15 .mobi domains to be auctioned in March

Washington (DC) - To help fund upcoming projects, the dotMobi group is auctioning off 15 of the top .mobi domains next month. Singles.mobi, casinos.mobi, and pizza.mobi are just some of the names that will be up for bids.

The other domains, all ending in .mobi, are airfare, areacodes, cam, creditscore, directions, eat, libre, loancalculator, models, newmusic, pics, and realestate. Last year, the group held a similar auction that raised nearly $400,000.

The auction will be held on March 7 at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. expo in Las Vegas, which is an event for domain name developers. Part of the proceeds will go to furthering dotMobi projects. "the sale of these 15 highly desirable names allows dotMobi to fund ongoing initiatives for the web developer and content provider communities such as our developer forum at http://dev.mobi and the free mobile readiness testing and reporting tool at http://ready.mobi," said dotMobi CEO Neil Edwards.

General registration of .mobi domains, which was created to have a specific web extension for mobile websites, opened up last October. Since then, more than 400,000 .mobi sites have been established.