500,000 .mobi Names Registered Showing Continued Demand for Useful Mobile Content

500,000 .mobi Names Registered Showing Continued Demand for Useful Mobile Content

May 02, 2007

Top brands lead way with millions of pages of mobile
content.

    DUBLIN, Ireland and WASHINGTON, May 2
/Xinhua-PRNewswire/ -- dotMobi, the company behind the
first and only Internet address designed specifically for
mobile phones, today announced more than 500,000 .mobi
domains have been registered in 104 countries since the
domain's commercial launch in October 2006. 

    The continual growth of .mobi registrations illustrates
that content developers are focused on delivering quality
sites and applications to mobile phones for consumers to
use.  Millions of pages of content are now live on .mobi
sites and many of the world's leading brands have gone
".mobi" over the past few months. 

    Travel brands have quickly adopted .mobi sites to
extend their brands for travelers while they are "on
the go." Existing sites range from the 2007 Webby
Award-nominated Travelosa.mobi to SAS (Scandinavian
Airlines), the first airline to enable .mobi access to
flight information, check in and schedules.  Soon,
travelers will see Amtrak.mobi plus the full range of
lodging properties from the Hilton Hotels Corporation
available as .mobi sites. 

    A number of high-end auto brands -- BMW.mobi,
Ferrari.mobi and Rolls-Royce.mobi -- are pioneering the way
for the automobile industry on the mobile web. But
"mobile" travel and automobile brands are only
the start. 

    News and entertainment heavy hitters such as ESPN.mobi,
Maxim.mobi, FoxNews.mobi, BusinessWeek.mobi and
CNNMoney.mobi have gone mobile. And music celebrities like
China's Wei Wei with weiwei.mobi, India's Vayu with
vayu.mobi and Tila Tequila with misstila.mobi have embraced
the mobile internet. 

    A number of mobile operators including TIM, the mobile
arm of Telecom Italia, and Bulgaria's Vivatel are making
.mobi an essential part of their communications strategy. 

    Others are finding unique applications for .mobi sites
such as social networking with yolo.mobi and cerkle.mobi,
hobbyists sites like bigfishtackle.mobi and p-o-k-e-r.mobi
and fitness sites like pumpone.mobi. Some additional hot
sites for people on the go are cabbies.mobi to locate a
taxi in the US, UK and Canada and screenings.mobi to find
film times and locations in those same countries. Also,
VoteScotland.mobi means that people can vote in elections
via their phones instead of going to the polling station. 

    "The results demonstrate the strong role dotMobi
is playing in driving the creation of mobile content on the
Internet," said Neil Edwards, CEO of dotMobi.
"Most importantly, the mobile industry's consumer
focus around creating .mobi sites is bearing strong results
in a short period of time. Consumers finally have
easy-to-use and affordable made-for-mobile content." 

    He added, "Our new cross-platform mobile Web
developer certification program is already graduating
certified developers with hundreds of additional developers
already signed to take certification testing." 
    
    About dotMobi

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

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

    For more information on dotMobi domains and
registration information, visit http://mtld.mobi . Visit
the dotMobi blog at http://blog.mobi .


    For more information, please contact: 

    Vance Hedderel
    dotMobi
    [phone]
    [e-mail]
    
    Danielle Siemon
    A&R Edelman for dotMobi
    [phone]
    [e-mail]
    
    Sasha Manners
    Edelman UK for dotMobi
    [phone]
    [e-mail]