Dotmobi extensions are designed especially for websites that can be easily navigated on a small cellphone screen. Such an ideal website would be vertical, slim, tidy and quick to load. While investors and companies bet on a future of online shopping via mobile devices, dotmobi has become the latest target for those looking to snap up Domain Names.

dotmobi domain names were opened to the public in September and currently more than 360,000 have been registered. However only a few of those names are active, such as nba.mobi and bmw.mobi.

Dotmobis are still largely not profitable, but there are those who are investing on the chance that they will be, as a result of cellphones, providers and users evolve to be more Web-friendly., While other non-dotcom extensions such as dotus, dotbiz and dotinfo, for example, have not been as popular with investors, analysts think dotmobis may be more successful, with support from big-name investors like Google, Microsoft, Nokia and T-Mobile.

The initial quick popularity has surprised executives at dotMobi, the company that owns and oversees the dotmobi registry.

Says Alexa Raad, vice president of marketing and business development for dotMobi "We basically did what it took dotcom almost 10 years to achieve, within a year," with the company’s biggest goal now to provide the tools for businesses to create quality Web pages, a determining factor in whether the domain name takes off.

"Even if a business doesn’t understand how to build on the name, nabbing it is the most important step right now", said Ellen Rony, who is the author and Domains consultant.

"No matter when now is, now is the best time," Rony said. "You can get into it when you can get into it. I don’t understand why anyone would wait."

Sometimes the buyers purchase defensively, in order to protect a name or trademark.

For example the state of Florida is going to court to protect its trademark from a domain name publisher that bought MyFlorida.mobi.

Florida-based Logical Sites chief executive and owner Thomas Rask bought the name for two years at $70, and it wasn’t long before a lawyer for the Florida Department of Management Services asked him to hand the website over, due to the state owning the MyFlorida.com trademark, with Rask claiming"It was a complete surprise, I had no idea they had a trademark,".

The World Intellectual Property Organization ruled last month that Rask needs to give up the site, so he has hired a lawyer to file a complaint with a district court in Tampa, arguing that the words "my" and "Florida" are too generic to enforce a trademark. He also says that since businesses with trademarks got to register their names before the public, the state should have done so then.

Tiffany Koenigkramer, spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Management Services, said that if MyFlorida was misrepresented by his site, "it could really be detrimental."

Rask however claims to have plans to turn MyFlorida.mobi into a destination for mobile users to get tourism information on the go. Logical Sites gets 30 percent of its income from advertisements on its Florida tourism sites, such as beachdirectory.com and keysdirectory.com.

It’s that on-the-go potential that is making a variety of mobi domain names so tempting for buyers.

At the October auction in Hollywood, the chief executive and founder of the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Domain Conference & Expo Rick Schwartz only planned to spend $100,000 to obtain flowers.mobi, but ended up paying double that at $200,000. The name was in hot demand at the auction, but the Boca Raton resident said he’ll have to wait several years to tell if it’s worth his $200,000, which is the most expensive known dotmobi purchase.

Schwartz plans to pounce on more dotmobi names at the next auction in Las Vegas in March, saying "I think there’s going to be a whole lot of action again on this," he said. "For whatever reason, whether it’s justified or not, they are making headway.".