pay per click” pages. That’s why many .mobi Premium Names that have been allocated have had content requirements attached to them.

And that’s how dotMobi became the first registry to sell Premium Names, and we paved the way for other TLDs to launch similar initiatives.

The processes we’ve put into place have generated sites like doctor.mobi, autism.mobi and wine.mobi. We have tried and tested several allocation processes, and continue to try and be responsive to the market. But there are only a handful of names that we’ve allocated … until now.

Since dotMobi has been under new ownership for several months now, we’ve had time to bring some projects to life that — for a variety of reasons — we weren’t able to previously, and that includes looking at allocating more of our Premium Names.

To help with that, dotMobi has made its remaining Premium Names “live.” By that, I mean each Premium Name now has its own Web page (which of course is accessible via a standard PC or a mobile phone.) For example, sex.mobi has a page at http://sex.mobi while wheel.mobi has a page at http://wheel.mobi.

Also, each page contains an “expression of interest” form, where someone who desires a specific name can let us know his or her interest in that name. And when that name is in line to be allocated, all parties who have expressed an interest will be informed as to how they can participate in that name’s allocation process.

This will let us formulate a strategy for accelerating the allocation of .mobi Premium Names. There is no timeline yet, but as new allocation opportunities arise, dotMobi will not be shy about letting interested parties — as well as the general public — know.

If you’re curious to learn more, download the full list of .mobi Premium Names, which link to their corresponding Web pages and expressions of interest forms.

Posted in Auctions, dotMobi, ICANN, Premium Names | 2 Comments »

ICANN #38: a very special event for goMobi and the .mobi domain

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

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.

Posted in Events, Featured Sites, goMobi, ICANN | No Comments »

New ICANN.mobi Site for ICANN No. 38 in Brussels

Friday, June 18th, 2010

New Mobile Site for ICANN No. 38

With just a couple of days to go before the 38th ICANN Meeting officially starts in Brussels, dotMobi is very proud to announce a brand new ICANN.mobi site.

After all the appreciation and great feedback that the four previous versions have received from the ICANN community, we have now completely redesigned the site to be even more pleasant to the eye and easy to navigate, ensuring that you can make the best of your ICANN Brussels experience.

One of the most appreciated features of the past sites has definitely been the “What´s on now” section, allowing attendees to get an immediate overview of the sessions happening at any given moment: we have now merged this function into the main “Schedule” display and made it the default view, while still allowing to easily display the full list of sessions for a specific day with one simple click. On top of that, the search function has been improved, and it now allows full text search to find just the session you need.

The site also includes a very handy Google Maps integration which allows to get turn by turn direction from anywhere in Brussels: considering how the attendees are spread around different hotels, we expect this feature to prove quite useful.

Although I am sure we all agree that ICANN Brussels is one of the key events of this year and many important decisions are expected to be made at this meeting, we do realize that many people will have their heads somewhere else: to make sure you can plan properly and avoid nasty schedule conflicts, we have also added a handy “World Cup Planner” with the schedule of all the matches in South Africa (after a long debate, we decided that merging this section with the meeting´s official schedule and highlighting the session-match conflicts would have probably been going a bit too far).

We hope you will enjoy ICANN.mobi and that you will find it useful: if you are in Brussels (and even if you are not) we´d love to hear what you think, and how we can keep improving it.