Destination: Dotmobi: Dotmobi Websites Are Not Widely Visited -- Yet, but Investors Hope They Will Be the Next Big Online Destination for Users of Mobile Devices
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By Bridget Carey, The Miami Herald  Feb. 6--Think fast: You need to order flowers right now for [insert loved one's name here], who is in the car with you. How do you do it without the person knowing?   Answer: Use your cellphone to order online at the new domain name flowers.mobi.
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As an impressive roster of technology industry celebrities gather at this week&#39;s&#160;Web 2.0 Summit&#160;in San Francisco, all eyes are on emerging opportunities for Internet companies.Experts point to online video, mobile Internet services, social networking, and enterprise adoption of advanced Web technologies as areas that are ripe for further innovation and capitalization.At the event, CEOs, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs will offer their views, in keynote speeches and panels, on a myriad of topics, both specific to their businesses as well as applicable to the Internet market in general.The lineup of speakers includes CEOs like News Corp.&#39;s Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft&#39;s Steve Ballmer, Facebook&#39;s Mark Zuckerberg, eBay&#39;s Meg Whitman, Viacom&#39;s Philippe Dauman and AT&amp;T&#39;s Randall Stephenson.Still, by now, the term&#160;Web 2.0, once synonymous with bold innovation in online services and applications, &quot;is getting a little tired,&quot; said industry analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence.&quot;It has always been an elusive term, but now it is very mainstream. It&#39;s widely used and the features that were characteristic of those early Web 2.0 companies are now widely adopted,&quot; Sterling said in a phone interview, referring to things like content tagging and sharing, blogs, wikis, and syndicated feeds.While receptive to the possibility that new, fresh ideas may come out of the conference, Sterling wonders how much the economic uncertainty in the U.S. is affecting the spirit of innovation so emblematic of the Web 2.0 era.On the other hand, Tim Draper, founder and managing director of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, sees big opportunities in the application of Web 2.0 technologies in large organizations, particularly in areas like hosted software, project management and communication, and networking.&quot;All the applications that have driven the enterprise over the last client server generation will be renewed with Web 2.0 applications that will replace or enhance those applications. Big opportunities [lie] here,&quot; he said in an e-mail interview.Opportunities also exist in the adaptation of online services to mobile devices, as demand for accessing these services from cell phones continues growing strongly, he said.Draper is also confident that players in the online video space will find business models that will satisfy the video creators, artists, and the providers of online video platforms, like Google&#39;s YouTube. &quot;Entrepreneurs are honing in on models that work,&quot; he said.Meanwhile, Andrew Parker, an associate analyst at venture capital firm Union Square Ventures, has great faith in online services that, with permission, monitor users&#39; activities and, based on that data, personalize their offerings.&quot;I call this set of services &#39;implicit Web services&#39; because they involve implicit data collection instead of explicit data entry,&quot; he said in an e-mail interview. &quot;I think we&#39;ll see more valuable implicit web services going forward.&quot;Some big vendors are taking advantage of the conference&#39;s popularity to announce new products and partnerships. Among them are:-- Hewlett-Packard, as part of its Print 2.0 initiative to improve printing from Web sites, will announce new relationships with large Web publishers, like Disney.com, Microsoft&#39;s Windows Live Spaces social network and blogging service, Yahoo&#39;s Flickr photo sharing site, and the popular Graffiti application for Facebook.--&#160;MySpace and Skype are partnering&#160;to let MySpace members make free voice calls via the MySpace instant messaging service. The new service, called MySpace IM with Skype, will integrate MySpace&#39;s IM service with Skype&#39;s Internet voice communications services, and will be generally available in November.-- Fast Search &amp; Transfer will unveil Fast Active Mobile, a mobile search and personal recommendations platform that wireless carriers can implement to offer these services to their customers. Fast Active Mobile will build a profile for every wireless subscriber, taking into account their searches, product views, purchases and other activities and information.-- NewsGator Technologies, an enterprise RSS vendor, will announce Social Sites, an add-on to its RSS Enterprise Server, designed to enhance Microsoft&#39;s Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 by making it easier to discover what colleagues within the organization are doing.The Web 2.0 Summit ends Friday.
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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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DotMobi, the industry group that  registers domain names for the mobile Web, launched a database  of cellphone specifications on Tuesday to help software  developers better design Web sites for mobile phones.
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Hitwise&#8217;s Bill Tancer recently posted about the distribution of Google&#8217;s traffic across its many properties. As you might expect and has been historically true, that distribution is dominated by search.  Right now, Google owns the &#8220;brand&#8221; in search. But Yahoo and Microsoft have more &#8220;diversified&#8221; traffic across multiple properties. Without some more effort and &#8212; dare I [...]
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The wide variety of operating systems on mobile phones is hindering the growth of cool mobile Internet applications, according to Arun Sarin, CEO of network operator Vodafone.The success of a mobile Internet application can be influenced by how easy it is to develop for a particular software platform, and how attractive the resulting application is to use.&quot;The first imperative for us is world-class user experience,&quot; Sarin said in the opening keynote session of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday.&quot;The easier the interface, the more you use it and the more you get onto the Internet.&quot;Mobile phone operating systems are key to that experience, he said, but there are too many of them: as many as 30 or 40, Sarin estimated.&quot;We have to reduce that number. There&#39;s no way that developers of cool applications can develop for that many operating systems. If we had three, four, five, that would be better,&quot; he said.&quot;Note, I didn&#39;t say one!&quot; he said, with a nod to the market for PC operating systems. &quot;We&#39;ve seen that movie before.&quot;One reason for the proliferation of mobile phone operating systems is that, historically, handset suppliers offered their own proprietary code to make the best use of their phones&#39; limited processing and memory resources. Developing applications for such closed systems is difficult.Today&#39;s high-end phones, though, have as much computing power as low-end PCs, spawning a new market for operating systems such as Symbian OS or Windows Mobile that run on phones from multiple manufacturers.That ought to reduce the number of software platforms in the market, but more are still arriving, including several based on the open source operating system Linux.Vodafone distributes and supports phones with many different operating systems, but not the one that for Sarin proved the importance of the operating system: Apple&#39;s iPhone.&quot;Apple has raised the bar with the iPhone, and we all now know how important user interfaces are,&quot; he said. &quot;We as an industry will have to raise our game to provide the kind of user interface that our customers are now becoming accustomed to.&quot;Apple changed the market with slick software and a closed design tied to its own hardware, initially making it difficult for developers to add applications. The company plans to open things up a little with the release of a software development kit (SDK) later this month.Another new arrival in the mobile phone operating system market is Google, which hopes to change the market with a different approach: making it easy to build and use compelling mobile Web applications.Google began by releasing the software development kit for&#160;Android, an application framework built on a Linux base, and founded an industry group, Open Hardware Alliance, to encourage its use. Several chip makers are&#160;demonstrating prototype phones running Android&#160;in Barcelona this week, and Google hopes that manufacturers will release handsets based on the software later this year.Naturally, Google hopes to profit from this move by driving greater use of its services on the Web. But other companies will benefit too, if their sites are usable by more phone owners.For Sarin, that&#39;s good news too: more Internet use means more revenue-generating data traffic on his network.
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By Arellano, Jonah  Videos account for more than half the Internet traffic currently. This phenomenon is projected to soar as the market for video "shorts" becomes more popular.  One site, Blip TV delivers online television shows.
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By Vijayan Menon  IN the mobile world, time and space will have no significance given the feverish pace at which technology is advancing.  It was not too long ago when a mobile phone was a chunky, brick- like gadget that had a limited range and which one lugged around.
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Predicting the next big thing is a popular activity in the mobile and wireless space.  Several experts look at what happened with some previous big things and predict what's next.
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China Mobile and Focus Media: Domestic titans selling at knock-down prices.
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Design and better access, not a new domain extension, will draw users to the mobile Internet, say analysts.
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Fred Wilson thinks so. And I agree. The reason the tech sector runs in cycles of euphoric booms and deep busts is that there is little support for long-term investment in tech. The new concepts that will fuel the next boom cycle are already here, but there isn't enough money flowing into developing them. The ideas that are getting investment are more and more derivative of the original idea that fueled the boom cycle that is now (likely) coming to an end. If you look back at the last two busts, there was one in the early 90s when the software boom had run out of juice, and then in the early 00s when the web boom had run its course. In both cases, the seeds of the next boom were already planted, but the investors weren't pushing money in their direction. The savior after the early 90s bust was the web, and the second was what they call Web 2.0, which is a really lame way to describe the networked creative environment, what I called the Two-Way Web. I'm going to be in NY in October, and I hope to meet with Fred and other investors to talk about how we can soften the busts and enhance the booms.
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Search junkies can be psyched for a cool site, but will some features backfire?
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CBS Mobile is teaming up with Medio Systems to add mobile search capabilities and search advertising opportunities to CBS Mobile sites. Is this ÃÂÃ¯Â¿Â½ÃÂÃÂ¢ÃÂÃÂ¯ÃÂÃÂ¿ÃÂÃÂ½ÃÂÃÂ¯ÃÂÃÂ¿ÃÂÃÂ½the shot heard round the worldÃÂÃ¯Â¿Â½ÃÂÃÂ¢ÃÂÃÂ¯ÃÂÃÂ¿ÃÂÃÂ½ÃÂÃÂ¯ÃÂÃÂ¿ÃÂÃÂ½ of mobile search?
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Though Brits aren't nearly as brainwashed Yes, Googleâs dominance extends beyond the desktop. Today, market research firm M:Metrics unveiled its latest rankings of the most popular mobile web destinations in the U.S. and Britain, and Google sits atop both lists.â¦
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While Yahoo is working with major mobile &#038; wireless carriers to provide advertising via the mobile Yahoo network and its partners, Google is working with Vodafone to develop a GPS oriented location based Google Maps for Vodafone users. The Guardian quotes: &#8220;Vodafone sees Google Maps as a new milestone in the relationship that both companies are developing,&#8221; [...]
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If you can't buy stuff, is it really m-commerce? E-commerce sites are putting their future success at risk by failing to offer users the ability to buy through their mobile websites, a new study has revealed.â¦