Mobile Internet

Thomas Husson | March 26, 2008, 05:11 PM

I have been skeptical at launch and ironic recently about the .mobi initiative.

My point is essentially that consumers should not even have to think about the url they are typing. It should be a smooth and direct experience. From a media / brand perspective, it makes sense to have only one single url to promote / advertise on all your docs.

Having said that, the market is still under construction and it is a good thing to have initiatives like this since they help to define guidelines that will guarantee a consistent user-experience, all the more as they are based on the same open standards recommended by the W3C's Mobile Web initiative. More than the number of registered domain names (close to 1M), the important metrics to look at are the number of live active .mobi websites (10% of the registered names) and even more interesting is the developer community around .mobi (10.000+ developers). At the end of day, it is more about providing tools to develop made-for-mobile websites. You'll find much more info here.

Anyway, I think the debate is not really a technical one. It is about providing the right info in a mobile context. What do your consumers want to have access to when they are on the move or when they browse on a tiny screen? Whatever the technology and even if in the case of an automatically-detected full mobile web browser, mobile Internet is likely to be different than Internet on your mobile.

We are only at a stage where barriers are being removed: compelling multimedia handsets, good browsers, mobile broadband networks and transparent / affordable tariffs. With a growing audience, media / content owners will understand the need to develop optimized mobile web sites. A virtuous cycle is starting with more users driving more innovation and more developments.

In the past 4 years, I have attended lots of conference where everybody was complaining about mobile data tariffs. No that "all you can eat" plans are available, it seems that the problem was solved overnight. This is still far from being the case.

I am curious to see if the speeches will be somehow different at the IIR mobile Internet conference next Tuesday in Berlin.