Here's a great overview of dot mobi standards and how they have the potential to make it easy / straightforward / accessible to access internet from a mobile phone. As most of you know, at the moment, if you try to surf the net on your mobile phone, you often run into errors or access-denied messages. That's because not all sites work on all phone browsers, including WAP sites. That's annoying.
If you want someone to view, shop, access your site from their mobile phone -- write your code following dot mobi standards. Then we can all visit.
Article from Roy Illsley, senior research analyst at the Butler Group -
The growth of Internet-ready mobile telephones and the frustration of users that find Web sites are designed for PC Web access, and not the limited screen and navigational capabilities of a mobile telephone, was the catalyst for the industry to work together and agree on the use of open standards to service this sector of the market.
Today, if you are using an Internet-ready mobile telephone there are only a small number of sites designed for the device, and these are often difficult to find. Therefore, by registering all content designed for the capabilities of mobile telephones under one TLD name, users can trust that any site ending in "mobi" will be compatible with their mobile devices.
Estimates vary for the number of mobile devices used to connect to the Internet, but a conservative figure is that by 2008 there will be 1.3 billion worldwide. Therefore, servicing this market with content designed for a user 'on-the-go' has significant commercial potential.
Consider the business traveler who needs to find the latest information on flights, hotel accommodation, or stock market prices while en-route. A laptop is useful, but requires the user to stop, unpack, connect, and then access the information; this is not always convenient, whereas accessing this information on the move from a mobile telephone would be.
A Dublin (Ireland) based company, mobile Top Level Domain Ltd (mTLD), is leading the development of Internet usage from mobile devices by switching on the dot.mobi domain name.
As a specialist domain name provider, mTLD ensures that services and sites developed around dot.mobi are optimized for use by mobile devices. mTLD has worked with the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) to produce a set of open standards that leading mobile telephone manufacturers can adopt to ensure these Web sites have the same look and feel from any mobile telephone.
mTLD has already issued temporary domain names to Newbay, Nokia, Google, TIM, Vodafone, and the Weather Channel, among others, to demonstrate the improved reliability of downloading dot.mobi Web content on mobile devices.
For the past week I have used the http://nokia.mobi and http://google.mobi sites, and the first thing that, as a user, I found different, was that the site address does not need to be prefaced with www, which inputting on a mobile telephone can be problematic. Other significant differences are the simpler navigation, only requiring the use of the up or down key, and the easy-to-read screen - all information is clearly displayed with no left or right scrolling required.
BUTLER GROUP OPINION
Ultimately, the success of dot.mobi will depend on the content providers producing Web sites that attract and retain the interest of Internet-ready mobile telephone users.
Why wait for an entire industry to rebuild what they have into a new "mobile format"? Solutions like our Skweezer portal leverage the existing desktop content and marketing investments of Publishers.
Posted by: Kevin Perkins, CEO Greenlight Wireless | June 06, 2006 at 01:03 AM