The mission of dot mobi, backed by a consortium of the world's leading mobile operators, is to establish its internet domain as the address of choice for businesses to locate their mobile websites, writes John Collins

Despite the best efforts of Ireland's skilled technology workers, this State's favourable corporate tax regime is still one of the prime reasons so many of the world's leading technology companies choose to locate European headquarters here.

So when a consortium of some of the world's leading mobile operators and technology companies, including Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, T-Mobile and Vodafone, was seeking a global headquarters for the dot mobi mobile internet address it was establishing two years ago, Dublin was at the top of the list.

"When the company was founded, quite honestly Ireland was picked because of tax reasons," explains Neil Edwards, the dotcom veteran who moved to Dublin to become chief executive officer of dot mobi. "There were also some ideas that there might be some good talent in Ireland and there might be some benefit in doing that, but the reality was that it was the tax rate."

The initial plan was to have a brass plate office in Dublin with a small number of staff but having spent a few weeks in the city establishing the office, Edwards says "the light bulbs clicked on".

Dot mobi now employs 30 at its offices in Dublin's IFSC with a couple of sales staff in Washington DC and a single representative in Shanghai. In Edwards's experience, Dublin is not too expensive - "on a par with other places in Europe" - although he does say finding affordable office space for a start-up company continues to be an issue.

Dot mobi may have been a start-up when it opened its doors in Dublin last July but it had the luxury of €14 million in funding from some of the world's leading mobile players. Its mission is to establish the dot mobi internet domain as the address of choice for businesses to locate their mobile websites.

While efforts to introduce new domains such as .biz and .info to compete with the ubiquitous .com have not been spectacular successes, Edwards says .mobi is an entirely different proposition.

The company insists that all sites carrying the suffix should be able to display properly on a mobile phone's relatively small screen. It provides a number of open source tools that test how mobile-friendly a site is and help them build a site that downloads quickly and displays correctly on mobile devices.

In theory that should overcome two of the major issues holding back use of the mobile internet, which remains stubbornly low. Firstly, it should tackle the problem of sites that take too long to download (and so rack up large data charges for people viewing on mobiles) and secondly it ensures that sites will display correctly on a small screen with a vertical orientation.

To help domain owners get compliant, a free MobiReady Report is available online (http://mr.dev.mobi/) - Edwards describes it as "€2,000 worth of research in 20 seconds". He claims that, by the end of August, any sites that do not score a four or five in the MobiReady report will be removed. At that point mobile users can be confident that dot mobi sites will display effectively on their phones.

The third element of the strategy, according to Edwards, is the development of a directory of mobile-ready sites that could be used by consumers. It will list all sites with mobile content, not just those that have a .mobi address.

"The vision for the directory is that Yahoo would use the directory or buy the data for their own directory because we are the brand behind the brand," explains Edwards. "We are not a destination site. We're a white label service."

To date, much of the interest in the new domain seems to have been as a form of brand protection or speculation. Edwards estimates that just 10 per cent of the 400,000-odd registered addresses (a number that is growing at a rate of 1,000-2,000 a day) have an actual mobile site associated with them.

About 10 per cent of the domains are active and Edwards says he is surprised the figure is so high as the tools to help companies build their sites have just been released.

In addition he estimates about 20 per cent of the names have been grabbed by speculators, which he says is about the same as in the dotcom world.

If the resale value of addresses is a good indicator of the health of a domain then dot mobi seems to be faring well - flowers.mobi recently sold for $200,000. The company has also reserved 60,000 premium addresses for itself which it is selling off in a variety of ways including live auctions at industry conferences.

Norbert Grey, dot mobi's vice-president for finance and administration, says that the company is on course to bring in about €12 million in revenue in its first six months. While dot mobi never expects to be a huge employer - largely because of the automated nature of the business once the initial infrastructure has been put in place - Edwards believes that the company's presence will provide knock-on opportunities for local technology companies. Already Waterford software company Nubiq has signed up as one of the providers of tools to build dot mobi-compliant sites.

Edwards has also fought for a major project which he calls "unwired streets" to be based in Dublin. Launching this summer, it will involve taking a real street in the city and giving every business on it a dot mobi web presence. The idea is to showcase what is possible when people can access mobile services and information that are relevant to their current location. "We're going to do it in our home city and we're going to make a big deal of it," says Edwards. "We're going to give people a reason to be proud of technology in Ireland - not just the nice tax advantages."

The response in Ireland to dot mobi has been mixed - no Irish companies signed up to be resellers of the domain but Edwards estimates 600-700 Irish companies have registered their brand names through international resellers.

Recent research by dot mobi also suggests that most Irish companies have a lot to do to support the mobile internet. Testing the sites of the top 1,000 Irish companies, it found that 93 per cent of members had websites unsuitable for use on a mobile phone and the average score was just 1.5, compared to 3.6 for sites in the .mobi domain.

Despite this, Edwards, who witnessed the dotcom boom and bust at first hand in his last job at Verisign, remains upbeat about the potential.

"We're here to create something big," he says matter of factly. "Potentially even bigger than dotcom because everyone has a mobile."