ideegeo Group Limited

For the past two years we’ve put a huge amount of effort into building domain registrar iWantMyName. This involved the successful commercialisation of a search, notification and registration engine technology that we built from scratch and launched without external funding or debt. That’s something we are hugely proud of, but we aren’t resting on our laurels just yet.

We started ideegeo with the intention of creating a pipeline of software projects and using our technology development and commercialisation experience to create a portfolio of opportunities that meant we could earn more export dollars and employ smart people to work with us. Mindful that it takes more than just good ideas to succeed on the Web; through our new venture arm ideegeo Research Ltd. we are reaching out to identify future projects. We have already got a new “skunkworks” partner project lined up for 2011 plus lots more ideas of our own to work on. Watch this space.

Geek Trivia: Skunk Works was a secretive hi-tech research facility of Lockheed Corporation. The name has become synonymous with informal technology R&D involving small teams, blue skies research and minimal managerial oversight. The name originates from a popular cartoon of the 1940s and 50s called Lil’ Abner featuring a bunch of rebellious hillbillies. Skunk Works was the local moonshine distillery that reportedly had skunk scent as its secret ingredient.

With 2010 rapidly drawing to a close we’d like to thank all our friends, customers and collaborators who encouraged and worked with us throughout the year. It has been another year of achievements and hard work as we refine our domain registrar technology iWantMyName and steadily build our support base globally.

We plan to spread our wings in 2011 with more innovations at iWantMyName, new partnerships and a push to offer additional consulting services for web based projects.

All the best for a safe and happy Christmas and New Year

Media Release:

A Wellington, New Zealand software developer sees greater opportunities to promote its domain registrar technology globally after Internet governing body ICANN changed the rules regarding registrar ownership.

Developers at ideegeo Group Limited launched their registrar service iWantMyName into the European marketplace with both Dutch and German language registrar sites a year ago. Company CEO Paul Spence stated that, “the European sites proved we had a robust and highly scalable technology that we could rapidly deploy into other offshore markets”. The company is forecasting over 200% revenue growth this year.

Mr Spence went on to say that recent rule changes at ICANN meant that domain registries, that oversee all top level domains (TLDs), were now permitted to own and operate their own registrar services allowing them to retail directly to the public. “The number of registered domains has now surpassed 200 million and continues to grow at around 7%. The industry still has a lot of momentum, fuelled by mobile growth, new top level domain launches and plans to make fully internationalized domains available.”

Chief Marketing Officer for ideegeo, Timo Reitnauer said the ICANN rule change opened up a whole new market for the company. “The iWantMyName software has multi-currency capability, inbuilt DNS management and made it easy for end users to domain customise a growing range of web services. We provide partners with a white label offering including a template structure and all the tools they need to translate content into their home language”, he said.

Seth Godin made the point in a recent blog article that almost everyone needs to employ basic design skills in their daily working life. He’s right of course, but that doesn’t mean we no longer need professional designers - good ones. Great design makes a huge difference to your selling proposition (if you are selling) and to user uptake (if you are communicating). That’s why we are talking to top notch designers about how we might work together.

Many web designers have a little bit of a coding background as well - but it’s not their first love. Polishing up the paintwork is usually much more rewarding than getting your hands covered in oily muck installing a gearbox. At ideegeo we don’t mind getting up to our armpits in oil and spare parts (and we are pretty good at back end web stuff too!). We want to work with the coolest designers around by helping with the nuts and bolts that make great websites tick.

If you are a web designer and need a hand with back end coding or sorting out databases and hosting, get in contact - we’d love to help. The code monkeys at ideegeo built popular domain registrar iWantMyName and are experts at scalability as well as knowledgeable in implementing full e-commerce functionality. Put them to work on your next big project.

It has been a huge amount of fun and hard work developing iWantMyName our domain registrar platform software. The product now has recognition in four different markets with a growing number of satisfied customers. But it was always our intention to develop and spin off some other projects in the future, based on our expertise in developing high volume web-based transactional environments.

Right now we are getting fired up about a couple of fresh ideas. The first involves building some new services that help individuals secure and develop their online identity. The second is a project that grew from our experiences in establishing payment systems for e-commerce sites. Traditional payment systems are under threat and we think some great new services will evolve that both complement and compete with existing providers.

We are pleased to report that we’ve been invited to take these ideas along to X|Media|Lab Sydney later this month to mix and mingle with the best and brightest from the global media and digital innovation industry. It’s an inspirational event that we try to attend on a regular basis, but this year it will be especially thrilling to be participating directly.

Much of our time in 2009 was spent on refining our domain management service to make it more attractive to partners around the globe. Consequently we launched a Dutch language partner site called Benikvrij and a German site called meinName. We also designed a system that means we can roll out a new implementation of the iWantMyName platform within a few days and scale up rapidly as customer demand grows. We provide our partner companies with a complete set of front end templates and they make the necessary translation into their home language. Of course we handle the billing set-up including whatever currency is required and make it compatible with any existing systems. You are also free in the choice of any domain registrar back end on the market.

With ICANN moving steadily towards full implementation of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), it is encouraging to know that we have already invested in a fully IDN capable system. The Russian and Arabic language domain name space looks set to heat up for this reason very soon. But we also see great opportunities in parts of Asia such as Japan and Korea where high average incomes and heavy internet usage combine to present an attractive proposition for a niche registrar player. South America looks like an interesting story as well. With an increasingly affluent middle class population and a highly developed mobile internet infrastructure, we’d love to see a Spanish or Portuguese language version of iWantMyName in that market.

We think that users all around the world will continue to demand a better experience when it comes to domain registration and management and we believe that iWantMyName provides a unique, easy-to-use package that helps domain registrars and resellers to grow market share. In particular our innovative web app domain customization service gives registrars a competitive advantage. Therefore we are now inviting expressions of interest from companies interested in deploying a customized version of iWantMyName in a foreign language market to meet the needs of their customers.

If you would like to discuss a partnership opportunity further, please contact timo@ideegeo.com.

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.

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.

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.