Get set for the mobile web gold rush

Mobile web use is about to get a similar boost to the one given fixed line-access by the introduction of flat-rate charges, according to the chief technology officer of the company responsible for .mobi registrations.

Mobile operators are beginning to offer similar affordable flat rates, and web use will be further encouraged by innovative devices like Apple's iPhone, said dotMobi's James Pearce.

He predicted a rush of people trying to cash in on the mobile boom. "I'm a great believer in the evolution of the internet. There will be a lot of people putting up .mobi sites and most of them will be bad. But that way we will find out what works."

DotMobi, backed by the likes of Microsoft and Nokia, is charged with promoting as well as managing use of the top-level domain designed specifically for mobile devices.

It has just announced 500,000 .mobi names have been registered, in a total of 104 countries. How many of these are companies registering names to prevent people squatting their brands is unclear.

But Pearce argued that mobile phone users were more likely to use a site that they knew had been specially formatted for a tiny screen. He claimed browsers such Opera and other software that attempts to reformat for mobiles on the fly never did so satisfactorily and made pages hard to read.

DotMobi has posted some very easy-to-use tools to enable non-programmers to set up and test .mobi sites.

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