It will serve as a trust mark and further enable the development of the mobile internet community, said Alexa Raad, MTLD’s VP of marketing and business development. The Dublin, Ireland-based company, which is better known as Dotmobi, this week announced plans for a directory of mobile sites with information about their content, again not restricted to .mobi sites.
There is scant information about mobile content, said Raad. Though some of the big search engines are rumored to have carried out research of their own, they haven’t shared it. She said that although .mobi sites number only 380 to date, there are currently some 200,000 mobile sites, which she said compares with around 90 million domain names on fixed lines. That disparity also explains why there is an ample supply of reports on quality, usability, and ease of access for the fixed-line internet, with companies like Keynote and Gomez specializing in this area.
The idea is to publish information specifically on mobile sites. We estimate that around 35% to 38% of sites have good, multilayered content rather than just operating as parking sites, said Raad.
She said Dotmobi has yet to decide whether or not to charge companies to have their site listed in the directory, or publish it for free with a view to fomenting overall growth of the market. She said the company currently uses the money from .mobi registration fees to pour back into the development of the community.
These initiatives join others from Dotmobi designed to stimulate the development of the mobile internet. There is a site called ready.mobi where a non-mobile site can be gauged on a scale of 1 to 5 for its mobile-readiness which takes into account how long downloads take and how much they cost.
site.mobi offers free site creation with templates and uploads, and a developer forum called dev.mobi, with information about creating more complex sites to run across different OSes, handsets and browsers, plus open source tools.
