Visa invests in DotMobi

Originally posted on CircleID: 

dotMobi, a consortium to offer the first and only Internet address created for mobile phones, today announced that Visa International has made an investment in dotMobi and will have a representative on dotMobi’s Board of Directors. This investment adds Visa to a consortium that already represents 13 leading mobile operators, network & device manufacturers, and internet content providers.

The addition of Visa to the range of dotMobi investors represents a vital addition to dotMobi’s mobile “ecosystem” represented by dotMobi’s investors. Visa brings to dotMobi extensive mobile commerce and payment capabilities, including solutions for contactless mobile payment, Over the Air (OTA) personalization, coupons and direct marketing.

“Visa’s strategic alliance with dotMobi puts us at the forefront of working with mobile operators and technology providers to develop practical and achievable best practices for the delivery of enhanced mobile commerce services,” said Patrick Gauthier, senior vice president, innovation, Visa International. “This alliance, coupled with our recently launched Visa mobile platform, positions Visa to advance the adoption of mobile services that provide convenience to consumers and value for those within the delivery chain.”

Neil Edwards, CEO of dotMobi. “We’re absolutely delighted to welcome Visa on board as our fourteenth investor. As always, our goal is simply to make the internet mobile. The addition of Visa to our company and to our board is the next step in making that a reality.”

With more than 450,000 domains having been registered with dotMobi since the .mobi domain launched to the public in September and with mobile web sites going live on a daily basis, accessing the Internet on mobile phones is fast becoming a day-to-day reality.

 

I saw the dotMobi presentation at the ICANN Lisbon conference and came away unimpressed. It's not clear to me what the need is for a dotMobi domain. When will a mobile user want to visit a company's dotMobi site?  The only uses I see are (a) to see where a company - eg - dotph.mobi - might be located, and to get that company's contact info.  (b) to click-to-call once the contact info is found.  

 Unfortunately, this isn't useful for big companies - like IBM - who have multiple locations and contact info. Yet it is these companies that will be buying dotMobi. The SMEs will probably just  put their maps/contact information on their existing COM websites. Webservers can detect if the browser is a mobile, and return the simplified page. So I expect more COM websites to be mobile enabled, than dotMobi sites!  This means that the mobile domain that most users will search first will be the COM domain (or the ccTLD domain), rather than the dotMobi site!

It's also clear at this point that DotMobi doesn't have an m-commerce strategy, which to me, is the key rationale for a mobile domain. (This was our conclusion with our  dotPhone foray). Unfortunately, dotMobi's answer is to create dotMobi policy formation group, external to DotMobi and composed of members of various industry groups. This will only make it more difficult for dotMobi to come up with a cohesive and innovative strategy. Innovation isn't really possible when left to industry committees.