The cell phone is tomorrow's desktop!!!

Nope I didnt say it - Father of Java, James Gosling himself, did! Read full article here

.mobi - good or bad?

Looking at the domain names of some of the popular mobile sites today, each of them seem to follow their own naming convention. This makes it almost impossible for a user to type in the URL directly on he mobile browser and expect to see mobile content, unless the site has server-side user-agent detection in place (like google.com for eg.) - which btw is not very maintainable in long term. The latest .mobi domains kind of addresses this problem as ICANN has placed content restrictions around .mobi registrations which mandates XTHML-MP content be served from .mobi domains. This enables a customer to confidently type .mobi URL - say company.mobi - and expect to see valid mobile content, without being worried about the possibility of getting flooded with the regular web content - wasting costly mobile data. Thus .mobi names do add value by providing initial navigation/getting users to the mobile site. However one could argue that users could use mobile search engines to get to the site rather than typing the URL in, but search results seldom guarantees that you get the right mobile URL.

On the down side, .mobi TLDs are not very mobile friendly in terms of the ease of use - 9 key presses just for the TLD alone isn't fun on a mobile phone.

Unfortunately standardization is something that isn't very popular at the moment in the mobile space - be it URLs, mobile content or even device browsers! Therefore adoption/non-adoption of this new .mobi standard in the mobile community is something we cannot predict right now but I do feel that getting the domains registered is the safest thing to do at this point.