Global Community Shows Demand for .mobi Domains

October 3, 2006; 12:08 AM

Individuals and businesses in more than 100 countries around the world registered more than 100,000 .mobi domains in the first four days of the domain's general availability, demonstrating a strong demand for the next evolution of the Internet. In contrast, it took ten years for the general public to register 100,000 PC-based domain names in the early days of the Internet.

.mobi is the first and only top level domain dedicated to delivering Internet content to mobile phones. Built on the open standards developed as part of the Worldwide Web Consortium's (W3C) Mobile Web Initiative, the .mobi domain makes accessing Internet sites on a mobile device faster, less expensive and more reliable by offering content tailored for the mobile Internet.

Among the first names registered were call.mobi, banking.mobi and mp3s.mobi, showing the wide range of users that content providers anticipate accessing the mobile Internet. Additionally, there were many names requested by multiple parties. For example, loan.mobi was requested by more than 80 registrants, while ads.mobi was requested by more than 70. The ten countries with the most registrations were the USA, Canada, the UK, China, France, India, Germany, Japan, Spain and the Netherlands.

Dozens of companies large and small, across all industries, have recently embraced the .mobi domain, including travel (thalys.mobi and kilburnie.mobi), information (live.mobi, businessweek.mobi and cnnmoney.mobi), retail (neckermann.mobi), sports (kicker.mobi), finance (diba.mobi), education (utexas.mobi) and corporate (bmw.mobi and amf.mobi).

"Given the research we've seen over the past year, we knew that there was a demand for the mobile Internet," said Neil Edwards, CEO of dotMobi. "It was great to see more than 13,000 brands get their .mobi domain names during the trademark registration period earlier this year, but it's even more exciting to see the general public sign up more than 100,000 names globally to build mobile Internet sites using the .mobi domain. The mobile Internet revolution is officially underway."

Landrush continues through October 10, followed by Standard General Registration on October 11.

The list of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) accredited registrars for dotMobi domain names can be found at: http://dotmobi.mobi/registrar.

For more information on .mobi domains and how to register .mobi domains, visit http://dotmobi.mobi. Visit the dotMobi blog at http://blog.mobi.

About dotMobi

dotMobi (the informal name of mTLD Top Level Domain, Ltd.), a joint venture company based in Dublin, Ireland with offices in Washington, DC, is leading the development of Internet usage from mobile phones by switching on the .mobi domain name. Unique among domain name providers, dotMobi ensures that services and sites developed around .mobi are optimised for use by mobile devices. On-the-go consumers can have confidence that the Internet site or service will work from their mobile device when using the .mobi address.

dotMobi is backed by leading mobile operators, network and device manufacturers, and Internet content providers, including Ericsson, GSM Association, Hutchison 3, Microsoft, Nokia, Orascom Telecom, Samsung Electronics, Syniverse, T-Mobile, Telefonica Moviles, TIM and Vodafone. dotMobi is also a sponsor of W3C's Mobile Web Initiative.

Vance Hedderel, dotMobi (mobile Top Level Domain, Ltd.) +1-703-485-5563 [email protected] Tara Yingst / Danielle Siemon, A&R Edelman Public Relations +1-650-762-2942 / 2947 [email protected] / [email protected]