By Roy Illsley, senior research analyst at the Butler Group

This week sees the launch of the dot.mobi Top Level Domain (TLD) name. This will be the first TLD name designed especially for Internet-ready mobile telephones, and the mobile industry has been given until Aug. 28 as a "Sunrise" period to register their trade and service marks as domain names. After Aug. 28 the dot.mobi address goes on general release.

The growth of Internet-ready mobile telephones and the frustration of users that find Web sites are designed for PC Web access, and not the limited screen and navigational capabilities of a mobile telephone, was the catalyst for the industry to work together and agree on the use of open standards to service this sector of the market.

Today, if you are using an Internet-ready mobile telephone there are only a small number of sites designed for the device, and these are often difficult to find. Therefore, by registering all content designed for the capabilities of mobile telephones under one TLD name, users can trust that any site ending in "mobi" will be compatible with their mobile devices.

Estimates vary for the number of mobile devices used to connect to the Internet, but a conservative figure is that by 2008 there will be 1.3 billion worldwide. Therefore, servicing this market with content designed for a user 'on-the-go' has significant commercial potential.

Consider the business traveler who needs to find the latest information on flights, hotel accommodation, or stock market prices while en-route. A laptop is useful, but requires the user to stop, unpack, connect, and then access the information; this is not always convenient, whereas accessing this information on the move from a mobile telephone would be.

A Dublin (Ireland) based company, mobile Top Level Domain Ltd (mTLD), is leading the development of Internet usage from mobile devices by switching on the dot.mobi domain name.

As a specialist domain name provider, mTLD ensures that services and sites developed around dot.mobi are optimized for use by mobile devices. mTLD has worked with the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) to produce a set of open standards that leading mobile telephone manufacturers can adopt to ensure these Web sites have the same look and feel from any mobile telephone.

mTLD has already issued temporary domain names to Newbay, Nokia, Google, TIM, Vodafone, and the Weather Channel, among others, to demonstrate the improved reliability of downloading dot.mobi Web content on mobile devices.

For the past week I have used the http://nokia.mobi and http://google.mobi sites, and the first thing that, as a user, I found different, was that the site address does not need to be prefaced with www, which inputting on a mobile telephone can be problematic. Other significant differences are the simpler navigation, only requiring the use of the up or down key, and the easy-to-read screen - all information is clearly displayed with no left or right scrolling required.

Ultimately, the success of dot.mobi will depend on the content providers producing Web sites that attract and retain the interest of Internet-ready mobile telephone users. ENS