.Mobi Forum Owner’s Call to Action

A few years ago, I signed up for Mobility.mobi, the leading .Mobi domain name discussion forum. Yesterday afternoon, Andres Kello, the forum founder and owner, issued a call to action to forum members and premium .Mobi domain owners.

Kello is looking to create a private Roundtable to discuss ways to accomplish one of two goals “: 1) getting this extension back on track, or 2) getting our investment back.” .Mobi domain owners are invited to participate and can show their interest in a thread Kello started on his forum.

With his permission, the entire email is posted below. (update, Kello asked me to post the contents of the thread instead). For full disclosure, I do not own any .mobi domain names.

Dear .mobi domain owners,

For over 5 years, the .mobi community has given mTLD / dotMobi the benefit of the doubt, watching in awkward silence as the company tore off — one-by-one — everything that made this extension unique, different, and exciting.

While the Mobility.mobi community was volunteering both its time and money to run an  Anti-Cybersquatting Initiative, launch the  Why.mobi Awareness Campaign, join the  mTLD Policy Advisory Board, and share  our views  and  concerns  about .mobi at the company’s request (among many other things), mTLD were busyeliminating the Trustmark  that made .mobi special, presenting one-way Webinars with  empty words  to appease the masses, telling us  one story about their finances  when their  balance sheet told another, providing  false statements regarding .mobi  on their site,  fabricating outright false forward-looking statements to its investor base, and getting  side-tracked with conflicting interests, among other things, all of which have negatively impacted our investment decisions.

(I strongly recommend everyone carefully read through all the Sticky threads in the  mTLD Registry / dotMobi Company, the  Private Discussion, and the  .mobi News and Discussion  section for more information, as a lot of this has already been discussed in great detail.)

mTLD have increasingly shown an apathy and callous indifference towards the extension that so many of us spent so much time and money trying to build, that it is time we — the .mobi community — took matters into our own hands.

If we don’t save .mobi, no one else will. And if the company isn’t going to make any efforts to commit to their promises — both implied and specific — then we all deserve to get our investments back.

As a result, we are creating a new Roundtable for all disenfranchised .mobi domain owners dedicated to either of those goals: 1) getting this extension back on track, or 2) getting our investment back.  Which of those it will ultimately be will depend solely on mTLD.

We’ve waited far too long. We’ve pardoned far too much. mTLD have taken advantage of both to become complacent and apathetic. What they fail to realize is that we’ve got nothing left to lose.

One way or another, things are going to change.

So if you are a .mobi domain owner and feel mTLD / dotMobi are leading this extension irresponsibly down a path to obscurity and want to change things, then please post here. There will be no discussions here, the purpose of this thread is simply to request membership to the Roundtable. Also, no PM’s please, this is not the time to be private about your disapproval, discontentment, and dissatisfaction. This is time to speak up.

One week from now, I will invite everyone who has requested membership in this thread to the private Roundtable on Mobility to discuss our next step.

Please spread the word.

Sincerely,

Andres Kello
Mobility.mobi, Owner

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

16 COMMENTS

  1. Sound business investing is all about risk assessment. You can’t make large returns without high risk and with that comes the odds of success being highly stacked with challenges.

    Everyone buying into an off the wall extension like .mobi knew it was ultra high risk.

    Most business ventures fail. That’s the norm. And these days it’s harder than ever to achieve success with new ventures.

    No point wasting more time, energy and capital on something that didn’t do as expected. Best advice is to chalk up your losses and move on to another venture.

  2. Did they not see the Flowers.mobi sale?

    It is funny how many people stay on the Titanic, hoping that even with water filling 98% of its hull and the ship pointed vertically and half submerged they still think there is a chance for it to come back. Instead of wasting time on something that is dead why not put time and effort into something else?

  3. Personally I do not think they have any chance.
    If .mobi just appeared I would say maybe, maybe, maybe…

    .Mobi has bad reputation now and many people lost money investing in this extension. Its almost impossible to rebuild reputation once you lost it.
    That`s why reputation is so precious.

  4. @ ban rober cline – “if new tld`s have chance why .mobi not?
    its abbrivation like other new extensions.”

    The difference is that with some new tld’s, the people driving the extension will have their own money at risk – unlike mTLD.
    If investing, it’s better to go with someone who equally has something to lose.

    I bought probably 200 .mobi’s – sold a few – got some traffic to some for a while, but ultimately the whole thing cost me money. I don’t see this extension being revivied now no matter what happens, but some people spent fortunes on them on the back of what mTLD promised but didn’t deliver on. I wish them well in getting satisfaction but can’t see anyone coming out of this any better off.

  5. It sounds a bit desperate and sad to me. It reads like a last ditch effort to point the finger of blame for bad investment at anyone but themselves. Obviously, he doesn’t know when to cut his losses as he is still investing a lot of capital (in the form of time and energy) in a losing extension.

  6. @Vance Hedderel – “Just for perspective:

    On September 26, 2011, the .mobi domain will celebrate its fifth anniversary of general availability. Today, there are more than one million .mobi domains under management, and .mobi is now the sixth largest gTLD in the world.”

    That’s just a statistic. It’s has nada to do with the unfulfilled promises of the registry. And no, I’m not getting into any details – they’re out there to be found.

    As director of PR for said registry…I’ll bet your a busy chap.

    As for the 6th largest gTLD – how many people can name 7?

  7. I think people much faster would invest in .co than .mobi.
    Apart form that .co just need less than year to have one million registration. So when Vanece says they have about million reg after 5years its really sad to me. But somehow they are proud of this. It just shows their low ambition and I think this is main reason for their failure.
    I do not keep with people like this. Bye bye .mobi.

  8. I feel sad for .mobi true believers and pretty much anyone who registered lots of .mobi. This .mobi situation is a very good indication of things to come for those who are planning to register new tlds domains or recently registered .co or .me domains. It will be the same saga all over again every time. End users only want to buy the very best single words domains in all these extensions and only for under a few hundred $ max, in most cases under $50. That leaves zero room to make any money with speculative registrations.

  9. “This .mobi situation is a very good indication of things to come for those who are planning to register new tlds domains or recently registered .co or .me domains. ”

    I disagree… I think .mobi was created to solve a problem that didn’t really exist and certainly doesn’t really exist much now. When I visit most sites on my Blackberry, they automatically detect that I am on a mobile device and don’t need an alternative url. New tld will be about branding and will succeed as much as the marketing of each extension allows.

  10. I agree with Elliot. Websites can now detect mobile phone browsers and display their content accordingly.
    There will never be demand for a tld that is not required.
    .co markets as an alternative to .com.
    .mobi markets to developers for websites to be accsessed by mobile devices.
    .me markets primarily for social networking, blogs and personalizing ones online presence.
    It seems Jon lacks the general knowledge of the reason these tlds were introduced and who they are marketed to/for.

  11. I think that has failed to focus on the true potential of the extension.
    If I go into a dotcom domain and detects my terminal, it is true that the web portal can readapt to a mobile, but maybe I do not want this redirection, and I prefer to choose to go to the dotcom or go to dotmobi at different times. So I think it really has potential if they are using some institutions but has not been able to focus well.

  12. As if domainers had the power to take an extension off the ground, or get it back on track.
    .mobi is the past, the whole concept behind it is flawed and was already outdated by the time the extension was released.
    Some people took a gamble and they lost. If you’re one of them, get over it. There will be no bailout, as simple as that. The sooner you get out of the game and cut losses, the better.

  13. Whatever you think, think the opposite. The problem with doing the same as everyone else, is that everyone is doing it. All this negativity about dotmobi comes from followers that dont want to take responsibility for their own actions and investments if they go bad. All the wrong decitions I have taken in life has only lead to better once. I own a few hundred dotmobi extentions and will never regret this venture if it dose not go well, it has been worth every single penny for the fun and hope it has given me so far. How can people loose faith now when the mobile future has just been born and ready to start growing. Applications for a mobile phones are expensive, but GoMobi from google in cooperation with dotmobi is cheap and easy to set up, only £5 per month on easyspace.com. I believe in dotmobi more and more actually. Gomobi is owned by google and who is it that just baught up Motorola? 2 + 2 = 4. i say go mobi guys, but if you want to play safe then follow the crowd and do like everyone else.

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