'Land Rush' Begins for .MOBI Domains
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Today is the day that designated domain name registrars have been given the green light to open up the application process for new .mobi top-level domain Web addresses to anyone seeking to establish a name in the burgeoning mobile Web space.
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Google is among more than 260 companies vying for wireless licenses to be auctioned in January, which could allow the search giant to extend its reach to the mobile Internet.
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Anyone welcome, provided you fork out the fee Mobile Top Level Domain (mTLD), the body which runs the .mobi domain, is looking for individuals and companies to participate in discussions about the emerging technology.â¦
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There has been talk of the Indian online advertising and search driven portal landgrab is beginning with Yahoo &#038; Google possibly targeting acquisitions of Rediff and other popular Indian web destinations, but Yahoo just made a move which is quite similar to their Right Media strategy in the US. Yahoo has acquired a 35% stake in [...]
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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has approved two new internet address types: .mobi and .jobs. This is just a preliminary approval.
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It&#39;s easy to be wowed by Japan&#39;s mobile communications infrastructure. &quot;Next-generation&quot; 3G coverage is now so ubiquitous that carriers have already stopped launching 2G phones; an impressive array of attractive handsets offer free digital TV; phones can be used to pay for goods and train rides, thanks to embedded contactless smart cards; and on the mobile information superhighway data whizzes along at 3.6Mbps. But watch out for the off-ramps.While Japan has led the world with many of the services offered to consumers, in some ways the mobile ecosystem here is downright backward as I found out last weekend when I tried to buy a new phone. A broken handset necessitated a new model and this is where my story begins.In Japan, phones are sold by carriers and not the phone makers. Companies like Fujitsu, NEC, Sony Ericsson, and a few foreign vendors including Nokia, Samsung, and LG sell their phones in the thousands to carriers. This gives carriers the ability to pretty much dictate to the phone maker what software needs to be installed.This model is one of the reasons that mobile Internet services like I-mode took off here so quickly. There was no chicken-and-egg situation with phone makers and users waiting for each other to take the plunge. NTT DoCoMo decided I-mode would be in new phones and so it was.But this model has a downside. Phones are so tightly customized to each carrier that it&#39;s not practical to keep the same handset when switching carriers, and if you see a phone you like you can only buy it if it&#39;s offered by your carrier.Back to my story. The new phone was looking quite expensive so I decided to switch carriers and take advantage of a free phone on a competitor network. Japan launched number portability a year ago, so I could make the jump without losing my cell-phone number. I&#39;d still have the hassle of a new e-mail address, but it appeared a small price to pay.Before long I had a new phone in my hands, but my phone numbers remained locked in the old handset. The new carrier didn&#39;t have a cable to hook up to my old phone so they couldn&#39;t transfer the address book and it wasn&#39;t possible to beam it between the phones. While my old carrier was gung-ho on Bluetooth, my new carrier wasn&#39;t so enthusiastic, so the new phone had no support. Similarly, while the new phone offered infrared, the old phone didn&#39;t. Heavy customization strikes again.Back home I fired up my PC and managed to get my address book from the old phone into the computer. Getting it to the new phone via a memory card seemed like an easy task ... but no! The VCard file wasn&#39;t being properly read by the new phone. Carriers, it was explained to me when I called the help line, often used custom fields in their VCards so there were sometimes problems. So much for a common standard.I won&#39;t bore you with the technicalities of how I eventually got my address book into my new phone, but suffice to say this story has a happy ending. I&#39;m now back in cruise control, enjoying all the attractions the mobile superhighway has to offer.The number portability system that enabled me to keep my phone number is coincidentally one-year-old this week. About 3 percent of users in Japan -- roughly 3.7 million people -- have made use of the system during its first year -- far less than the industry predicted, or feared.One thing that&#39;s said to be stopping users from switching is the inability to keep their e-mail addresses. While carriers fussed over the details of keeping numbers, they forgot, or perhaps ignored, the need to carry e-mail addresses between carriers. In other countries this wouldn&#39;t be a big deal because most messaging is done via SMS, which relies on phone numbers, but in Japan the advanced stage of the market has again caused hassle for consumers.
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October 28, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Two new domains, .post and .travel could appear next year after ICANN , the organization that oversees the Internet address system, announced their preliminary approval on Wednesday, according
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By Goh Thean Eu  MALAYSIA'S smallest mobile operator DiGi.Com Bhd has promised to invest hundreds of millions of ringgit to roll out high-speed mobile Internet services if it wins a government licence to do so.
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The internet could soon have two new domain names, aimed at mobile services and the jobs market. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has given preliminary approval to two new addresses - .
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With mobile phones soon expected to push PCs aside as the most popular tool to access the Internet, the company has given mobility a top priority and is taking steps to establish its mobile search engine as the technology of choice for mobile operators.
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One domain, &quot;.mobi,&quot; will be set up for websites trying to work with the restrictions of Internet surfing on cell phones.
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Desperately seeking revenue A consortium of network operators are banding together to back their own mobile internet search, according to The Telegraph.â¦
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Internet users may soon see two new domain name suffixes in their browser window: ".post" to identify the postal community and ".travel" for travel industry associations and organizations.
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DECEMBER 14, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Two new top-level domain names moved closer to approval this week, as the body charged with overseeing the Internet&#39;s technical matters moved into negotiations with the companies applying to set up and run the &quot;.
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(InfoWorld) - Fast Search & TransferÂ and InfoSpaceÂ have expanded the scope of a years-long collaboration in mobile search, aiming to improve the technology they offer to carriers and end users. The companies have developed a hosted search service they will offer to carriers, which in turn can offer it under their own brand, Fast Search and InfoSpace announced Monday. In recent years, Fast Search and InfoSpace have provided mobile search engines to carriers -- individually and jointly -- but this new service represents a deeper partnership that goes beyond joint licensing and marketing. It involves ongoing research and development as the vendors seek to edge out competitors in mobile search functionality. They will focus on improvements to the search index, development of a mobile ad platform, expansion of their existing filtering and recommendation capabilities, and refinement of "zero term" search, in which content is pushed out to users based on their preferences and profiles and without requiring a keyword query, said Michael Brady, Fast Search's senior director of mobile business development. Since 2001, Fast Search has focused on the enterprise search market, but it is convinced consumer mobile search is worth pursuing because it is expected to grow significantly in users and advertising revenue in the coming years, Brady said. InfoSpace specializes in mobile content delivery and search. Industry analyst Iain Gillott of iGR said carriers feel more comfortable with "white-label" deals because they like to maintain as much control as possible over subscribers. Having GoogleÂ or YahooÂ pushing ads directly to their customers terrifies them, Gillott said. A big challenge mobile search providers will face is getting users comfortable with search on their cell phones. "Search isn't the first thing that jumps to mind when you open up your phone," Gillott said. Fast Search and InfoSpace will need to work with carriers to make their search engine visible and easily accessible on handsets, he said. The mobile search ad market is so small and new that Jupiter Research considered it almost nonexistent until the end of 2006, although the market research company plans to issue a forecast for it this year, analyst Julie Ask said. There is no clear market leader at this very early stage of the game. The main ad-related challenge for mobile search providers will be to gain a big enough audience for their inventories of ads, Ask said. Then comes the issue of relevance. "If I am online and type 'Bruce Springsteen' into Google, I receive 2.75 million listings. This is useless on a mobile device. They need to assume that I have intentions that are different on a mobile device than on my PC," Ask said. For example, if a user enters the name of a recording artist such as Springsteen, the mobile search engine should assume the user may be looking for ringtones, wallpaper photos, or concert tickets, Ask wrote.
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The alternative search engine buys Bloglines in a move to compete with the likes of Google and Yahoo. Also: Mitsubishi feels the financial pain of repeated scandals.... EarthLink earnings are up and looking good... and more.
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It joins the battle for mobile users with Google.