DigitURL. Meet Pa.am. Pa.am is much prettier.

DigitURL, the URL redirection utility for mobile phone users, has met its match. And it's match is a whole lot prettier.

Introducing Pa.am, which uses a very simple approach to alleviating keypad pressing woes on your mobile. Pa.am uses the 'alphabet' of mobile-optimized letters on a phone keypad to create short URLs that are exceedingly easy to type. This alphabet comprises the first letter assigned to each numeric button (from 2 to 9) and contains only the following: A, D, G, J, M, P, T, and W. This innovation, of using the one-tap-only letters for mobile URLs, isn't new: Ameritrade was smart in registering amtd.com, which is a cinch for mobile phone users to type in, and amtd.com went to Ameritrade's mobile site for many years. What Pa.am - which requires only 4 taps (w/o the dot) from the user - does is make creative use of third and fourth level domains to assign a 'tinyURL' that is mobile friendly. We created the shortURL of 'dwm.j.pa.am' to get to DigitURL. That URL is just 8 taps (w/o the dots). Other URLs generated via Pa.am are even shorter. Certainly Pa.am's utilization of the '.am' tld - dot am is the ccTLD for Armenia - is a vast improvement over '.com'.

Now, if you're a mathematician, you'll probably be quickly figuring in your head that Pa.am could only work for a few thousand URLs if they were to keep the total domain length short (8-10 digits). All of them would be used up in a few weeks. What Pa.am does to solve this problem is an expiration date, of either 48 hrs or 'single serve.' Per the site: 'Single Serves last just 30 seconds after first use, with a 15 minute maximum.'

If the expiry feature was not a problem, then Pa.am just beat WordDial and DigitURL at their game. Any URL can be shortenend to 8 or 9 digits (w/o dots) or less; and that cannot be outdone.

But expiry is a problem. Users want perpetual, easy access to the popular sites they frequent without bothering with typing in lengthy mobile URLs. Pa.am is more likely targeted to users who want to one-time share a site with a friend, or friends, via an email link. Dotcom wordnumbers are a better solution for perpetual, easy access to popular mobile sites.