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goMobi is here! Try it out for 30 days free

Update: goMobi v1.2 was released in early December. You can find out more about the v1.2 release here.

Starting today, you’re able to sell goMobi through OpenSRS. It’s a new service from dotMobi that provides your customers with a simple, inexpensive way to build and host a mobile-ready website that works along with their existing site.

Why goMobi?

The mobile web is hot and it’s getting hotter everyday.

The 2010 Mobile Web Progress Report by dotMobi revealed that the mobile web is showing incredible growth worldwide. The 2008 edition of the report showed 150,000 mobile-ready websites. Now, in 2010, there are over 3 million sites. That’s an incredible two-year growth rate of more than 2,000 percent!

Compare that to the growth of the Internet on the desktop between 1996 and 1998. Back then the size of the desktop web grew from about 150,000 sites to 2.0 million sites. In other words, the mobile web is now growing at a far faster rate today than the desktop Internet did in a comparable timeframe.

Tap in to the Mobile Market

More and more big brands are adopting mobile Web strategies, but there’s still incredible room for growth considering the number of mobile Internet devices that are being added every day. Consider this: right now, there are four mobile phones purchased for every computer purchased.

But mobile phones and other devices need mobile-ready sites – that’s where goMobi comes in.

goMobi gives you a way to tap into the growth of the mobile web, providing additional value to your customers, and of course, giving you a way to make some money at the same time.

Try it yourself!

goMobi is a monthly subscription service and the service is not tied to a .mobi domain purchase. It’s available to OpenSRS Resellers at a very low wholesale cost of $2.50/month.

The very best way to understand this product and what it offers to your customers is to try it out yourself. To facilitate that, we are offering a 30-day free trial with all goMobi subscriptions (for both you and your customers!). That gives you a month to give the product a try and get a good sense of how it works and what it offers to your customers.

You can find out more about how goMobi works, both for you in terms of selling it, and for your customers in terms of managing and using it on our goMobi pages.

Click on the “Try it Out” link to view a short screencast that will take you through the steps to provision and setup your own goMobi site in just a couple of minutes.

CIRA Contest Looking for .CA Websites Making a Difference

A few OpenSRSers are at the meshmarketing event held right here in our hometown of Toronto. One of the presenters is the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) who are the keepers of the .CA domain extension.

Over the past few years, CIRA has doing a ton of work to promote the .CA extension and to show Canadians how people are using their .CA websites.

CIRA .CA Impact Awards

As part of those ongoing efforts, today CIRA announced a new initiative. Starting on January 6, 2011, CIRA will begin accepting submissions for the .CA Impact Awards.

CIRA says they created the .CA Impact Awards as “a celebration of people and organizations that use their .CA website to make a difference.”

Prizes include a cheque for $5,000 for the winner. If you are selling .CA domains through OpenSRS, this is definitely something you will want to pass along to your customers. Who knows, maybe one of them will be the winner!

You can find out more at the CIRA .CA Impact Awards website.

Locking .CA Domain Names

The transition to the new EPP-based registry platform for .CA domains went very smoothly. The last of a couple of minor bugs have now been fixed and everything is back to the new normal for .CA domains.

We thank all of our Resellers for their help and patience throughout the transition process. The result is a better experience for .CA domain registrants and a .CA domain extension that’s much easier to sell and support.

Locking your .CA Domains

We do have one important follow-up note for Resellers with .CA domains in their accounts. With the transition to the new platform, domain locking is now available for .CA domains. The default state for domains after the transition is “unlocked” so you will want to lock the .CA domains in your account to provide an added level of security to the registrants of those domains.

Using the “Bulk Domain Change Management” section of the Reseller Web Interface makes this a pretty simple task:

Click on “Bulk Domain Change Management”. Then click “Bulk Domain Search” which will allow you to get a list of all the .CA domains in your account.
Search for “*” and select .ca domains in the “Search for Domains by TLD” section. Add your email address and click “Results to File” to run the search.
In a few minutes you’ll receive a list of the .ca domains in your account. Copy the list out of the email and then paste it into a text editor and save it as a .txt file with one domain per line.
Return back to the “Bulk Domain Change Management” screen and click on “Domain Lock” to start the locking process.
On the next screen, select “Upload a list of items” and then “Choose File” to upload the text file you just created. Add you email address to get a confirmation email when the bulk change is completed. Then select “Lock Domain(s)” and click “Submit” to lock the domains.

Here’s a quick screencast tutorial demonstrating how to do it:

New Features and Enhancements for OpenSRS Email Service

We’re just putting the finishing touches on a Fall Release for OpenSRS Email Service. Your users should see these new features and enhancements starting on October 28th, 2010.

Here’s what’s happening:

Allowable email message size increased to 35MB: incoming and outgoing messages can now be larger. This reflects the increasing size of things like photos and other attachments users are sending through email.
Maximum length of a folder name increased: users can now create folder names up to 40 characters in length (up from 15) for both IMAP and Webmail.
Three new languages: Webmail is now available in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish including the user help system built into the webmail interface. This is in addition to the languages already supported: English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese.
Per-user branding: you can brand webmail down to the user account level instead of just the domain level to add or remove features like the calendar and RSS reader for a subset of accounts on a domain. You’ll see a new drop-down menu to select the brand on both the “New Mailbox” and “Edit Mailbox” screens in the Mail Adminstration Center (MAC) where you can set the brand on the account.

Expect to see the new release in the Production Test Environment (PTE) starting on October 21st, 2010. A week later, on October 28th, 2010, we’ll promote the release to both Cluster A and B.

CIRA Registry Transition is Underway

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has begun the transition to its new registry platform as of this morning at 9am EDT. We’re keeping a close eye on things over at CIRA and we’re in regular communication with the registry throughout the transition.

The CIRA registry is unavailable throughout the 24 hour transition period. That means no new orders, or changes to existing .ca domain names. All .ca domains will continue to work at all times during the transition.

CIRA expects to be back up and live on the new platform tomorrow (Wednesday) at 9am EDT and we’ll resume taking .ca orders at that time.

In the meantime, you can stay up-to-date through OpenSRS System Status and here at the Reseller Blog. For a complete rundown of what’s changing, visit our CA Transition page.

You might also want to follow us on Twitter and CIRA also has a number of Twitter accounts that they use to pass along important information:

@OpenSRS
@CIRANEWS
@CIRASystems – providing updates on the CIRA platform
@cira001 – CIRA CEO Byron Holland