Good news to website that designed for mobile devices, now you can own .mobi domain name !!

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved the .mobi domain on Monday, July 11, 2005, at a meeting in Luxemburg. The first .mobi names will be expected to be registered in the first half of 2006, and will be administered by a company called mTLD Top Level Domain Ltd, of Dublin, Ireland, which reportedly will have 20 to 25 people and an annual budget of US$10 million to run the operation.

However, there are still some obstacles for the new domain to get widely used.

Quoted:
“The answer isn’t having another extension; the answer is having more applications and more capabilities for supporting mobile devices,” Gartner Latest News about Gartner Group Research Vice President Phillip Redman said.

Among the obstacles that the carriers are struggling to overcome is the lack of user access the Web from their mobile devices. According to one of those touting the .mobi domain, the GSM Association, there are 1.8 billion mobile users in the world but only 12 to 14 percent have ever used the Web from their phones. Honestly, I have not try using my hand phone to access to the Internet, but it’s simply because the GPRS fees over here is expensive. :p By the way, I used to get latest football results utilizing HTTP connections through the J2ME application I developed.

Quoted:
“It shows that mobile technology and information that’s optimized for mobile use is getting a lot more respect based on the demand that consumers are showing for it,” Mark Elliott, a communications manager for Sprint, said.

Hopefully, more websites targeting mobile devices, that come with .mobi domain, will be launched next year.