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Mobile Web Surfing Made Easy
By Kathryn Jones
October marks the beginning of a beautiful friendship between the Internet and billions of mobile phone users across the globe. A new Internet domain called .mobi was unleashed to the public on Sept. 26 with the goal to make accessing websites on mobile devices less cumbersome for those on the go.
Hostway UK recently released the results of a survey that revealed most people have newer mobile devices that will allow them to access the Internet. However, 73 percent of those people are not taking advantage of their phone's Web features because they find that their phones are slow at uploading content, and most of the sites exceed screen size and are difficult to navigate.
The survey stated that 90 percent of the people interviewed said they would use mobile Internet if they were assured that the pages would load faster and not derive costly fees from their phone providers.
That's where .mobi comes in. It makes mobile devices as useful as a PC for browsing sites, yet far more portable. Since there are four times as many cell phones as there are PCs in the world, .mobi's goal is to act as a universal gateway for accessing the Internet at any time, any place.
Mobile phone users don't browse the Web the same way they would a PC. When using a phone to access the Internet, they want contextually relevant information at a quicker pace. Rather than clicking on a weather or sports page and navigating around until they find that day's sports scores or weather forecast, .mobi site users will be fed this information right away in bite-size bits.
The organization charged with overseeing the domain name registration, Mobile Top Level Domain (MTLD), said that if phone users go to an address with the .mobi suffix, the site is guaranteed to be formatted especially for mobile devices. When using a PC, most URLs begin with http:// or www. Now with .mobi, users can type in yahoo.mobi, aol.mobi or espn.mobi and know that the site they are accessing will work on a mobile phone.
“Some sites are optimized for mobile users, but others are not," said Vance Hedderel, a spokesman for .mobi and MTLD. “We are trying to make it easy for users to know thousands of domain names that have already been registered within the first day.”
Almost 13,000 companies have already registered .mobi addresses as part of a preregistration process open to trademark holders, including Yahoo, Google, 20th Century Fox, Nokia, Sony, Vodafone and Microsoft.
MTLD expects 200,000 mobile sites to be registered during “Land Rush,” a sort of early-bird special when available .mobi domain names can be registered at $45 between Sept. 26 and Oct. 11.
Oct. 12 is “General Ongoing Registration” when domain names can be registered for $35 indefinitely. Both registration periods require a minimum two-year/maximum 10-year registration contract with a renewal fee of $35 a year.
Dotmobi is a top-level domain (TLD) approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Domain names can contain the English-language letters A through Z and the digits 0 through 9. Hyphens are allowed, but they cannot begin or end the domain name. Spaces and special characters (including !, $, &, @ and so on) are not permitted. The length of a domain name can be as short as three characters and as long as 63 characters.
The technical requirements for websites using the .mobi name are as follows: First, responses to URLs must be encoded in XHTML (Wap 2.0.) Second, .mobi sites must implement a page at the second domain level in order to eliminate the need for a www. or http://. Third, there are to be no frames.
Feature story provided by MidwestBusiness.com. |
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