.Tel domain names go live

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 11 March 2009 02:17

IT Industry - Market

The new .tel global top level domain name has gone live with tens of thousands of names eight years after its backer Telnic first floated the idea.

Telnic claimed to have  achieved a milestone in the delivery of a new Internet service, with tens of thousands of .tel domains going live to create what it said was "the world's first global directory.

 "This is a momentous day for the company as eight years of development has come to fruition," said Henri Asseily, CTO and chief strategist at Telnic. "We're delighted to be delivering something that will push the boundaries of communications and the internet to the next level,  putting the power back into the hands of the individual when it comes to using and sharing contact information."

Telnic claims that "Businesses and individuals are now logging into their own .tel domains, enabling them to store contact information, keywords and location information, which is then published to the internet quickly and securely without needing to build a website."

He added: "This fundamental change in the use of the internet will break open the ability for anyone to now own a domain and  be found from any device. This is the biggest innovation to hit the internet and communications and it seems fitting that we have achieved this on the 133rd anniversary of the first use of the telephone. From today, people will be able to dial a .tel name to connect with people. The future of communications is now wide open to innovation."

Telnic intends that .tel will be a one-stop shop where individuals and organisations will be able to provide a range of contact information. According to Telnic it will allow anyone to publish and control, in real time, how they can be reached. .tel has already been called ‘game-changing’, ‘the white pages killer’ and ‘the Google of online address books'.

However major companies that failed to register their .tel domain during the 'sunrise' period could now find it taken up by a much smaller company with a similar name, and hence a perfectly legitimate claim to it. Perhaps the most hign profile example to date is Chinese search engine Baidu.

Baidu provides an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. The domain baidu.com attracted at least 5.5 million visitors annually by 2008. But the domain Baidu.tel was snapped up by Baidu Europe, a Groningen-based automation and web design solutions organisation.

Telnic announced in January that a number of major telcos had secured the .tel domain names and were investigating the .tel as a platform for added-value services. CEO Khashayar Mahdavi, said “Several operators, especially those concerned with VoIP, are moving to become ICANN-accredited registrars in order to use this platform to deliver value-added services to their customers.”