ideegeo Group Limited

With the successful launch of iWantMyName as a global domain registrar site and then into Germany and the Netherlands last year, we felt it was now time to turn our attention to home. We have had so many requests from our friends to establish in the New Zealand market, because of our unique service offering, friendly user interface and great customer support. Finally we had to say yes and we now have a dedicated Kiwi site at http://iwantmyname.co.nz offering fixed prices in New Zealand dollars.

The Kiwi iWantMyName has New Zealand’s widest range of domain extensions, many of which are unavailable from other local domain registrars. Examples of exclusive domains include the recently launched .TEL and .ME suffixes plus interesting country code top-level domains from all over the world such as .LI (Liechtenstein), .IO (British Indian Ocean Territory) and .FM (Federal States of Micronesia). Customers from the existing site can use the same login details to access their accounts across the iWantMyName platform suite. We also offer the same free services on our Kiwi version so that you can hook up your own domain to customise a wide range of great web applications such as GMail, Blogger and Zoho. In the very near future we also plan to add some cool new Kiwi-made services that we really want to support.

We think it is appropriate that the launch of a new product should be celebrated with some special offers. So until the end of February we are offering new .COM, .NET, .ORG and .NAME domains for only $19.90 NZD plus .INFO for $9.90 NZD. We are also able to offer a FREE one year extension if you transfer your existing domains across to iWantMyName NZ. Transfers can be handled from your personal dashboard once you join up. Please note that all domain prices quoted on the Kiwi site are GST exclusive and that we provide full GST invoicing to all our valued customers.

In addition, we are supporting the Australasian Linux conference LCA2010 which rolls into our hometown Wellington on 18-23 January. Look out for the iWantMyName crew at our stand at the Open Day on Saturday 23rd. We would be happy to demo the new site and discuss how we are supporting the open source movement and other technology communities in New Zealand.

It is with a huge amount of pride that we announce the launch of two new registrar sites. In conjunction with a great partner in the Netherlands we’ve created Ben ik Vrij a Dutch language version of our iWantMyName site. With all the functionality of our existing platform plus full Euro currency integration Ben ik Vrij allows us to enter one of the largest domain markets in Europe.

But we aren’t just stopping there. We’ve also opened a wholly owned and operated German language site and we called it simply Mein Name. The German site is a special achievement because ideegeo in part has its origins in an idea that began in Germany. Mein Name a little bit like a return home for us.

The new sites demonstrate how we can powerfully leverage the underlying technology behind iWantMyName and how we can make other partnerships work in new markets. Expect to see further rollouts and cool new services in the future as we change the face of domain name management.

Lately we’ve been hard at work adding smart services and some cool new domain extensions to our domain management site iWantMyName.

We have also produced a lot of useful articles about domains, domain ideas, tools and web apps. This material is available over on the iWantMyName domain blog. So in case you haven’t visited recently, here is a short summary.

Highlights from the iWantMyName blog worth checking out:

• 50+ New Domain Extensions We Might See in 2010
• 10 Tools To Run An URL Shortener On Your Own Domain
• How Many Domain Extensions Exist Worldwide
• Your First Name Under .COM Might Still Be Available (Upside Down)
• Search IDNs With The Virtual Keyboard
• The Art Of Finding A Domain Hack

We’ve  proudly launched support for the registration of macronised domain names on iWantMyName, our global domain registrar site, just in time for Māori language week.

Indigenous groups around the world are looking seriously at how best to protect their digital identity, as the Internet continues to impact powerfully in both in economic and sociological terms. Providing macrons for the use of Māori language domains is a small but significant step towards preserving the expression of Māori language online.

We are also pleased to be able to provide advice to Karaitiana Taiuru of the Māori Internet Society who is currently building a case to create dotINDIGI (.INDIGI) a new top level domain for all Indigenous Peoples. “We see the opportunity to write Māori macron characters in web addresses as a long awaited natural progression”, said Mr Taiuru recently. “We are glad that an innovative local venture like iWantMyName is offering this opportunity at such an early stage and their support for Māori language week is highly admirable. It is also a significant step forward for all Indigenous Peoples of the world to be able to have their own online identity without character constraints.”

In addition to Māori macronised domain names, iWantMyName has also successfully implemented Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) for other non Latin characters. For example, an individual or company could now secure a dotCOM (.COM) domain using Chinese, Hindi or Arabic characters. This could be an advantage to a business looking to set up an online presence in a non-English speaking market.

Test the iWantMyName Domain Search with IDNs:

http://iwantmyname.com/search?domain=māori
http://iwantmyname.com/search?domain=überümlaut
http://iwantmyname.com/search?domain=任提谋

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.