Introduction of Mandarin, Hindu, Cyrillic and Arabic in domains
Keywords—memorable words that a user can type into a mobile phone instead of a number—are very popular in China. And specific to the Chinese market, dotMobi will offer Web addresses in Chinese characters. These addresses in non-standard language characters are known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).
The use of Chinese-character IDNs will allow Chinese-language mobile Web sites to be found more easily by search engines. According to Analysys International, more than 270 million Web searches were performed on mobile phones in China in the second quarter of 2009—double the figure from a year earlier, which highlights the importance of search for Chinese mobile websites.
Chinese-language .mobi domains will be available in a special sunrise period beginning at 4 a.m. UTC on October 29, 2009
Icann, the organisation that oversees internet domain names, has approved the use of non-Latin characters such as Mandarin, Hindi, Cyrillic and Arabic in web addresses.
That means that the huge number of people who presently use the internet but are not native English speakers will be able to type web addresses in their own language and navigate to the pages – rather than, as at present, having to add ".com" or ".org" to the end of website names written in their own language – or even write an entire site address in unfamiliar letters.
