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May 24, 2006
Brand Naming: The Dot Mobi Domain
If there ever has been a huge, forbidding goal on the ocean called the World Wide Web, it is seamless, quick connectivity to cell phones. Ahab claimed his own Moby in the South Pacific, now web surfers have bagged theirs in the form of dot-mobi, the new leviathan of brand naming.
The interestingly named and Dublin-based Mobile Top Level Domain, formed by investors such as Microsoft, Google, Samsung Electronics, Nokia, and Vodafone, is using its new, mobile friendly, dot-mobi domain name to make it easier to browse the Internet using cell phones and BlackBerries. The dot-mobi name assures cell phone and Blackberry browsers that they are guaranteed fast access.
Not a small thing when you consider that more people worldwide own cell phones than computers. According to the Wall Street Journal, the captains of the Internet have taken notice: on Monday, in what one writer referred to as a "mad rush", thousands of new Internet domain names were introduced including myyahoo.mobi, google.mobi, fortune.mobi, xboxlive.mobi, msnlive.mobi, 20thcenturyfox.mobi, cbs.mobi, and fox.mobi.
Microsoft alone wants 200 domain names and P&G is expected to register 500 dot-mobi sites for its trademarked products. Even the wireless names have signed up: Cingular.mobi, Sprint.mobi and Verizon.mobi are all registered. This avalanche of new names has led Wirelessweek.com to declare that "the great Wireless Internet land rush is on again".
You have 70 days to register and the cost for trademark names is $140/year for a dot-mobi vs $10/year for a dot-com. The high price discourages cyber-squatters. Dot-mobi is well in sight, I assume most other companies traversing the Webby Seas will "lower away".
Technorati Tags: dot-mobi, .mobi, Mobi, Mobile Top Level Domain, Domain Name
Posted by William Lozito at May 24, 2006 5:32 PM
Posted to Brand Naming
| Branding
| Consumer Electronics
| Marketing
| Naming
| Technology
| Telecommunications
| Trademarking
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dotMobi is unique from other TLDs, most of them actually boutique, because this is the first time (after the dot com of course) a TLD is coined for purely functional, rather than conceptual, reasons...when you consider that the world has four times the number of mobile phones as it has PCs, you realise it is worth the effort to launch a service like this
More info, news & links on dotMobi @ Mobinomy - for the dotMobi Economy...Mobinomy also plans to start offering the first directory service for dotMobi web sites soon
Ec from BPO Database Online