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100 Most Popular Sites on the Internet Evaluated for Mobile Readiness

2007-03-28 14:15 2375

dotMobi Investigates Top Mobile-Ready -- and Not-So-Ready -- Web Sites

ORLANDO, Fla., March 28 /Xinhua-PRNewswire/ -- CTIA Wireless -- dotMobi, the company behind the .mobi domain -- the first and only Internet address designed specifically for mobile phones -- today announced its evaluation of the mobile readiness of the 100 most visited sites on the Internet.

Using a list generated by Alexa(R) Internet on January 23, 2007, dotMobi evaluated the most visited sites using http://ready.mobi, a unique testing tool produced by dotMobi that incorporates industry standards set by the W3C consortium and key investors including Ericsson, Microsoft and Nokia.

The tool at http://ready.mobi simulates a mobile device and accessed each of the top 100's PC-based web page and its .mobi (or other mobile) address, if applicable. The report follows a stringent assessment, and scores each site from one (least mobile ready) to five (most mobile ready).

According to this scale, the top 10 mobile ready sites are Google.com, WashingtonPost.com, Ask.com, Yahoo.com, Flickr.com, Live.com, Facebook.com, Overstock.com, Weather.com and USAToday.com. Only three of the top 10 most popular web sites -- Yahoo, Google and Facebook -- scored greater than a three out of five on the Mobile Ready Report.

Overall, sites that used a .mobi address tended to score well because they generally followed the dotMobi standards and best practices to ensure an optimal mobile experience.

The report indicated that many of the otherwise top web sites are not optimized for easy mobile viewing by consumers. These top 100 sites averaged a score of 1.3 out of five, illustrating the need for organizations to tailor, for mobile phone users, the high-quality content they provide on their PC-based web sites. On average, just the home pages of the tested sites cost a hefty $1.50 and took almost 40 seconds per page to download.

Consumer research has consistently shown that a site's page structure, appearance, download cost and download speed are primary reasons why users avoid accessing the web on their mobile phone. Despite this, more than four mobile phones are sold for every one PC that's sold globally and, in turn, more and more consumers are accessing the internet via their mobile phones.

"There's plenty of room for improvement because the mobile internet is still developing," said Neil Edwards, CEO of dotMobi. "The results indicate that consumers will most likely not have a good experience when they want to view their favorite sites from a mobile phone. The .mobi domain provides a viable, easy-to-manage platform for even the most popular sites to optimize their content for mobile phones."

To view the top 100 sites with their http://ready.mobi score in detail, visit http://pc.mtld.mobi/mobilenet/Top100.htm .

The tests performed in this evaluation can be repeated for these top sites and any others using the publicly accessible test at http://ready.mobi.

About dotMobi

dotMobi (the informal name of mTLD Top Level Domain, Ltd.), a joint venture company based in Dublin, Ireland with offices in Washington, DC, and Beijing, is leading the development of internet usage from mobile phones with the .mobi domain. Unique among domain name providers, dotMobi ensures that services and sites developed around .mobi are optimized for use by mobile devices. On-the-go consumers can have confidence that an internet site or service will work from their mobile device when using the .mobi address.

dotMobi is backed by leading mobile operators, network and device manufacturers, and internet content providers, including Ericsson, GSM Association, Hutchison 3, Microsoft, Nokia, Orascom Telecom, Samsung Electronics, Syniverse, T-Mobile, Telefonica Moviles, TIM and Vodafone. dotMobi is also a sponsor of W3C's Mobile Web Initiative.

For more information on .mobi domains and how to register .mobi domains, visit http://dotmobi.mobi . Visit the dotMobi blog at http://blog.mobi .

Source: dotMobi
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