ideegeo Group Limited

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.

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.

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.

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.