CNN announces 90 million susbcribers to CNN Mobile ....NO MOBI extension REQUIRED (or even acknowledged). ....And now here comes Ask® Mobile GPS™ AGAIN IAC is oblivious to dotMOB's very existance and they have the 270 MILLION eyeballs!
As you can see from the full page "m" (before the) DOT brand ad in USA Today, the mobile branding being engrained in the public eye is just not the one everyone hoped for. Don't shoot the messenger. If you have an investment you should be on the MOBI people who took your money to promote and advertise the cause. Hate them, not me.
4 comments:
Do you have a negative personal interest toward dot Mobi? There are seemingly a lot more villainous topics within your scope of expertise. It seems to me that dot Mobi is an honest attempt (however successful orunsuccessful) at creating a mobile compatible namespace. Why not post to your blog anytime companies uses dot Com instead of dot Net?
For a domain that's only been available for nine months and has gotten ESPN, Amtrak, Hilton, Polo, BusinessWeek, BWM, Maxim, SAS, Bank of America, Fox News and Rolls Royce, plus thousands of small businesses on board, as well as having registered 550,000 domains, you may be sounding the death knell a bit prematurely.
Big brands move in their own time ... and nine months honestly isn't a long time in corporate terms.
You might want to look at http://showcase.mtld.mobi/ to see the many types and kinds of businesses that are finding new opportunities -- and revenue streams -- via the .mobi domain.
That said, dotMobi's mission is to make the internet mobile by helping to grow mobile content and usage. That's why we launched our developer's forum at http://dev.mobi as well as our site building tools at http://site.mobi. While we think the .mobi domain is the best way to bring the disparate elements of mobility together for consumers, we're happy to see USA Today and others going mobile and encouraging use of the mobile internet (and that goes for the iPhone as well).
Thanks for your comments. I'm sorry for a misunderstanding and want to set the record straight.
I am not out to indict dotMOBI or impede your success. I'm an investor too. I have a lot riding on your success and wish every developer welll.
Here's my issue: You tout a unique selling proposition that consumers will be engrained to substitute Mobi when they want a Mobi site, which will drive more adoption and easier use.
But you also have a responsibility to those who invested in your extension based on this claim, to do the advocacy necessary to make it so.
My blog or domain forums won't kill your project. Users aren't reading these pages. Consumer adoption is key and right now the consumers are seeing ads like these with everything but.
This is especially unacceptable in two examples I cited from members of the consortium (many signing one ad for mobiletv.com). They defy their own standards in print.
A shareholder could make heads roll for that and that's exactly what you guys need to be doing to save your brand. I'm just showing you a radar screen of two planes about to collide. Only you can save your brand.
With 550K registrations booked you don't need to be cutting and pasting the playbook message here. You closed the sale. Now invest in the PR and advocacy plan to get on the news, be on the Today Show, have Paris Hilton typing in a Mobi... you know what YOU need to do to get the word out to the consumers and corporations, even to have a slight chance.
I wish you luck because as you see my blog I tend to call out all kinds of examples of backwards branding. Finally there's an easy way to extend a 30 second spot on the web, and everyone misses it by refusing to use a simple domain. They can't even get dotCOM straight, so you got some work to do.
Vance,
Frankly, the Fortune 500 name-dropping is disingenuous.
Question:
How many of the obscure and mostly worthless two letter ccTLDs (.ws, .cc etc) can say that "ESPN, Amtrak, Hilton, Polo, BusinessWeek, BWM, Maxim, SAS, Bank of America, Fox News and Rolls Royce" are among their customers?
Answer:
Pretty much all of them. It's called a defensive registration for brand protection. It doesn't mean the TLD will be a success, or even useful.
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