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.

Did you know that you can find iWantMyName on Tumblr now? The free blog hosting service at Tumblr allows you to quickly post things that you discover from around the web. Follow us for quick bits about the domain name world, web apps and stuff we like. Recent updates include a domain name fail, TLDs of the Worldcup 2010, and our friends from Couch.io going crazy in their CouchDB rap.

Maybe you’d like to set up your own Tumblr page? Remember iWantMyname customers can personalise Tumblr pages with their own chosen domain using our free custom domain setup service. We can even recommend some cool background themes for your site. If you need other apps or services to manage social media content for your business or personal use we make it easy to set up these as well.

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.

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.