It’s always a good idea to kill your startup in public. Russell Beattie did that last month with Mowser, a service that converts regular Web addresses into mobile-friendly ones, because he said didn’t “believe in the ‘Mobile Web’ anymore.” Luckily for him, some people disagreed with him (and not just Mike).
Mowser’s intellectual property and the site itself was acquired today by dotMobi, the mobile domain-name consortium based in Ireland. The technology will be integrated into dotMobi’s own http://find.mobi/ service, as well as some of its mobile domain creation tools. Needless to say, Russell Beattie is now a happy man.
One man’s poison is other man’s food.
This is great news. We are using mowser for http://recalledtoys.mobi as a way to keep parents and caregivers up to date on the latest toy recalls, and we would not be able to do it if we had to reformat all of the information ourselves. The dotMobi registry is showing again how forward-thinking it is and how to best support it’s .mobi owners. Congratulations to Russell and Mike on making a truly useful product, and for dotMobi mTLD for keeping it around and making it better in the future.
That’s great news for Russell, but I still have to wonder about his earlier take on this technology, and what he thinks of dotMobi and its long-term prospects. Russell’s original quote, in full:
“I don’t actually believe in the ‘Mobile Web’ anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst. … Two years ago I was convinced that the mobile web would continue to evolve in the West to mimic what was happening in countries like Japan and Korea, but it hasn’t happened, and now I’m sure it isn’t going to.”
nice quote azhar
Gr8 news for Russell.
Glad it finally worked out for russb and miker.