We all remember the Super Bowl commercials for Go Daddy, which have largely been associated with race car driver Danica Patrick. However, this year, the company’s Super Bowl commercial took things to the next level with depiction of “sexy combined with smart.” The commercial featured supermodel Bar Rafaeli kissing a nerdy guy named “Walter,” and I honestly had to look away from the television during the spot…but I guess that was Go Daddy’s intention, to give people something to talk about!
Now, this week, Go Daddy has an announcement that it hopes SMBs will be chatting about: The Web platform has acquired M.dot Inc., a mobile app for small business website creation and management. The addition of M.dot to Go Daddy’s product offerings now gives Go Daddy’s customers an easy way to create and manage compelling mobile websites right from their smartphones.
Go Daddy CEO Blake Irving made the formal announcement at today’s ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Go Daddy office located in Sunnyvale, Calif. “M.dot’s global vision of a mobile future for small businesses fits beautifully with what our customers need right now,” he said in a media statement. “Go Daddy wants to help businesses connect with their customers wherever they are in the world, and that means providing killer mobile technology. It also means helping our customers manage their business from anywhere, anytime with the simplicity of their smartphone or tablet. With M.dot, small businesses can compete on a big-time level without spending big-time money. We’re completely stoked to have M.dot on board.”
Over the last three years, mobile Internet traffic has grown more than 10 times from one percent to 13 percent of total Web usage1. In that same time period, smartphone and tablet shipments surpassed PCs. Go Daddy customers are using their smartphones to manage their online presence more and more every day as a means to find and acquire customers. The M.dot acquisition provides Go Daddy’s customers with an SMB-based platform to capitalize on these trends.
M.dot was founded by Dominik Balogh and Pavel Serbajlo in June 2012. They have the backing of Silicon Valley investors including Floodgate, SV Angel and Archimedes Labs. The company will operate from Go Daddy’s Silicon Valley office, which is a major new center of engineering and product design for the company. Over the next year, Go Daddy plans to double its current Sunnyvale-based staff, from 40 to 80.
The M.dot app offers mobile website creation based on pre-loaded templates with easy-to-use custom features, such as store location, driving directions, tap-to-call, galleries, business hours and price lists, all in a user-interface designed for mobile device screens.
