CircleID

As you'll see in this announcement, dotMobi has been admitted as a member of LACTLD—a long acronym for the longer "Latin American and Caribbean ccTLDs Organization." The LACTLD is a not-for-profit organization of the ccTLD managers in Latin
America and the Caribbean. It's the regional equivalent to Europe's CENTR (of which dotMobi is also a member.)

Over the past three years since the launch of .mobi, we've been to a lot of places—that's meant both figuratively and literally. However, we've barely touched down in Latin America ... until now. The market there is quickly becoming receptive to the mobile Web. As Trey Harvin, dotMobi's CEO, noted in the announcement, "Latin America is ... showing a year-over-year increase of mobile Web use of 0.6%, second only to North America's 1.1% increase." That information was from an interesting AdMob report. And more importantly, it shows how the mobile Web has quickly become a go-to tool for on-the-go folks.

A side-note statistic I saw recently: the iPhone only represents 13.3% of the global smartphone market, and that global smartphone market is in turn only 14.3 percent of the mobile phone market in 2Q09—meaning that many, many people are using the mobile Web without an iPhone, or any smartphone at all. (See the report information here.)

I'm reading these numbers as: the iPhone may be driving interest in the mobile Web but people aren't waiting for an iPhone to access it—while apps may be cool, I agree with Google who say apps are ultimately limiting and the mobile Web will be accessed directly via type-in traffic or via search—both of which bear well for .mobi, everywhere in the world.

Written by by Vance P. Hedderel, Director of PR & Communications at dotMobi

About dotMobi

dotMobi is backed by leading mobile operators, network & device manufacturers, and Internet content providers, including Ericsson, GSM Association, Hutchison 3, Microsoft, Nokia, Orascom Telecom, Samsung Electronics, Syniverse, T-Mobile, Telefónica Móviles, Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM), Visa and Vodafone. (Learn More)

Related topics: Domain Names, Domain Registries, Mobile, Top-Level Domains, Web