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Over the past two years of the .mobi domain, many of the first "verticals" that went mobile have not been a surprise because of the nature of their industries: travel (priceline.mobi), hotels (hilton.mobi), transportation (amtrak.mobi, sas.mobi, thalys.mobi) and dining (zagat.mobi).

However, the one industry that caught me unaware in terms of popularity has been banking and finance. Bank of America (bofa.mobi) is the probably the most active in promoting its .mobi site, but there are dozens of others around the world from lacaixa.mobi to deutsche-bank.mobi to usaa.mobi. It proves out a point that we discovered in the study we conducted with AKQA earlier this year: people are most interested in utility in their mobile sites. They're not against entertainment like games and ringtones, but rather that they see a mobile phone primarily as an way to help simplify the day-to-day administration of their lives.

The reason I'm mentioning this because of a press release dotMobi issued yesterday saying that California-based ClairMail has added DeviceAtlas to their service offerings.

ClairMail is a business-to-business company that builds mobile versions of existing banking sites, giving banks "transactional" mobile sites that tie into their back-end systems. Their customers include Alerus Financial, City Bank (Texas), 1st National Bank of Scotia, and Cascade Bank (Washington State). Now with the addition of DeviceAtlas to their platform, they can offer "device aware" mobile sites to their customers. And with that, we're sure to see the banking market continue to flourish as a prime space for mobile users.

Written by Vance P. Hedderel, Director, PR and Communications, dotMobi

About dotMobi

Headquartered in Dublin, dotMobi - a wholly owned subsidiary of Afilias Limited - is a worldwide leader in enabling the development & discovery of quality mobile content through innovative services, in turn helping businesses and individuals reach the world's billions of mobile phone users. dotMobi spurs mobile industry innovation by giving content providers the tools they need to ensure the Web will work on mobile phones with speed, accuracy and relevant content. (Learn More)

Related topics: Domain Names, Registry Services, Mobile, Top-Level Domains