“Whilst .tel domains provide new ways of generating revenue through the support and optimization of premium rate telephone numbers, software downloads, ringtones and competition-based formats, we recognized that those used to traditional monetization methods still felt somewhat restricted,” said Henri Asseily, CTO and Chief Strategist at Telnic Limited. “We have therefore enabled .tel owners to include clearly identifiable, text-based sponsored advertising links. In this way, we maintain the clear purpose of a .tel domain as a single point of contact whilst also meeting the requirements for monetization across all internet-enabled devices.”

The solution has been to introduce a special sub-type of a text (TXT) record with a ‘.tad’ suffix. This is stored in a special folder within the .tel domain. This record contains the title, label, description and URI to use in the advertisement, as well as display settings which enable the domain owner to position the advert in their chosen place on the page (top, bottom or right) when the content is delivered to the proxy page. When the proxy loads a .tel domain, it checks the format and settings of the adverts and displays them accordingly.

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Qwista.com makes .tel domain totally searchable, bringing all the .tel data to your fingertips. With Qwista it gets extremely easy to find the contact details of a business or an individual, even if you failed to remember the exact .tel address. The new search engine employs its own proprietary database and algorithm to deliver the most relevant results and comprehensive coverage, allowing its users to fully utilize .tel’s communication capabilities. The advanced language-independent algorithm allows searching pages in any language. Morphological search, ensuring improved relevancy, is already available for English, German and Russian, and it’s only a question of time for other languages.

Initially, .tel pages are not divided into commercial and personal ones, and it complicates search significantly. A user has to make his way through a dozen of various company pages before he finds the page of a new friend, and vice-versa. Qwista addresses this problem, offering the option of searching commercial and personal pages separately. It analyzes the content of a page to include it into one of these two categories, providing the results as accurate as possible in this situation, and thus ensuring comfortable searching experience for a user.

Lightweight, efficient and easy-to-use, Qwista delivers its capabilities in the intuitive interface optimized for mobile devices. With all the advantages offered, the system clearly claims to be the first choice for anyone looking for a reliable .tel search engine.

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With well over 200,000 .tel domains registered since General Availability on March 24th customers from all over the world have been benefitting from the .tel domain. Languages now supported include English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

“Kebab shops in Algiers and dermatologists in New York through to hotels in Vietnam have all been happily using .tel domains, but we’re very pleased to be able to open the .tel domain up to many more people around the world,” said Justin Hayward, Communications Director at Telnic Limited. “The .tel is a revolution in simplifying and lowering the cost of publishing on the internet under an individual’s own space and we want to remove as many barriers for as many people to take advantage of this as possible.”

User guides have also be translated in conjunction with the control panel, access to which is supplied to .tel registrants through ICANN accredited registrars or .tel service providers. To view the control panel and guides in the language of their choice, users can simply change the settings on their browsers.

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Almost every day new tools are being presented to expand these possibilities. The .tel domain already even has its own search engine, Jepaa.com, which provides only .tel-page results.

The Swiss company Movetec behind Jepaa and other innovation projects around .tel now presents TEL-MACHINE.com with various useful functions available outside your registrar’s environment. More exciting tools are under development.

You can now use the following functions:

For each of these functions will be available soon, further information and instructions

Sign up today for free and test the first TEL-MACHINE.com Tools.

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He is currently working for premier Russian digital agency Actis Wunderman. However, Oleg is also the person behind bigcity.tel, an innovative .tel domain that automatically updates weather and activity information about big cities around the world.

“Many people remember the computer culture of demo-making in the 90s – a peculiar atmosphere of searching for creative solutions and developing impossible things, driving on the maximum of computer resources. Today, assembler code and byte optimization algorithms have lost their relevance, but in their time they opened new horizons for creative technology. Telnic has demonstrated this type of creativity by making an extraordinary present to all progressive people. Yes, I’m talking about .tel – an innovative take on traditional technologies. The .tel creates a multitude of possibilities for cutting-edge software which, in my opinion, have started a portable revolution in the domain industry.”

“When I first heard about .tel, I didn’t think it was particularly revolutionary, but the spherical image of the .tel logo hypnotized me! I couldn’t resist this power and fell into learning about .tel and its technical specifications. I was soon impressed by the domain’s capabilities and a fire of new ideas on how to leverage .tel blew up my mind, to the extent that I froze my current project for Google Andriod and switched on to .tel.”

“The main objective as I see it of a .tel domain is as a useful management of contact information, but the potential provided by this platform is much greater. bigcity.tel has been planned to expose some of that potential and show everybody how .tel domain owners might develop these opportunities. Sometimes I need certain information about weather and upcoming concerts, but have no computer access.”
“The idea of a universal source of this kind of data sounded good to me and I decided that the .tel domain is an optimal solution for dynamically updated text information. It provides both a Web and WAP presentation layer, mobile device integration and plugins for PIM software. All it needed was quality content in the .tel pages. ”
“Currently bigcity.tel shows weather conditions for up to 2 days (with information provided from Yahoo! Weather) and upcoming entertainment events information (provided by Eventful.com) in selected major cities. To obtain this info, I used an open API of these services and handy Telnic Client Web services to publish data into .tel pages. A software platform in Java has been created for managing these processes.”

“Bigcity.tel is in the testing stage now (so, some errors could appear) and soon local news information and a list of interesting places to spend a weekend will be added.

“The development of this project didn’t take much time at all and the main Alpha version was ready in 2 weeks from the start of programming. It’s not difficult to develop sites like bigcity.tel; for example, it could be a service for exporting twitter records, linking to new photos or dynamically displaying the current location of the domain owner. With an optimistic vision, I can see a lot of innovative projects providing such services in the future.”

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Digitrad is a Unified Communications Platform.
Voice and telephony market is huge, estimated to top 3 trillion USD. The problem today is that communications are everywhere, the result is we have too many different identities.
What Digitrad does is simple:
Digitrad simplifies the way people communicate by using their name as a single point of contact.
Digitrad makes it possible by using the infrastructure of the .tel which is the first domain name dedicated to communications and combining the features of the different social networks and IMs you are using everyday.

Digitrad Presentation French Tech Tour 2009 from Micha Benoliel on Vimeo.

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Samuel Voet, internet entrepreneur from Belgium

“At first when .tel launched I was looking for interesting names and while trying to understand what .tel could be used for and what it was all about I registered a few names. Some are very good and will find their usage in the future. Cancel.tel is something different. I didn’t even register that name during the first day of .tel going public, but when I noticed it after a few days for some reason it caught my attention.

“People use their phones to take care of business, so then I tried to find a link between the domain cancel.tel and how this could be used in a good way with the .tel platform. I am convinced that .tel has a lot of power and could mean something important in the age of mobile telephones. Of course, you have the directory-style applications on things like realestate.tel and phonebook.tel, and it allows a great form of branding for companies and celebrities. If .tel becomes more important in the future it will have a significant amount of value for people and companies. Cancel.tel is a bit different from all those things. It doesn’t promote anything, but I decided to turn it into a service instead.

“This service can be used by anyone around the globe and will assist people because it uses the strength of what .tel has to offer. It makes use of the simple and easy-to-remember word compared to multiple complex telephone numbers. It is very easy and fast, excellent to navigate on a mobile phone when a person is not at home where they might use a normal phone book, a computer or all kinds of other help devices.

“People don’t have to think when they are in a certain mental state (they’ve just lost personal documents, ID, bank cards) so .tel allows to make use of a simple word to get instantly connected (with one press of a button) with the credit card service of their choice. It’s even more simple than calling an emergency number.

“Cancel.tel isn’t really a business project. If I can assist hundreds or thousands of people each year, save people tons of hassle and money with a simple domain name that costs under ten dollars then it’s better to keep it as a service.

“I know at this stage there will not be many solutions or services on .tel which will have such an “interesting” service. If you take fire.tel, it could be a way to contact a fire department on a global scale, still people will just call the emergency services in case of a fire. So it really isn’t that obvious to come up with .tel related services.

“But if a government registered swineflu.tel and then put out a commercial on television where they make use of the .tel name and people could just call if they see something suspicious. If the government used a normal phone number they would need to broadcast many more commercials because they would be forced to put the number out for people to remember, or to make sure people would write it down. With swineflu.tel, just as with cancel.tel, the number is replaced by an extremely easy to remember word.

“Cancel.tel was created in a strange way, almost unintended for what it became, now it’s there, people like it, I receive mails from people telling me how much they appreciate the site. It’s so simple but it does what it needs to do, almost like a spoon or a cup to drink water. In a way, cancel.tel just demonstrates all the aspects (almost all the aspects) of a .tel domain name and what it can be.”

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After helping Telnic to raise awareness of .tel in the UK at the launch earlier this year, Lynne realized that her members – and through them, women’s charities – would benefit from .tel as well. Here, she explains her thoughts on .tel, the internet and doing business the feminine way:

“I was delighted when I was first invited to be a spokesperson for .tel, which is the most dynamic global directory in cyber space. It has subsequently made perfect sense to create a partnership between my SEED community of women entrepreneurs and .tel which will ensure that both personally and professionally our members can be accessible and contactable very easily as well as having their search engine results maximised. .tel also enables SEED women to find the necessary business resources that they need, too – a win-win situation.”

“The most important thing in today’s business environment for small businesses or people starting out in business on their own is the need to be seen and the need to be found. It’s a highly competitive world and you need to be as visible as possible. We live in the communication age and we can’t do anything without making connections. We need to know how to get to others – and how they can get to us.

“Your customers and potential customers need to have total accessibility to you and your team, on-line and on-phone and need constant access to your contact details. The internet is now your main tool for the promotion and expansion of your business. Search engine maximization, an efficient e-mail address and a well-designed, articulate website are now priority.”

“For the first time, more women than men are using the World Wide Web. We are talking to each other, buying each other’s products and services, researching resources and promoting our own business. It is in many ways so natural for women to use social networking and connection on the Web. This is going to blossom even more over the next year or so as women really take over the internet.”
Lynne’s Seed Network for Women has teamed up with Domainmonster.com to offer Seed Network members a discount on .tel domains. Domainmonster.com is making a donation for every .tel domain sold through http://seednetworkingforwomen.com to charity.

Lynne Franks and the SEED Network supports V-Day and Unicef’s STOP RAPING OUR GREATEST RESOURCE: POWER TO THE WOMEN AND GIRLS OF THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO, a global campaign which began two years ago and is already beginning to make serious strides by educating, advocating and taking action. The campaign is raising funds to build the City of Joy, a leadership and healing centre for a hundred women survivors, where they will turn pain to power, rebuild their lives, reclaim their dignity and further develop their leadership skills to become the new leaders of the DRC. The money will be donated by SEEDGives Ltd through the British Registered charity ‘Until The Violence Stops’ to go towards the City of Joy.

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“I have been lucky enough to have been chosen for a number of high profile gigs in the industry and have recorded commercials for the likes of Pepsi and McCoys, introduced Bill Gates on stage for his Microsoft “farewell” tour, voiced a number of animation characters for various US and UK-based studios. And I am also the voice of the “talking signs” for hospitals and Police Forces across the UK – but my favourite gig is always paying a visit to Stephen Fry’s charity, Listening Books where I record audiobooks for blind and partially sighted kids. Great fun, and my kids generally get to keep the actual paper copies of the books I read. I have to say though, I did enjoy having to sing Auld Lang Sine as a “comedy Elvis” for next year’s New Years greeting cards recently.

“Being discovered on the Internet is essential for me – it’s the only way potential new clients can see me and hear what I do. Even when I am recommended by someone, it’s much easier for them to just say: “click on OverVoice.tel” rather than have to remember all my details. I would say that most of my business now comes from the Internet in some shape or form. Nearly everyone sits down in front of a PC, at some point in the day, and there I am!

“I first heard about the .tel domain in an email from my domain hosting company SimplyNames.com and was intrigued to find out more. There was definitely a “buzz” about the new .tel extension – people were saying that it was the biggest thing to happen to domains since the creation of the mighty .com! So I had to have a look.

“I found out that the .tel domain name is slightly different to your run-of-the-mill domain name. You can’t just “map” your shiny new .tel over any old IP address, infact, when you buy your .tel, all you get for your money is a username and password for a website where you simply enter your business or personal details.
“Not very exciting. Until you realise that you are actually entering your information into the actual DNS (Domain Name System) rather than just mapping your .tel domain over an IP address (as with every other domain extension).

“So what? Well, that means that the information you enter into your .tel template is universally available – in the same format. So mobile phones, PDAs, netbooks, VOIP services and specific software applications, for use on websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and Ecademy can have access to all this contact information – in the same format!

“As a Qualified Google Advertising Professional I was particularly pleased that the .tel domain is very search engine friendly. All the necessary keywords and phrases could be added to my public-facing page and within a few days Google had indexed my domain and I was out on the Internet, ready to be discovered. Within the first week, I was contacted by a voice producer who was actually trying to buy “OverVoice” for himself but instead found me and gave me some work. Probably the best £15 I have ever spent.

“I can certainly see how it would be massively advantageous for businesses and radio stations and broadcasters to use their .tel domain to promote competitions and requests – but definitely in advertisements. It is so much easier to just remember one word or phrase and immediately have access to a company’s contact data (and any other data they would like you to have) rather than trying to remember phone numbers, email addresses and websites.

“If audio producers or businesses want to hire me, they just have to remember one word: ‘OverVoice.tel’ (OK two words made into one and .tel) and all my information is there!”

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The sessions will run at lunchtime on both days by successful Entrepreneur and now Chief Strategist of Telnic Henri Asseily. Telnic, which is the sole sponsor for all of the seminar halls at the exhibition, will also be answering questions on Stand 534. Telnic partners, including domainmonster.com (www.domainmonster.com), will also be at the show selling .tel domains.

Small businesses and independent traders from removal companies (http://removals.tel) through to radio voice-over artists (http://overvoice.tel) are benefitting today from .tel domains in the UK and globally. .tel domains provide small businesses with a host of features, including:

• A presence on the internet under their control without the need to build or pay for a website
• Great search engine optimization features built in to help deliver better search results
• A comprehensive listing in a global directory of .tel domains which can be accessed from any device, quickly and at very low cost
• The ability to change contact information quickly and easily from handheld devices
• Integrating ‘live’ .tel information into ‘contact us’ pages for existing websites

“As a small business ourselves we know how important it is to be available for customers especially in this economic climate,” said Justin Hayward, Communications Director at Telnic. “Small businesses, whilst they can adopt social media tools and use social networking to spread the message, still rely on good old-fashioned conversations with customers as well. .tel can provide the small business owner with an easy way to manage all of those interaction points and enhance customer service at the same time.”

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