With 2.2 billion cells in the world, what do you think about the .mobi browser for cell phones. This seems to be backed by everyone except for companies such as apple and at&t. And .com's can be accessed clearly from the iphone. Do you think .mobi is going to be the next big thing?
Better put on flameproof clothing before asking that question. .Mobi is probably the most heated topic in domaindom. It depends on who you ask - and largely depends on where they have their money. Is the mobile web sufficiently different from the PC web to create in users' minds an opening for an alternative extension (so they know they won't be paying for large, expensive-to-download images, for example). Will the .Mobi investors (which include Nokia, Microsoft and Google) really get behind .Mobi? - They have not to a great extent so far but there is a lot of clout there. This will take several years to sort out, and some investors who were expecting immediate profits are jumping before renewals hit. Others are spending considerable time and money developing their names. The recent Sedo auction, despite the technical difficulties, placed .Mobi, in terms of dollars spent for a single domain name, on a level with .Net and .Org - a amazing performance for a new extension. And although the detractors were quick to malalign the winning bidder of Music.mobi ($611,000) as a noob, he actually has a lot of internet and business experience, and there were several other bidders not far behind on that and the other auctions. To the anti-mobi crowd it all is a big pump and dump scheme, and any positive news is just more "pump". .Mobi investors wonder why Nokia, Microsoft and Google would bother pumping and dumping for a few $mil. .Mobi is more risky than .Com. Poorly chosen names will be worth little even if .Mobi is successful. But .Mobi may indeed be the next big thing. It could be a bust, too. That is what is meant by speculation.
If you are looking for a quick flip, this probably isn't the tld for you. The rules are very different for .mobi's on what you can put on them. It's a very different business model than the generic .com type in parking revenue generators. That said, it is far easier to type in whatever.mobi on a numeric keypad than m.whatever.com or whatever.com/mobile. The good news is that if a developer follows the development requirements, the site will load properly on any cell phone. That's not to say you can't have flash light or javascript on a .mobi site, you can, but you also need to have a page that can detect an older phone and let the user know that they need to upgrade their phone to view it. It's really more of a convenience to the end user than anything else, because most .com, .net, etc. sites are not formatted to load quickly on a site. In fact, .mobi traffic is way up because of iPhone, not instead of it, and .mobi sites are starting to appear on the apple.com iphone apps page. Really, it's a personal choice, and like accentnepal said, there is much heated discussion about it on other forums and blogs. If you don't have the patience to keep renewing your .mobi until the world figures out how to browse the internet on a mobile phone, you might want to hold off registering. If you are patient and want to develop something new that grows in the search engines, this would be the time to do it imho.
I've bought a few .mobi beginning of last year but not gonna buy anymore now. At this stage, I'll see how things pan out this year but it's definately not a quick flip extention IMO.
.mobi definetely has some prospects, may not as much the hype but very soon, things will start opening up all it takes is interest by certain big companies, definitelu worth long term invetsment but not short term
Some future for the very best generics & NNN but the market has stagnated. I am currently selling two this weekend which I registered almost 2 years ago (landrush) for double their cost though. Many other niche domain markets do better than that - right now LLL.com for example.