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.

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.

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.