movingconcierge said:
It just dawned on me that .mobi may be the biggest, most elaborate and well-funded, most contrived, well-thought out, bought into, successful and longest living hoax in history.... :p
I looked inside my computer and I couldn't find a mobi anywhere!!!
Who here has seen even one mobi running around? I laid a mobi trap, used chewed-up .coms and .tvs for bait .... nothing, not a nibble.
I will believe it when science has captured a mobi, live or dead, and studied it properly. Until then it is a crypto-extension.
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Neil Edwards could have provided a lot more informaiton, his "thats a good question"s were annoying and claims of development percentages exagerated. But it seemed to me he answered three of the biggest questions on this board - indirectly, but clearly:
What is happening with the premiums/RFPs?
Mobi is moving too slow?
What is the contribution of the backers?
Neil Edwards said that .mobi began as a project of Nokiea in the year 2000. Nokiea had determined then, in 2000, that there was a need for standards to enhance the usability of their cellphones and that the best way to do that would be a new domain extension. Nokiea submitted an application to ICANN at that time for an extension (wonder if it was called .mobi?).
The application was rejected, so Nokiea formed a consortium of industry leaders to agree on standards and convince ICANN. Edwards and company work for Nokiea, et al -- they are not promoters who were drinking one night and decided to make .mobi.
So .mobi has been under development for about seven years. With that time scale they do not feel a hurry to release the premiums until they feel the "market indicators" are ripe. The premium names are their trump cards and they intend to play them well. They are working on industry adoption, it is a slow process, Edwards mentioned speaking a few weeks ago to the M50 I think he called it- a clique of the very largest company's chief marketing officers - when I Googled it one site called it the "skull and bones" of marketing, refering to the elite Yale group that includes President Bush.
Mobi has been 7 years in the making, it is PART of the companies listed as backers. It is a delibrate corporate strategy put in place to enhance the value of the corporations' products by creating a easily identified mark that would insure usability of web content by their customers.