Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist, posted on his blog about the strange rules of the Dot.Mobi Mobile Web Europe Awards.
He especially criticizes some of the submission criterias and I am kind of on his site when it comes to awards, that have a strange smell of being biased (even that I am a big fan of .mobi).
Anyways…I think one of the results of his posts are clear: Google, Microsoft, Nokia and pretty much all the carriers, which all have a lot of control what the mobile web user can and cannot see, back dotMobi not only financially but also with events like the Mobile Web Europe award.
One observation webmaster and domainer can make right away: Get a .mobi for your brand if you want to keep your mobile traffic in the future.
August 6th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Please note the “ilovemobileweb” awards were not created by nor they administered by the company dotMobi; they are a program of the dotMobi Advisory Group (http://www.advisorygroup.mobi) — an independent industry association — and will be administered by Informa. The company dotMobi is providing smart phones to winners of the six categories, which are part of a package of prizes each winner will receive.
The “ilovemobileweb” awards are the upcoming Mobile Web Europe event, which is part of a new series of events that includes Mobile Web Americas (premiered in January 2008) and Mobile Web Asia (to premier in 2009). That series is the official event series of the dotMobi Advisory Group and again are being run by Informa.
I volunteered to be a judge of the “ilovemobileweb” awards because I see a LOT of sites on a daily basis, have a good sense of what is or isn’t “good” from an end-user angle and I’m pretty darn impartial.
As I said in my comments to Mr. Walsh, if the dotMobi Advisory Group really wanted to “weight” these awards, they wouldn’t have opened them to competition at all.