Two players in a quiet harbor, for now

When we think of mobile portals and numeric domains, the New Zealand company named WordDial first comes to mind. Since the 1990s, WordDial has been building a portfolio of thousands and thousands of generic dotcom wordnumber domains, or numeric domains that spell generic terms on a mobile keypad such as 6397.com (News) or 3462623.com (Finance). Many domains in WordDial's immense portfolio are featured on the company's free interlinked set of portals, which allow mobile customers to access a type of yellowpages to the mobile web.

According to a webpage spidered recently by Google, it appears that another company may launch a portal for seven of its generic dotcom wordnumbers. Skias Corporation, the first publicly-traded numeric domain company that was founded by Scott Smith, owns such generics as 66639.com (Money) and 32737.com (Fares), which will belong to the to-be-launched portal(s).

Smith knows he has a good thing with these domains. Few numeric domain investors own domains that spell generic words since probably over 90% of the best of these are owned by WordDial, which appears to be highly resistant to selling them. It's hard to know what kind of success privately-held WordDial has had with its portals. Therefore, it's hard to know how much success Smith's public corporation will have with its version of the portal revenue model for numeric domains.

One thing, however, is for certain: when the numeric domain boat comes in, and mobile users begin visiting 66639.com over Forbes.com and 6397.com over Cnn.com, both Smith and WordDial will be hearing two sounds.

The foghorn. And 'ch-ching.'