DUBLIN -- Individuals and businesses in more than 100 countries around the world registered more than 100,000 .mobi domains in the first four days of the domain's general availability, demonstrating a strong demand for the next evolution of the Internet. In contrast, it took ten years for the general public to register 100,000 PC-based domain names in the early days of the Internet.

.mobi is the first and only top level domain dedicated to delivering Internet content to mobile phones. Built on the open standards developed as part of the Worldwide Web Consortium's (W3C) Mobile Web Initiative, the .mobi domain makes accessing Internet sites on a mobile device faster, less expensive and more reliable by offering content tailored for the mobile Internet. Among the first names registered were call.mobi, banking.mobi and mp3s.mobi, showing the wide range of users that content providers anticipate accessing the mobile Internet. Additionally, there were many names requested by multiple parties. For example, loan.mobi was requested by more than 80 registrants, while ads.mobi was requested by more than 70. The ten countries with the most registrations were the USA, Canada, the UK, China, France, India, Germany, Japan, Spain and the Netherlands.Dozens of companies large and small, across all industries, have recently embraced the .mobi domain, including travel (thalys.mobi and kilburnie.mobi), information (live.mobi, businessweek.mobi and cnnmoney.mobi), retail (neckermann.mobi), sports (kicker.mobi), finance (diba.mobi), education (utexas.mobi) and corporate (bmw.mobi and amf.mobi).

"Given the research we've seen over the past year, we knew that there was a demand for the mobile Internet," said Neil Edwards, CEO of dotMobi. "It was great to see more than 13,000 brands get their .mobi domain names during the trademark registration period earlier this year, but it's even more exciting to see the general public sign up more than 100,000 names globally to build mobile Internet sites using the .mobi domain. The mobile Internet revolution is officially underway."

dotMobi