DotMobi, the company behind the .mobi top-level domain, now offers support on its developer forum.The forum is a central location where developers can go for information, examples, how-to guides and case studies of mobile sites. Online training courses are also available for working with .mobi.

Ronan Cremin, director of Developer Initiatives at mTLD, dotMobi's parent company, says: "The web democratized the publishing process, making it possible for anyone to publish cheaply, but this has not been the case in the mobile space - developing sites that work well on a mobile device is still too difficult and not well understood. With the developers- forum we have a place to create and collect open-source tools for developing .mobi sites. This makes mobile publishing much easier.

The developer forum includes:

• Discussion forums - places where developers can pose questions seek answers, as well as search for existing solutions
• Blog area - this is an area where dotMobi staff and certain key industry personalities will maintain blogs
• Training - there is a streaming training course that anybody can view in order to help them develop good mobi sites
• Site validator - a tool to help people check that their sites work well on real phones
• Technical articles - specific articles on how to build mobile sites
• Solution finder - a "matchmaker" function to help site owners find mobile developers who can build their sites
• Case studies - technical studies of real mobile sites

In the beginning of 2006, dotMobi released its Switch On guides for developers. Switch On guides are best-practice guidelines that are simple and straightforward, with the aim of making content and services work on mobile devices. The goal is not that all mobile sites look the same, but that they are built on the same principles of small pieces of texts and images, which are called "content snaps."

The domain standards are based on open standards from the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, which comprises major telecommunication vendors and operators from around the world.

The potential of the mobile internet can be seen from the figures. There are currently about 1 billion PCs globally and 2.5 billion mobile phones, and the gap is widening: phone sales are growing at about twice the rate of PC sales. The mobile internet will be the only form of internet for users in emerging markets and locations where PC requirements, such as initial costs and reliable electricity, are hard to overcome. And many of these users are walking around with internet-enabled mobile phones today.

Just as many developing countries have experienced a technology leapfrog of going straight to mobile voice communication, some regions of the world will bypass PCs and go straight to mobile devices as the computing platform of choice.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) proved this point recently when it tracked the hits on its popular mobile internet site. Of the international visitors to BBC's mobile site in the month of July, 61 percent came from Nigeria and 19 percent from South Africa.

More people in Japan access the internet using mobile phones than using PCs today. This trend is likely to be repeated in other countries also with the relentless spread of mobile phones. At the current rate the switchover point at which more people globally will access the internet from their mobile devices than from PCs looks set to happen in about 2008. Cremin says mobiles are more accessible to young people because of their low costs and that they offer a level of privacy that a shared family PC cannot deliver. Mobility is not the only benefit, just the most obvious one.

Companies have started registering their .mobi domain names in waves. The first wave was restricted to trademark holders and then the registration was opened to the general public. More than 200,000 domain names have been registered so far, showing .mobi is the domain choice of the future.

By Aimée Ravacon

Read a dotMobi case story about European rail company, Thalys