Dot-mobi domain Land Rush begins today at EnCirca.com

September 26, 2006; 05:48 AM

EnCirca, Registrar for the .mobi top-level domain name, announced it will start accepting first-come, first-served registrations starting at 10am EDT on Tuesday, September 26.

"Today is the first day that the general public is able to claim their desired dot-mobi domain names," says Tom Barrett, President of EnCirca. "Trademark owners should also act quickly to protect their brand names in dot-mobi, if they have not already done so."

Starting with today's .mobi Land Rush, there are no restrictions on who may register a .mobi domain name. The .mobi registry expects up to 90,000 names to be registered during the initial land rush, with several hundred thousand registrations by year-end, as prices drop close to the pricing for .com domains.

The .mobi Land Rush follows the end of the Sunrise Period that was designed for registered trademark owners to protect their trademarks. Over 13,000 registered trademarks were registered during this phase, a sign that trademark owners moved quickly to secure their brands in .mobi. The launch of dot-mobi is following the fever caused by the dot-eu top-level domain, that was introduced earlier this year.

The dot-mobi domain, in the form of www.nokia.mobi or www.microsoft.mobi, is intended to be the suffix for web pages that are formatted for cell phones and other wireless devices just as dot-jobs is the domain name for company recruiters and dot-com is the domain name for many Web pages on the wired Internet.

Worldwide, there are four times as many cell phone users as there are Internet users. This means that the wireless Internet has the potential of being much larger than the current PC-based Internet. But few web pages are designed to be accessed via mobile devices. Many sites can't be displayed on tiny cell phone screens, and most would take a much longer time to download than on a PC.

The .mobi top-level domain name, with universal standards and protocols, will help solve these issues. All .mobi domain names must follow a new website protocol to ensure easy viewing from mobile devices. Examples of dot-mobi-optimized websites include http://time.mobi and http://google.mobi.

The .mobi Land Rush is open to all companies, organizations, trademark owners and individuals interested in registering .mobi domain names. EnCirca is offering real-time first-come, first-served applications at www.encirca.com.

About .mobi

Mobile Top Level Domain Ltd (mTLD) is the global registry for the .mobi top level domain. Appointed by ICANN, mTLD investors include Ericsson, Google, GSM Association, Hutchison, Microsoft, Nokia, Orascom Telecom, Samsung Electronics, Syniverse, T-Mobile, Telefonica Moviles, TIM and Vodafone.

EnCirca, Inc. (www.encirca.com), Domain Name Registrar for the .mobi domain, is an ICANN- accredited Registrar founded in 2001, specializing in brand protection in new top-level domain extensions. EnCirca also supports other top-level domains, such as .travel, .jobs and .pro.

Tom Barrett, President, [email protected], +1.781.942.9975