Saturday, Sep 1, 2007    Text size: 

Addressing what he called the most popular three rumors concerning dotMobi, Edwards stated that “sex.mobi will go on sale very soon. It is not a joke.”

“We will be releasing approximately 500 high value names for sale in the coming months,” Edwards wrote. “These names will be sold through three to four of the well know online and live auction venues from September to next January.”

Noting that many critics have asserted that the company waited too long to release premium names and “killed the market need for dotMobi,” Edwards strongly defended the decision to hold off.

“I make no apology that dotMobi waited one year to start selling premium names,” Edwards wrote. “We are a well funded company who has a long term view on dotMobi. The content publishing tools were not available last year to build good mobile content sites. It was not in the best interest of the consumer or the company to release names for sale when buyers would have had no good way to produce content. The tools are now readily available for building good mobile sites through site.mobi, dev.mobi, and many of dotMobi’s 100-plus resellers.”

Edwards also answered critics who have asserted that the company’s investors had no intention of doing anything real with the TLD, and merely “created the company as a money making scam.”

“dotMobi’s investors are building new products and services utilizing the .mobi domain name, the new tools available at dev.mobi, and using dotMobi to push out new industry services like our upcoming mobile phone database and our content directory,” Edwards wrote.

Edwards suggested that his company’s critics may have had unrealistic timeframes in mind for the development of the TLD, given that the companies involved are very large — and very cautious — mobile industry entities.

“You have to remember that we are talking about the biggest mobility companies in the world whose product life cycles are long… and confidential,” Edwards wrote. “The investors behind dotMobi are no more going to publicly pre-announce their competitive services using dotMobi than Apple did with the iPhone.”