Mr Pearce builds a .mobi site (part 1)

OK. After a day on the beach with the kids, I have an idea. That could have taken weeks – in the interests of pacing this story, thank goodness it was only a few hours.

It’s a simple idea – a bit naive, but good enough for the exercise.

Whenever I travel abroad to a country where I don’t know the language, I always find myself stuck with the simplest conversations. I feel really guilty not even knowing how to say thanks to the taxi driver (I failed miserably with Hungarian last week).

So my site is going to provide – to mobiles – translations of the same 5 words (in as many languages as I can compile):

“Hello“, “Thank you“, “Yes“, “No“, “Goodbye”

…all the vocabulary a world citizen requires 😉

Now this should work quite well as a mobile app. It’s a low-bandwidth, low-markup sort of service, and it’s exactly the sort of thing you need when you’re in a mobile context.

So… first the domain name. I think I’ll take the first letter of each of these 5 magic words and see what’s free.

HTYNG.mobi is available (as the .com is, incidentally). But it doesn’t quite strike me as memorable enough.

So I’ll swap the first two letters, and it at least becomes a pronouncable word. I go to my registrar (Dotster, as it happens), check it out…

 

… and $49.98 later (I have to register it for 2 years), I can welcome to the world THYNG.MOBI!

Stay tuned as I actually try to do something with it.