There’s a new top-level domain in town, and its name is Dotmobi. The name is a moniker for mLTD, which stands for mobile Top Level Domain, Ltd. It was appointed to be the authorized worldwide registry for the .mobi domain by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers in July of 2005.
The domain was created in order to provide places for sites that are tailored specifically for the small screens on mobile phones.
Dotmobi began its sunrise period (intended only for trademark owners) on June 12. Big companies such as Virgin, Target, ESPN, eBay, Ferrari, VISA, American Express, Wal-Mart, and Rolex were among the first brands to register their .mobi domains within the first few hours of the sunrise period. The trademark sunrise period will end on Monday, August 21, 2006.
A limited industry sunrise which lasted from May 22 to May 29 yielded approximately 2,000 registered domain names, while about 5,000 domain names were registered during the first two days of the sunrise period for trademark holders.
The reason for these big companies registering these domain names remains to be seen. Many of them might have registered these .mobi domain names just to protect their trademark instead of doing so in order to enter this arena.
Some companies may wait before taking on a project with these .mobi sites. If their pages already look fine on the smaller screens found on mobile phones they may not have a reason to build a separate site on the new domain. A simple redirect to an existing .com page would be sufficient.
“There is a trend among companies to go directly to the consumer,” said Dotmobi’s VP of marketing and business development, Alexa Raad. “They are opening the gates, reaching consumers more efficiently. It’s all about channel building. These companies want to build their brands beyond the PC or the newspapers.”
Sources:
http://www.namesbeyond.com/mobi/index.php
http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/
marketinginsider/wpn-50-20060621BrandNames
TargetMobiMarket.html
http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?
guid=8327148B-97B8-4EDE-B4D2-AF1F0EDB527E
http://www.dotmobi.org/
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