Navigating Multimedia With Your Mobile

Cellular Industry Offers Some Direction

With an explosion of Internet-enabled entertainment and content services, helping consumers easily discover mobile content relevant to their tastes has become a tough nut to crack and widely is considered a barrier to the mass adoption of multimedia services. Sifting through carrier entertainment decks requires scrolling and several navigational turns, while accessing content via a WAP portal can be both frustrating and hard on the eyes if the Internet site isn’t optimized for mobile viewing.

But help is on the way. This spring’s CTIA show saw the unveiling of the “.mobi” Internet domain name suffix. The .mobi designation signifies that a site is for access by mobile devices, with mobile-formatted Web content; sites using the suffix will be restricted as such. It is sponsored by a consortium of companies including Hutchison 3G UK Ltd.’s 3G-focused cellco, dubbed “3”; Ericsson; the GSM Association; Microsoft Corp.; Nokia; Samsung; Syniverse Technologies Inc.; T-Mobile USA Inc.; Telefonica S.A.; TIM and Vodafone plc.

Addresses including the .mobi domain are registered through ICANNaccredited registrars such as EnCirca. .mobi is in an initial startup period for trademark owners only that began in May. EnCirca, for one, is accepting first-come, first-served applications for registration. This “sunrise” period will be followed by a “landrush” during which the domain will be thrown open to nontrademark owners (beginning Aug. 28) for companies and individuals without prior rights.

The Web site www.dotMobi.org will keep a running list of mobile devices that support the new .mobi top-level domain.

The domain name is likely to aid the mobile search experience; search engines specifically can look for .mobi domains, guaranteeing that the search results will be handset-friendly.

In the meantime, Motricity Inc. has signed a partnership agreement with Ask.com to offer surfers a simpler way to find mobile content — such as ringtones, wallpapers and games — directly through the Ask.com search engine. For example, visitors now can search “Britney Spears” and click on either ringtones, wallpaper or game links within the Ask.com “Smart Answer” results bar, provided at the top of the search results page. In this case, clicking “ringtones” takes users to a list of available ringtone titles such as “Oops! ... I Did It Again.” Or, users also can search for specific ringtones by artist, and be presented at the top of the page with the most popular ringtones for that artist, which they then can browse and preview.

Ask.com users also can use the “Mobile Content” tool on the new Ask.com Toolbox, which offers shortcuts to more than 20 search tools, including maps, images, weather, a dictionary and local and desktop search directly from the home page.

CTIA in Brief

CTIA this spring saw the launch of PayPal Mobile, a text message-based service allowing consumers in the United States and Canada to send money using their mobile telephones. PayPal, part of online auction giant eBay Inc., also will let people buy items using PayPal Mobile’s Text-to-Buy service or give to charities. “With the overwhelming popularity of mobile phones, the time has never been better for the merging of e-commerce and wireless devices,” says PayPal President Jeff Jordan. To use PayPal Mobile, customers first register their mobile telephone numbers through their PayPal account online and enter a PIN. They then can make payments by sending a text message to PayPal. PayPal calls the user back to confirm the mobile payment, and then sends the money to the recipient. In the case of a Text-to-Buy purchase, after the merchant receives the payment, the item is shipped to the address already saved in the user’s PayPal account. There is no extra charge from PayPal to the consumer to use the mobile capabilities.

Broadband wireless provider First Mile Communications LLC and regional wireline service provider Southern Telecom intend to transform the INFORUM, a 990,000- square-foot interconnection facility in Atlanta, into a major hub site for broadband wireless. First Mile will provide broadband wireless connections to expand Southern Telecom’s wired network; the companies will use the connections to connect some 5,600 businesses in 1,500 office buildings with carriers in the INFORUM.

The Wi-Fi Alliance has issued a paper on the 802.11e QoS standard to outline how Wi-Fi has moved from a PC technology to providing access for gaming consoles, digital cameras, digital media servers for high-def video and other devices. 802.11e defines how access points prioritize traffic to optimize the way shared network resources are allocated among different applications. A key piece of it is Wi-Fi Multimedia QoS, which enables the transition from data-only applications to voice and video services with appropriate throughput.

In other Wi-Fi Alliance news, the organization has partnered with CTIA to develop and promote certification programs to ensure that carriers and end users have the highest quality experience possible with converged devices. The groups will cooperate on test programs for overlapping aspects of dual-mode Wi-Fi/mobile phones, such as RF performance and the handover between cellular and Wi-Fi networks.

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines