.mobi

.mobi

August 4, 2005

It was announced last month that the ICANN or Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has approved the .mobi domain for mobile phone websites. With the Internet and cell phones becoming more popular with each day, it was decided that there is a need for mobile content so that cell phones would be used more often for Internet capabilities.

The group behind this addition is a group of powerful cell phone providers including Hutchison 3, GSM Association, Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Telefonica Moviles, T-Mobile and Vodafone.

There is hope that with the new domain, website developers will begin to add sites designed to be viewed from a cell phone or handheld. With the technology improving the websites that can be viewed, it is hopeful that consumers will upgrade their cell phone to one that can best utilize web applications. "As .mobi will encourage the usage of advanced functionalities in mobile devices, the market potential for those devices will increase," they said.

The launch of the new domain, .mobi will begin early in 2006. Trademarked companies will have the first option to purchase new domains and after that, it will become open to the public.


"The style guides will be developed and published prior to the sale of any domain and will be validated with a broad community of mobile Internet vendors and users prior to the style guides being a requirement for any domain purchase. We in .mobi believe that natural industry enforcement will occur and .mobi domains will follow the style guides. For example, if mobile content is not tagged appropriately, it will not show up in a search engine of .mobi content. Companies that are repeated and egregious violators of the style guides will be removed from the name space until compliance is validated," stated Rick Fant, mTLD board member and director of mobile services at Microsoft, in an interview.

With the release of .mobi it is expected that Internet services via cell phones will become more user friendly. Images and such will be developed to fit a small screen versus a PC monitor.

Another major domain, .eu for European sites will be released this year. Click here to find out more about cell phone service.