ideegeo Group Limited

ideegeo is moving up in the world and not just because we recently moved to the 14th floor at our new office. With global domain sales continuing to grow at around 12%, despite the economic recession, and over 180 million domains now in total, it was no surprise to see rapid sales growth once we launched iWantMyName our innovative domain management service.

In fact, most of our time this year has been involved with extending, improving and scaling up iWantMyName. The website takes a leaf out of Google’s design book with clean lines, high functionality and (best of all) no annoying up-selling. We’ve also created value-adds such as Domains for Apps that allows clients to easily personalise their favourite hosted services. In fact some app developers liked our service so much that we are now talking about how we can deepen those relationships further. Watch this space.

We’ve added other services too such as an updated version of our iPhone App, with speed and interface improvements, and a cool Twitter bot that lets you check for domain availability directly from your Twitter account. Our next big project involves further internationalisation of the platform including non-English language versions of the site and implementation of local currency sales transactions. With some additional developer resources on board now, we expect to spend the next few months hard at work on this. We are also open to new global partnerships in this respect.

Having a view over the city of Wellington is great, but it also reminds us that we are part of a wider technology industry ecosystem. That’s one of the reasons we set about establishing an Erlang user group here in Wellington which is held every month now. We think Erlang has a big future, which is why we have used it extensively within our own products and services and are encouraging local developers to explore this emerging development language.

With much of our technology development being linked closely to the domain industry we were very pleased to hear that the next ICANN event was to be held “across the ditch”. So in a couple of weeks a bunch of us will be jumping on flights and heading to Sydney, Australia. There’s a lot happening with the new gTLD program plus ICANN is moving steadily to progress the issue of internationalised domain names (IDN). So we are looking forward to learning all about these developments and catching up with a few old friends in the domain industry.

As you may have heard, ICANN, the internet’s governing body announced a new gTLD (generic Top-Level Domain) program in June last year. This program plans to liberalise the creation of new domain extensions in addition to the already existing .COM, .NET or .ORG etc. meaning that any company or organisation could apply for their own extension such as .APPLE, .BLOG or .BERLIN. Actually it’s not as simple as that because you have to fulfill certain financial requirements and also need the respective technology but there is no denying the fact that this change will bring more competition to the domain industry and even more important be as much revolutionary as evolutionary to the Internet in general.

In our opinion we have only touched the surface of what is possible with an Internet address system. Over the last 10 years, since ICANN began, a foundational structure has been put in place to manage the huge growth of the Internet. Firstly, there is an extensive registrar / reseller channel to deliver domains to the consumers including the big players such as Go Daddy, Network Solutions and smaller ones like our own iWantMyName. There is also a significant secondary market for trading with domains including the platforms of Sedo or Afternic, infrastructure providers, e.g. Pool’s auctioning platform or HEXONET with their Registrar-as-a-Service offering. Finally ICANN has made considerable  progress with the standardisation of legal frameworks and continues to build on these efforts.

But now it’s time to move on to the next level as new services begin to emerge out of this ecosystem. That’s where the new gTLDs come into play. More competition will drive innovation and as we have discussed earlier this is certainly needed in an industry which is sometimes perceived as slow to adapt. To demonstrate how opportunities are emerging from the new TLD regime, we have picked three clear examples of innovative products and services:

.TEL

The recently launched .TEL domain (available for public registration on iWantMyName from Mar 24th) is not part of the aforementioned new gTLD program, but it already showcases the potential of the other upcoming extensions. It indexes all your contact details on your domain name without the need for a website and is accessible to third-party applications through the standard DNS system. You can think of it as a virtual telephone book entry for all your identifiers online and offline. If you have to change your phone number, Skype address or business email you just need update your .TEL domain and all individuals and applications that have access granted to your domain are up to date immediately.

Let’s think one step ahead here: with the rise of Software-as-a-Service offerings and more and more web-based applications, could the new domain extensions even serve as trusted de facto file extensions? In the very near future, it could be possible to fully personalise your experience of the web by securing all your hosted services and documents under a single domain. Having your domain managed by an independent and trusted source will be critical to the integrity of such a service.

.ECO

At last week’s ICANN Mexico meeting the .ECO initiative gained some momentum after Al Gore expressed his support. It was immediately deadpooled by some commentators, but we are asking ourselves: why not? It is basically putting a quality label on something just like we already have for so many things in the real world. There is ‘gluten-free’ for food, ‘Made in Germany’ for manufactured goods, ‘Full HD’ for TVs and so on. So why shouldn’t we put a .ECO label on projects that support environmental causes or activities? Plans to donate a part of the registration fees to environmental causes further validates the argument in favour of creating new business models in the industry based on new top-level domains.

.INDIGI

The .INDIGI project aims to provide a home for indigenous people on the Internet. It is especially dear to us because we reside in New Zealand which has its own original inhabitants, the Māori. The project is founded by Karaitiana Taiuru who already brought the official .MAORI.NZ to the .NZ namespace and therefore has been a strong advocate to make this happen. However, there is one challenge these TLDs are facing. They absolutely deserve to exist but as Anthony van Couvering pointed out the fees ICANN decided to put on those applicants could simply be too high. Nonetheless, ideegeo is supporting their efforts with our technical advice and we look forward to the success of this significant project in particular.

These were only three examples out of many ideas that exist already and we haven’t even touched the topic of IDN top-level domains which finally makes Internet addresses more accessible for users in non-Latin alphabets. It has still a long way to go and the initial plan to introduce new gTLDs has been delayed already; but it will happen and we are a strong supporter of these changes. If you want to find our more about the latest timeline, consulting firm Minds + Machines has published an excellent overview.

What is your opinion on the new domain extensions? Have you heard about any other? We are looking forward to your comments.

Erlang is a functional programming language that evolved out of the telco space and was built for concurrency. It is a perfect fit for everything that needs to run in parallel and is a native citizen in cloud based computing. We used Erlang for our iPhone interface in the iWantMyName project and use CouchDB for various purposes in several projects. We are experimenting with RabbitMQ and run an ejabberd jabber server; and I am sure we have even more Erlang based software that I have forgotten to list.

Because of the high level of interest in this language, we have decided to host an Erlang usergroup in Wellington commencing in February. We are so confident in the further establishment of Erlang that we have employed it successfully in some of our own projects. Furthermore, a number of the toolsets we use to build our projects or run our infrastructure are built in Erlang as well. As we foresee a growing need for Erlang programmers, we are trying to raise awareness around this very special programming language.

If you are interested in Erlang or in software based on Erlang or just curious how functional programming works generally (or how wired the guys doing it look like!) then please come along and chat with us. Most probably we will chat about CouchDB as well and if you are interested in other erlang based software then you are very welcome to contribute to the discussion.

We have a google group on http://groups.google.com/group/erlounge-wellington

When: 3rd Feb 2009
Time: 6:00 PM
Where: AltSpace (http://altspace.co.nz/)

Suite 607, Level 6 29 Brandon Street, Wellington

see you there.

The creation of our domain registrar site iWantMyName was certainly the most exciting project I did so far. This is mostly because of an early decision to use the latest stuff you can get out there on the technology scene at the moment. We use Erlang with mochiweb for the iPhone interface, CouchDB for database storage where applicable and lots of nice things like nginx as frontend load balancer and so on. The only traditional thing in the game is Perl which obviously powers the backend.

So what is this all about? Erlang is a telco language that gained traction in the web world since many of us realized that scalability is the problem we continually run into. Erlang is not a panacea, but it is a functional language that makes concurrent programming really easy. We only use Erlang at the moment for the iPhone API to dispatch requests to our domain engine but what we experienced in performance and from the ease of development, we will definitely write more parts in Erlang in the future.

CouchDB is the next big thing in the database world when it comes to web related development. It is a schema-less database loosely modeled after the Lotus Notes principles. CouchDB is written in Erlang (yes I love Erlang) and gives you a map/reduce database with powerful replication features and no painful configuration odysseys. We use CouchDB for caching, logging and for various user settings. The nicest DB we have in CouchDB is the TLD database though, check it out in action on our price list.
The platform itself is a Catalyst application using the power of Perl with the MVC pattern that seems to fit the development of web based applications so nicely. The platform talks to PostgreSQL and CouchDB depending on the functionality needed. As we went along, more and more features went into CouchDB though and with further development we will use it even more. Catalyst enabled us to push the whole platform out on the market in only three months time and I have no regrets having chosen Catalyst over the many other options out there.

The backend is Perl and PostgreSQL. The domain business is traditionally Perl and in fact lots of the registries and registrars we work with run on Perl as well. It just seems to be native to this kind of business. The Perl environment is written as a set of daemons interacting with each other. There is no old school cron driven bit of code here. It is entirely event driven. Even though the Perl code is performing well we intend to rewrite big parts of this infrastructure in Erlang in the future.

Now that we have a bit more time again, we will start to review our code base and write some more articles about CouchDB and Erlang. And we will release those bits of code that are general enough to help others understand the principles we used. Watch this space for announcements.

Last week we flipped the switch on our first major online venture. Not only that, we satisfied our first customer and began earning export dollars. It’s a good feeling after many long hours of hard work.

iWantMyName is an international domain registrar site offering a wide range of domains for sale to the public. It’s a highly competitive industry to enter, hence we are differentiating ourselves from day one. Helpful functionality and friendly usability are hard to find amongst existing registrars, so we’ve gone the extra mile to make the site as clean, sharp and easy to navigate as possible.

We will also be progressively adding functionality that assists users to “personalise their experience of the Web”. So for example if you want to hang all your cloud hosted email, documents, work spaces and social networks under your own domain, we think you should be able to do exactly that without any fuss. Now iWantMyName can help you make that transition. With all the buzz around hosted solutions and portable universal IDs lately, we think this is where the digital world is headed already.

Check out the site and please do feel free to give us feedback.

Pretty boy rockers from the band Europe released a cult classic over twenty years ago with a triumphant keyboard riff that still thrills listeners today. We hope our new domain registrar site will roar up the sales charts and still be number one in a couple of decades too.

It’s now only a few days to until we go public with the new site. The smooth lines and easy functionality of the site belies the many hours of hard work that has gone into the project. Our tech guys may not be as good looking as the band members from Europe, but they sure as hell work just as hard to satisfy their audience. We’ve had to overcome a few hurdles along the way, like banks who don’t want to know about start-up companies in the current economic climate and bureaucrats who don’t understand the pace of life in a fast moving new company and take two weeks to return your calls and emails. But with dogged determination we’ve pressed on.

Things move fast on the Web and online enterprises must continually reinvent themselves and reinvigorate their business model - especially when economies are faltering. That’s why we don’t want to be just another wannabe. Differentiating our product is important, very much so. That’s why we are planning semantic search functionality and a whole host of value added services that other registrars do not offer.

ideegeo has a vision for the future that is both user-centric and grounded in the realities of cloud computing and hosted services which are now coming of age and launching daily on a desktop or mobile platform near you. Web users of the near future will need mobility and portability. Owning and managing your own personal domain will be as ubiquitous as owning a car or a refrigerator. In fact your car and fridge will probably come complete with their own IP addresses! That’s when you demand - “I want my name!”.

We’ll release more once we’ve signed off on our final testing phase. Stay tuned to this channel.

So what are we currently working on? Well, apart from the already mentioned iPhone software there is a brand new domain registration web site under development. The topic of domain registrar site usability was covered by Domain Name Wire and Tucows’ Ross Rader a couple of months ago. Making the user experience a happier one is a goal close to our hearts at ideegeo and it is something we hope to address with our forthcoming registrar site and related product line.

You don’t need to look far to find sites that simply do not cater adequately for the user experience. The worlds biggest domain registrar Go Daddy is a good example. I really do not want to buy the Go Daddy girl, four other domains and a hosting plan. I just want my domain name! On the other hand Go Daddy recently introduced a new service called SmartSpace which was covered by ReadWriteWeb and is a step in the right direction. But again there is one comment in the ReadWriteWeb article which speaks volumes about the current lack of innovation in the domain industry, “Do they really need to offer new domains to users all the time? The registrars are still so focused on catering to domainers that the UX sucks ass.”

But there is hope. Services like the social network based on domains Chi.mp or Hover from Tucows show that there are at least some companies who think about how you can connect Web 2.0 technologies with domain names and bundle value added services into the mix. However, it seems like most first generation domain registrars which were founded around the turn of the millenium, after the fall of Network Solution’s monopoly, are totally stuck in their current business models.

That’s why we have decided to take a different direction with ideegeo. Our web sites are domain-centric, focussed on usability and simplicity and built with the actual Internet end user in mind. We want to help you to get the domain name you want and we intend to make that process as uncomplicated as possible. We are inspired by companies like 37signals and their ‘Getting Real‘ manifesto. We have the freedom to build everything from scratch using cool open source technologies like Erlang and CouchDB. That’s fun!

We will keep on working hard in the next couple of weeks to present you with our first product well before Christmas. Watch out for further announcements.

Carsonified run a series of events featuring web design and mobility in both the UK and U.S. Now they are giving away a magic golden ticket including an airfare and free pass to the event of your choice. It is a magical proposition for us because we are based on the other side of the world but would love to get to some of these events.

Carsonified host the Future of Web Design, Future of Web Apps, Future of Mobile, Fuel and other Workshops and are always on our radar when it comes to interesting web stuff.

So please help us to win the ticket! All we need is 25 comments to this blog post before the end of September.

And you can win something too! As we are sponsoring and attending the Software Freedom Day 08 event in Wellington we will give away a sweet surprise for all attendees who visit us and leave a comment on this blog during the event. We will also blog live from SFD’08 and feed the little bird by the way.

If you want to meet us in person watch out for some guys with white MacBooks and shiny white polo shirts with our logo. You just can’t miss us.

Even if you are not attending SFD08, you can still leave a comment too of course. Please.

Telco mobile networks are toast without good content

It is always encouraging to make some progress forward in a new business, so it was pleasing to round off the week by signing an agreement with a development partner to work on our much anticipated iPhone application. What would be even more encouraging is if the telcos stimulated growth in the mobile application industry.

ideegeo is collaborating with coravy. Limited, an Apple approved iPhone developer. They will provide us with a stylish mobile interface and we will deliver the back end search functionality based on our underlying technology. It’s a win for both parties because we both get to extend our development skills and demonstrate capability. We’ll be sharing more about this as we achieve some milestones in the project. We have a mobile product pipeline planned, but should have version 1.0 available within a couple of months.

The telecommunications providers should be pleased that developers are thinking about next generation applications. With Telecom having taken years to make the decision to invest in WCDMA it was no surprise that it was found to be losing market share to Vodafone. Now that Telecom is planning to switch over to a 3G capable network by about November we will finally see some competition in the market place. The networking technology itself is moving ahead in leaps and bounds and as capacity ramps up prices must drop. More attractive pricing plus lots of cool apps should ensure that mobile computing will finally hit the mainstream in New Zealand and globally.

What is still unclear is why the telcos rarely talk to independent developers. It’s all very fine investing in mobile network infrastructure, but if there is no product who is going to use it? Telcos have traditionally not been successful at developing their own content offerings, whereas small niche developers have been. The telcos want to retain and grow their user base, so why not encourage mobile application development as an industry? Where are the telco sponsored developer forums, competitions for best mobile app and the investments into intrapreneurial spinoff ventures? Surely we can do a bit better than PacMan and mobile Bridezilla?

Finally everything came together!

The ideegeo Group just moved into a new office in the co-working space AltSpace in Wellington. Our preparations have lasted for some months and it is good to see that things are really starting now. We are currently refining our strategy and build some backend technologies which will help us to quickly go to the market with new products in the future. This is an exciting time and we are all happy to be part of it. And could it be any better than starting our business in a beautiful country like New Zealand? We don’t think so. The wilderness and untouched natural world is exactly the environment we love and need and which gives us the freedom to have fun and to be creative in what we do.

This blog might not have many updates in the beginning because - to be honest - we have more important things to do. But we are listening to you and will keep you informed on Twitter and Friendfeed in the meantime where you can follow us already. And don’t forget to become a fan of us on Facebook.

Have fun. We surely have!