With customers in 181 countries, from Aruba to Yemen, .tel is a truly international service, and we’ll continue to add further language support as usage increases around the world.  However, with all of the top 10 most-used languages covered off, accounting for over 1.6 billion internet users, there shouldn’t be a problem of information getting lost in translation when visiting a .tel today.

*Andrew Kolchoogin informs us that Hyvää päivää is actually closer to ‘good afternoon’ than ‘hello’ – thanks for the information, I guess someone needs to update Wikipedia

1)  Mobile Search for Directories

We’ve rolled out an update to the search functionality on mobile devices. Those community members with complex .tel domains or directories and which choose the ‘Search this .tel’ option rather than the ‘Search all’ option will now see that the search box appears at the top of the smart phone view.  This should assist those seeking information within your .tels to access the search functionality much more quickly, rather than having to scroll down to the bottom of the page (potentially through 100 different records).

The ‘Search all’ option still provides the search box at the bottom of the page, as it is more likely that the viewer will take a look through the contents of that .tel prior to deciding whether to seek the information from another source.

2)  .tel Redirection

If you’re a brand owner or have a portfolio of related .tel domains and you don’t want all of them to be found online or have the time to populate all of them now, help is now at hand.  You may have purchased multiple .tel variants or defensive registrations, but you don’t want all of these to be seen or don’t want to put duplicate content in (not a good idea from a search engine perspective).

Now, all you need to do is list the main .tel that you wish to promote within the .tel domains that you don’t want to use right now.  This will result in the visitor being diverted to your main .tel if they type in one of your other .tel names into the browser or discover it some other way.

Remember, this will only work if there’s nothing else in the .tel domain that you wish to divert automatically to your chosen main .tel domain, so make sure that the domain you wish to divert has no other content in it.  You can also divert it to a sub-page of another domain, but it won’t divert to any other domain extension – this is specifically a feature for managing multiple .tel domains.

3)  Rich Snippets

We’ve updated the way in which .tel presents this information within the template, which should deliver even better information back to Google and as a result, present even better information back to the person searching so they can click on the .tel to proceed with their search.

4)  Support for more third party icons

We’ve updated support for more third party services on the .tel, looking at feedback from the community and actual usage of these services listed in the .tel domains.

We are still working on the final item listed in the September newsletter, the new templates and we will provide a development update in the next newsletter due out this month.

• Telpages search: Now, you can search for .tel information from within the app, rather than having to type in a known .tel name. As well as delivering back search results, a confidence bar is provided highlighting the results that Telpages thinks are the best fit for your search

• Recently Visited .tel Names: In order to save time, and in case you forgot to save previous searches, a cached version of recently visited .tel names is provided in a list.

• Pull down to quick refresh: Whether recently visited or saved contacts, up-to-date information can quickly be accessed by a simple swipe down and re-saved with one click to your contacts

• Share: As well as saving to your address book, you can also quickly share a discovered .tel name, a business recommendation or a new contact by email, twitter, facebook and other services (if you’re following @rikkles or @justinhayward on Twitter you may have seen us testing this). This is yet another great way of easily sharing .tel information with anyone you want

This .tel site was created to promote A Night at the Museum in Crakow on 20th May 2011.  The goal of the site was to include Cracow Museums and galleries of art on the map of European Night Museums.  Museums are placed in separate pages, outlining the program of events, descriptions of exhibitions etc, and phone, email , web links  and Facebook pages.

We created a link to “Mapa Nocy Muzeów” – a cumulative map of all the museums of Krakow taking part in Night of the Museums.  This links back to a map showing all the museums taking part in the event.

Additionally, another sub-page was called “Bezpłatny przejazd MPK “, giving information about the special rates and free travel to and from the museums.

Below is a snapshot of the Google Analytics for http://nocmuzeow.tel

The above statistics show that the launch of nocmuzeow.tel was cool. Within 4 days of registering the .tel site it was visited by over 1,100 users, of which the date falling on the Night of the Museum in Cracow recorded nearly 700 visits.

An Ancient Skill

The fundamental fact is that this type of curation is not new.  In 1996, a small research project that then turned into a search engine called Google, provided an algorithmic curation of web pages presented to the user when searching for ‘relevant’ information (or simply one result if they were ‘feeling lucky’!).  Whilst the format has stayed the same substantially since then, with automation and algorithms at the heart of the service, it’s a poorly-kept secret that Google employs thousands to make sure that the results expected to be delivered are maintained.

In the late 1990s, TiVo started enabling this type of curation of content on television, based on programmes watched, and enabling people to cut out or fast-forward through adverts.  Television did not die; instead, new technology providers sprang up to provide different types of channels based on genres, with services like Virgin Media and Sky in the UK providing ‘on demand’ television.

In music, radio stations for years have been curating music choices, picked by DJs.  Themed channels have also been around for a long time.

Curation, Distributed

What has changed is the ability for anyone to curate some form of content or culture easily.  In the same way that blogging on free platform enabled anyone to start curating information on the web and providing opinion on it, now the medium has changed to enable people to more easily (but yet not simply) create applications that can be downloaded to devices and share that curated content.

Curation in and of itself is not the creation of social media.  Those with access to cheap and standardized technology – pamphleteers in the 1640s for example – were able to curate and present information.  What has changed is the ability to reach a broad audience and, by association, be discovered by like-minded individuals, opposing factions (whether trolls or Governments) or potential customers.

The act of curation and the ability to curate is open to all, and that is the fundamental point.  The scarcity value of information and content – whether it be music, opinion or indeed contact information – has been unlocked, never to be placed back into the box.  Each and every individual with access to an internet connection and a device has the power to begin curation and stands every chance of being ‘liked’, +1’d or shared so that the message is distributed virally far and wide (or indeed to a small, confined community).

Marketing by Curation

No small business or individual professional today should consider themselves to be marketing themselves appropriately if they leave curation of their brand or online reputation to a third party.

Where once the purpose of a press release was to engage and inform the media (which at the time were the only channel which had the power and the reach to influence the people you wanted to communicate with), now it stands as a tool for search engine optimization to be directly discoverable as a piece of editorial by potential employers, partners or customers.

Equally important is the curation of the ways in which people can contact you.  It’s critically important to make sure that your contact information is (securely) up-to-date in the distributed nature of the global business environment.  Curation is potentially the most important tool of any individual or small business today.  Make it work for you.

Like the plot for this film, identity as an issue seems to crop up every couple of years.  Like the critics’ opinions on Mr. Neeson’s latest adventure, there’s a mixture of responses as to what the answer to the tricky issue of identity and identity theft ‘should’ be.

What is clear is that there are a number of commercial and large-scale projects ongoing around the world that are trying to address this in a concerted fashion; far more concerted it has to be said than in previous years.  What is interesting is looking at why this is happening and what people feel about this.  There’s no doubt that with the increase in life online, there’s a battle for ownership of identity.

Money Never Sleeps?

Like all consumer technology advances these days, two of the main drivers in the consumer space when it comes to identity seem to be from Facebook and Apple.  Did you miss those?  You may well have done.  Recently, Apple godfather Steve Jobs announced in the iPad 2 launch event that there were now something in the region of 200 million credit cards stored in the iTunes/App Store.  A financial link to a user is obviously an incredibly powerful way of validating who that person is (unless the card is stolen, in which case, that identity will either be short-lived or the person using it to purchase goods or services will soon be relocating to a secure facility).  Given the fact that less than 25% of people alive today have a bank account, this isn’t necessarily the best way of validating identity.

At the same time, in late February, Facebook rolled out Facebook Comments.  Billed as an attempt to enable sites to clean up their comment spam, those wishing to comment on an article with Facebook Comments enabled now have to sign in either using Facebook Connect or Yahoo! ID.  This obviously impacts on whether or not you’d wish to associate yourself with a comment on the site.  With over 550 million users, one would think that this identity provision would scale.  Facebook is obviously keen for people to be who they say they are, as advertising revenue increasingly funds its growth and success and the value behind that is the real-life data gathered in the biggest Truman Show experiment ever.

Both of these models seem based on the individual as a consumer and the value of that consumer to the ecosystem around the devices (in Apple’s case) or the platform (in Facebook’s case).  The first is tapping in to the cash that can be directly extracted from the consumer through providing very simple one-click verification of a transaction, however small.  The second is tapping into the value around the transactions – both financial and interaction-based – that the consumer undertakes and how that impacts on their friends, family and associates.

Face/Off?

Whilst not describing themselves as identity solutions, the implicit aspect is that this is what they are intended to be.  But these systems are built on transactions – What do I buy? What am I commenting on? – inside their own ecosphere.  This isn’t useful outside of that particular walled garden – there’s no personal continuity presented; how someone acts and the persona they are on Facebook may be completely different from whom they are at work.  Indeed, again, people are modifying their behavior when it comes to commenting using Facebook Comments.

Both solutions seem to be changing habits and activity (buying more things, commenting less) online, rather than driving understanding of what people actually need to do (have control over my credit card spending, making an anonymous snarky comment about something to let off steam right now).  This is forcing change on people through a technology service dependent on the moral structure of the service provider.  Many people feel fine about this; they live their lives in public and don’t understand why people might not wish to do the same as a default.  Even reading articles about being stalked on FourSquare don’t seem to deter them.  The problem is that when choice seems to be taken out of the equation as controls get more and more confusing for normal people, the default setting of privacy becomes ‘off’ because it’s too hard to set to ‘on’ and there’s an assumption that if something happens, it will be resolved by the service provider.

Cue the Sun!

In a time when the US government is seeking to encourage people to have a unique online identity in order to interact with Government services online, and having recently sat down with both Jobs and Zuckerberg at lunch, the drive towards online identity is front of mind for Governments.  It’s not just the United States.

The question is, will the systems that are chosen (driven by commercial organizations) inevitably change the individual?  Will we all, like Liam Neeson, wake up one day from a coma to find out that our identity has been taken away from us?  Not by another individual, but by a system that has been introduced as ‘best fit’, that changes who we are by changing what we do because of the lack of flexibility and individual control that we have being represented by that identity system?

Let’s hope there’s enough time to think this through.  I may just have to go and see Unknown now to see how Hollywood has it ending.  I’m certainly hoping it’s more Truman Show than Brazil.

A colleague recently sent me a link to a blog post regarding the New York Times’ celebration of its 80-year anniversary in 1931. It commissioned the leading business, scientific and philosophical thinkers of the time and asked them to predict what the world would look like in 80 years time, so what 2011 would look like.  Whilst a selection of these is only available here and I hope more will be released by the NYT soon, some of those predictions highlights are incredibly close, and I’d encourage you to read them at your leisure.

What struck me when reading these was, not that each and every one of them had applied their minds to something so far beyond them as to imagine a world that they would never be able to see, but to understand that all of their predictions came from a fundamental notion that the one constant that they could rely on was change.

Who’s going to drive you home tonight?

In 2010, we’re so used to change, we perhaps forget that it is happening at all!  Incremental change and incremental innovation surround us, perhaps nowhere moreso than within the technology and devices that are inherently changing our lives at a microscopic level.  Gesture-based gaming, internet connectivity in airplanes, touch screen smart phones, self-driving cars (OK, some not so small changes in that last one!) have all emerged and crept up on us over the past two or three years, making us think how on earth we survived before they were around.

And yet, in all of this, the need to remember that things can change and change quickly seems to have been forgotten when it comes to our perspective within business and communications.  One of very few lone voices caught our attention here at Telnic highlighting the potential concern of forgetting that change is inevitable.  A recent post by Tim Schumacher over at SEDO clearly and comprehensively outlined the threat to businesses (and indeed, professionals) of believing in the hype of social networks in being all-powerful and omnipresent and committing brand suicide by “advertising their Facebook landing pages, Twitter handles or even their iPhone applications”on billboards.

Smile and the whole world smiles with you

Don’t get me wrong.  Social media is fantastic at many things and driving interest, awareness and, in some instances, sales is much easier in the connected marketplace.  The reach and acceleration of communication, some good, some bad, has at no other time had such an impact on people’s awareness and ability to communicate what they think about particular brands than through social media platforms.

What is not so positive is the level of immersion to which brands, often guided by those who are being paid to promote the business rather than to secure their long-term future, are being held.  By ceding control of your direct relationship with your customers, the Emperor’s new clothes of today becomes the company that sheds its existing brand and adopts the transparent overcoat of social media, exposing what’s left behind and with the salesman of the overcoat pointing and laughing all the way to the next customer!

No brand, large or small, needs to lose control to this extent.  Tim’s clear articulation of the threat and his summary point to the fact that these are “proprietary walled-garden approaches” and thus are not directly addressable from the open web.  This is fair enough and completely true; any independence is ceded to these so-called networks and it is a requirement that in order to connect, you join and play by their rules (which they can change at any time), effectively putting a middle-man in control of your relationship with potential fans or customers.  If this is the future of doing business, why are many companies that have previously sold through indirect channels trying to set up direct models now?

Danger, Will Robinson!

Not only is it dangerous to lose control of the point of contact with your customer (and sometimes the connection completely, as per the recent downtime for Facebook  - I wonder how many customers were lost to those advertising solely their Facebook pages on television that day?), but it’s also dangerous to forget the change factor.  Social media is of course today the darling of the web, but just how long is that going to last?  Facebook and QQ are dominant networks in their regions, but so is Skype in terms of size (and in terms of the risks that one proprietary network faces – do we see a trend here?).  What happens if charging models change for internet access or companies or Governments decide that the productivity of the country or organization is at stake (Facebook is the most blocked site on the internet according to a recent study by one DNS service provider, closely followed by MySpace)?  What happens if, heaven forbid, today’s social network de jour becomes tomorrow’s Friendster or Friends Reunited?  Suddenly, your business is a piece of furniture in an empty house where the party goers have gone somewhere cooler, and you’re put out in a yard sale.

Time waits for nobody

Back to Tim at SEDO: “Providers can go out of business, and there is no regulative environment in place.  Seems unlikely? Remember FortuneCity or Geocities?  They were the over-hyped early predecessors of social communities offering easy site hosting.  Nevertheless, Yahoo terminated Geocities in 2009 – after having bought it for a whopping $2.87 billion in 1999.”

The sad fact is that in the online industry, $2.87 billion is small change in the VC world, but back then it was a significant investment.  We’re seeing market valuations of ten times that number when we talk about today’s leading social network.  But we’ve also seen that even in the case of the largest financial institutions, no organization is ‘too big to fail’ any more.  With the recent down-sizing of MySpace in an attempt to provoke a sale, these timescales for failure seem to be compacting.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (turn to face the strain)

So the key to all of this is to accept and plan for change.  One way of doing that is to insure against being overly damaged by that change.  Ownership of your points of contact, as Tim says, is critical in all of this.  It costs little to own your own domain name and renew it annually.  It costs little more than time to own and use a .tel as a point of contact whilst still enjoying the noise and fun that participating in social media is today whilst it’s free and whilst it continues to drive business.  Planning for change is critical to survival.  As Professor Peter Drucker wrote, coincidentally in a book published in 1999, “Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes — it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm.”

Now that’s one piece of advice that shouldn’t change over time.

Why?

LOC(K) in the location

Firstly, one of the key things that all .tel domains have the ability to provide a location record quickly and simply.  Many small businesses struggle with this when building their own websites.  .tel makes this an extremely simple task.  It then becomes ingrained in the essential information stored in a .tel; the contact information and descriptive content is contextualized also by a location record.  This makes it especially juicy for search engines when looking at relevant content to serve up.

Micro-formatted information

Secondly, as the .tel automatically publishes micro-formats such as hCard which help software to identify labeled content and handle it better, Google can take this location information and the contact and context information and understand its relevance in its entirety.  If a keyword is Silicon Valley and the location record matches, this is relevant and useful information for a local search.

Relevant content for all devices

Thirdly, as a .tel domain is automatically formatted in the right way for every device, it becomes a customer-friendly single point of contact that customers can use to then decide how they interact with the company; it instantly provides customers with a choice of ways of interacting.  This is crucial when exploring new ways of interacting with customers who might want to check in on Foursquare, interact on Twitter or write a review on Qype.  With so many interaction points, a company can remind a customer of all of the places they might be able to interact on a .tel, thus making much better use of those touchpoints from an ROI perspective.

Local in the real world

Finally, a .tel can be used in local outdoor or interactive advertising to bring customers to relevant information, interaction points or offers.  As the .tel can be populated ‘on the fly’ from mobile devices, information can be changed very quickly. Thus, a local offer that is running for one hour only for local shoppers can be switched on and off without any hassle.

One enhancement you might consider if you’re a local business is using TelAds to provide offers and vouchers for your customers.  There’s been an incredible growth in the past couple of years in terms of customers wanting to use coupons to gain great deals.  Many of the services out there today however have too many hidden terms and conditions and leave very little profit left.  Using free third party services to populate your TelAds with time-limited vouchers or offers for first-time customers, will provide you with the ability to drive further revenue.  In 2011, we’ll be making this even easier by providing a special voucher record which you’ll be able to populate from within the control panel.

With the price of a .tel averaging at $15 per year, and the power of instant information at people’s fingertips, customer service and coupon offers, search engine optimization, mobile access from any device and location at the heart of the domain, .tel is a perfect solution for Local Search.

The proof is in the pudding

When we write that .tel is juicy for search engines, it isn’t just wishful thinking, or some kind of sales pitch. Many initiatives at Telnic and independently in the .tel community have repeatedly shown by the numbers that .tel domains are some of the most powerful (and certainly cheapest!) search engine optimization (SEO) you can achieve.

Telnic is currently undergoing a study with a large yellow page provider in the US to look at the value of providing .tel domains to their customers.  Whilst Google has only indexed the .tel domains in the past three weeks, the results have been dramatic.  Both Google and Bing, at the time of writing, are presenting over 50% of the domains indexed in the top 15 results for named search, with 39% of .tel domains being ranked in the first 10 results in Google and 44% of .tel domains being ranked in the first 10 results in Bing.

The speed of indexing and the authority given to such a young extension shows the power of .tel, even without significant SEO attributes such as cross-linking being performed during these tests.  We hope to share more from this and other trials in the coming months.  Do let us know if you’re getting good results as well.

Here at Telnic over the past few months we’ve been working hard helping our newest partner Tong Ji Ming Lian (Beijing) Technology Ltd (TJML) get ready to launch their .tel services in China.  China is a quietly innovative country, building on centuries of ground-breaking invention. Culturally, China is on a fast-track to being the largest economy in the world, and naturally, international organizations are becoming increasingly focused on working to develop in this market. 

It is often the case that localization, which is difficult for large or global companies coming in to China to achieve without the benefit of significant local understanding, is the main cause of a quick or inevitable exit.  This results in a vacuum in which local companies can take the learnings from the solution, learn from its success in other countries, and deliver something that gains popularity within China through use of micro-innovation.

 This is exactly what .tel-only partner TJML is doing with the .tel platform in China.  TJML have taken the platform and are offering .tel services and registrations in Chinese, including enabling verification of ownership services and adding additional elements that will enable them to promote .tel widely.  They’ve already forged partnerships with media and telecommunications companies which, as far as we understand, will enable people to utilize their .tel domains as OpenID’s and log in to some of the more popular online services.

The team behind TJML are experts in the local market and we’re delighted that they’ve spent time really understanding the benefits of .tel and what’s required to make it a success in their local territory, from personalization aspects through to marketing and promotional activity and, importantly, those partnerships. 

The launch, in conjunction with TJML and the China TMT Business Association, is being held in Beijing on Monday 20^th September will be attended by our CEO, Khashayar Mahdavi, who will provide a short speech of thanks to all involved as well as provide Telnic’s view of what benefits .tel can bring to China, its residents and its climate of micro-innovation.  We’re delighted to be bringing .tel to China and providing the platform for its curious and talented developers to create new value around for the benefit of the Chinese people.

Moving from a web-view to a multi-modal view

The majority of the work done to date is with the traditional web and mobile web in mind.  To an extent, this has been driven by a requirement that .tel is still being perceived, purchased and utilized as a traditional domain.  This may be due to its relative ease of set-up and its pure functionality – that of providing information online in a basic format for easy discovery and access.  It can be set up in minutes, is accessible from mobile devices ‘out of the box’ and now, with the support of AdSense and TelAds, can provide a revenue stream in addition to the contact information displayed that many find easy and simple to action.

But this is not the ultimate vision of .tel.  The above functionality will be enhanced, tweaked and supported as we move forward of course.  However, the use of DNS for storing of that information is the power behind the vision for .tel.  As it’s stored as data, it can be accessed, manipulated and utilized by many means.  As can be seen from the applications we’ve developed for the iPhone and Android, .tel is the first domain that can be managed completely from mobile devices.  With the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Outlook applications, one can lookup contact information from the DNS without leaving your address book, and import it there and then also.  And through third party soft phone applications, the same can be done, enabling the global directory to serve really fast contact information that is updated in real time.

Moving from online to offline access

All of this is done with an internet connection.  We must remember however that there are instances where we may be without internet connectivity (my iPhone service drops out even at major London train stations) and many in other countries with either no or low access to the internet, either through coverage, government regulation or poverty.

This is where it becomes interesting.  With OAuth support, services can be linked together without having to share usernames and passwords, creating a strong bond which will then allow .tel and other services to interact.  This we know will help those in the community who are developing management solutions for .tel to provide a trusted online service and we hope deliver them much success.  But at the same time, it will enable ‘offline’ services to interact with .tel.

What do I mean by this?  There is a proof of concept running on Twitter (see http://twitter.com/2tel) at present which shows Henri Asseily and my .tel names being managed by Twitter, and the both of us looking up information from other .tel names.  OK, fine, Twitter is an online service.  But what we’re actually doing is managing our .tel names and looking up .tel information via the Twitter SMS gateway.  We’re simply using the Twitter service as a bridge at present to enable us to utilize their SMS gateway to do this.  It could quite easily be a stand-alone SMS gateway.  OAuth will therefore enable .tel owners who don’t have continuous access to the internet to manage their names, and enable those with no internet access at all to access real-time updates from .tel names via SMS.  The first top level domain you can access and update without an internet connection.

This is what excites me.  I have to admit, I’m excited because I came up with the idea.  But if I can come up with that idea (and I’m not a real technologist, I just like and talk about technology) then what can the real technologists come up with?  The future of OAuth and binding .tel names to SMS I think provides a significant opportunity to telecommunications companies to begin to offer these to their customers, and a compelling business model for them to embed these into their offerings.  There is a huge market out there of people who wish to be found online but don’t have access to the internet all the time; India is just one of those markets and virtually all communication is done by SMS or mobile.

Moving towards a single uniform identity that you can own

At the same time, OpenID will also provide a compelling case for .tel to start to become used as an identifier for people online.  Many people don’t have the skills or desire to build a website of their own.  They use free services – Blogger, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook – to communicate with people when they want to (as well as still SMS, which remains the biggest surprise to mobile companies who never expected it to be successful as a communications tool).  But at the same time, we increasingly see that individuals need a place they can ‘own’ online – the ‘go to’ resource so that, if they leave one or more social networks, they won’t lose their ‘social graph’ (or, in non-jargon, the friends they really want to keep in touch with whom they re-discovered through the social network).  Additionally, the pervasiveness of these services and networks is leading to complexities in remembering usernames and passwords for all of these services (especially if security is front of mind).  OpenID makes a .tel domain the username that people can utilize to sign in to other services.  It then provides one place to bind all services together, and also an increase in the ability for people to utilize their .tel names more than just as a web address to give to people.  Sure, you can get a free OpenID from third-party service providers, but you’re back to the same problem; how long can they continue to provide this as a free service, or as a service at all, without a revenue stream?  With .tel becoming an OpenID provider, you own your domain – it’s not yourname.openidprovider.com, it’s simply yourname.tel.

So I believe the next six months will open up the ability for existing owners to re-engage and potential owners to re-evaluate .tel as more than just a web-based service, and I’m looking forward to seeing the developments that existing members of the community and new participants will develop.