November 16 2007: 9:17 AM EST

Brett Dewey’s company thrives on spur-of-the-moment purchases. His North Hollywood, Calif., web business, WickedCoolStuff, collects $1 million a year for nostalgic merchandise such as Captain Picard action figures, Underdog lunch boxes, and toys based on Monty Python movies. His customers, mainly men in their late 20s, are more tech savvy than most online shoppers, but they aren’t chained to their computers. Even Star Trek fans venture outdoors.

So when Dewey heard about a new kind of website tailored to conduct e-commerce over cellphones, he jumped at the chance to make himself accessible to clients during virtually all their waking hours. “If someone sees an advertisement, he may not remember it by the time he gets back to his computer,” he says. “But his phone is always on hand for an impulse buy.”

If the first wave of online business was all about getting a dot-com, the next may be about adding a dot-mobi. The new web address became available for the first time in May and is administered by Mobile Top Level Domain (mTLD; mtld.mobi), a private company based in Dublin. Sign up for a dot-mobi address and you’ll be required to stick to a list of best practices, such as using the xhtml language. Complex design elements such as frames are banished. “When a site is built that way,” says mTLD marketing director Vance Hedderel, “it’s guaranteed to work well on every cellphone in the world.”

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