Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Supporting Open Source at LCA2010

Monday, January 18th, 2010

After a very wet and stormy weekend here in Wellington it was with a palpable sense of relief that the heavens parted and sunshine once again blessed the city as delegates filed into the Convention Centre for the opening of the Australasian Linux Conference LCA2010. As locally based event co-sponsors, we are especially keen for visiting delegates to enjoy a taste of the natural environment in our scenic hometown.

So why is a commercial developer of domain registrar software supporting an open source event? Perhaps that question is best answered by our chief technologist Lenz Gschwendtner who will be speaking at the LCA Miniconf on Parallel Computing 10.30am Tuesday 18th January. Lenz recently wrote an article explaining how we managed to roll out the iWantMyName platform into three new destination markets in the short space of just a few weeks. Being a modular platform, we make use of some fantastic open source projects (such as CouchDB,RabbitMQCatalyst) to implement and run the system. But we also give back to the community, by adding various source libraries to CPAN and GitHub as we extend our skill set and progressively develop the platform further.

The business of open source is an important theme that cuts across the entire conference this year and that is another reason why iWantMyName is supporting this event. We think it’s cool that the acceptance of open source technology is growing across business and government in Australia and New Zealand. Not only will it lead to greater business productivity, but it will almost certainly allow much greater innovation and diversity as developer communities flourish. In fact ideegeo set up an Erlang user group in 2008 and we are very active in other ICT groups around Wellington. No doubt many new ideas will be born in the conference hallways this week as various global communities come together.

To help these ideas along we are running some great offers on our newly launched Kiwi iWantMyName site. Of course we have a great deal for our homegrown and much loved .geek.nz domain or if you need a domain for a community project, check out what we can offer for .org or .org.nz domains. For perl hackers we offer .pl and for the enthusiasts amongst you .io (input/output) or.sh (shell). Use our domain search to run a name check on over 80 differentdomain extensions - the best selection available by far Down Under. Then you can use our great management dashboard to hook your new domain up to any of the popular hosted services we feature such as GMail, Zoho and Blogger. Bingo! Your own customised office within a few minutes.

We are very keen to get feedback on our site and meet some of our customers in person. So please look out for the big red and white iWantMyName banner at theLCA2010 Open Day on Saturday. You can also find us at Monday evening’sTweetup at the Green Man pub or catch us on Twitter @ideegeo & @iwmn.

iWantMyName Launches

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

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.

The Final Countdown

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

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.