With less than one month to go until Sunrise opens, Telnic has warned that trademark owners risk missing out on being listed in the new global, ‘live’ contacts directory if they fail take advantage of the first come, first served application period for their branded .tel domains. Telnic is the company formed to act as the Registry Operator and Sponsoring Organization for .tel.
A .tel domain provides organisations of all sizes a named listing with unlimited contact information in a global directory, accessible from any device connected to the internet. Customers can then search for and find up-to-date contact information quickly at little or no cost to them, connecting with .tel owners how they want to. Additionally, the .tel is search engine optimized through its ability to store indexable keywords, providing additional content for branded discoverability on the web. All of this is provided without any further investment over and above cost of purchasing the domain name, such as website building and maintenance, web hosting or other services normally associated with domain name hosting. It also requires no technical skill to set up, being managed by a simple dashboard.
The registration timetable is:
• Sunrise opens at 15:00 GMT on 3 December 2008 and closes at 23:59 GMT on 2 February 2009. Owners and licensees of trademarks registered with national effect may apply.
• Landrush opens at 15:00 GMT on 3 February 2009 and closes at 23:59 GMT on 23 March 2009. Open to everyone. Any domain that is not registered during Sunrise will be eligible for Landrush registration at a premium price.
• General Availability opens at 15:00 GMT on 24 March 2009.
In October, Telnic Limited published resources and open source code for developers, enabling them to create new applications and services on the .tel platform: ‘to energize the developer community’ As well as resources, code, toolkits and the .tel management console, Telnic has also released beta versions of applications on the site that can be used on BlackBerry devices, iPhones and Windows-based PCs. These applications integrate with the address book and make them dynamically updated with information stored in a .tel owner’s domain. They are free to download, under an open source license, and can be used as models for new types of applications around communications, directory services, location-based services, search and social networking, designed to exploit the DNS-based .tel service.
