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

• 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

A couple of weeks ago a significant update was made to the .tel Mapping Tool, which displays .tel domains, sub-domains and related domains on a map in a very easy but modular way.

The previous version of the mapping tool allowed you to visualize a domain’s info in the “bubble” window in a single way:

But now with the latest update you can pass in a format for the bubble by using the parameter “info=”. The value of that parameter is a javascript snippet. The easiest explanation is through an example:

‘<div><span style=”float: left; margin-right: 10px;”>’ + r['logo'] + ‘</span><span>’ + r['dds'] + ‘<br /><a href=”http://’ + domain + ‘” target=”_blank”>’ + idndomain + ‘</a><br /><br />’ + r['firstnaptr'] + ‘</span></div>’

The above gives the default bubble with the image on the left, and on the right the domain and the first contact record below it.
If you want to change it, note that this is a javascript string concatenation. It’s pretty clear what the params are:

• domain : the punycode domain
• idndomain : the unicode IDN domain (what you want to show to users)
• r : the result from the domain lookup, which has ‘logo’, ‘dds’ and ‘firstnaptr’, respectively the logo image, the title of your domain (dds), and the first naptr. All of those are actual html snippets.

If you want to pass in the ‘info=’ parameter using GET, you must escape the whole thing. And don’t forget to put single quotes at start and finish, like the example above.
If you use POST, you’re good to go.

Note that you can completely screw up the page if you pass in a broken javascript string, as it’ll break the whole javascript code on the page. You’ve been warned: with great power comes great responsibility…

The .tel Mapping tool also now supports all .tel IDN domain types (such as chinese character domains).

Should you want more detail on how to use the .tel Mapping Tool, please see the “Tools for Website Integrationl page.

They have a neat app, great, but mobile web is increasingly where the action is – users can be lazy – when they have an urgent need for local, they grab their smartphones and tap in what and where into their browser – who leaves their web browser to open up the YP app to find a taxi? Downloads are one thing, continuous front of mind usage frequency is quite another. Both bases need to be covered. The Google mobilize product, a basic landing page is free and is based on a sub domain:  https://sites.google.com/site/[your business name]. This is one approach for YP companies, either re-purposing their customer sites for mobile web, or even partnering with Google.

An interesting and simpler alternative would be to offer their customers YP branded .tels: yourbusiness.tel. These are very smart mobile landing pages based on award winning technology that utilizes the internet DNS in a clever way to store customer contact data and business profile information. The key benefits are cost and speed to market. With .tel there is no product development required and no operational costs e.g. design and hosting. This means that even if publishers include .tel packaged in their offering for free, they retain ownership of the customer and his unique top level domain with the YP companies look and feel and brand logo. This means users and advertisers recognise it as their value proposition, and at typically 1% ARPA, it’s an extremely low cost solution.

The battle for the mobile internet is really shaping up – it’s not about the app, it’s about being in lots of places at once, especially mobile web. Wherever users search for local information, publishers need their brands to be uppermost in their minds.  

At the end of the call she said to me “Thanks for confirming my thinking, what would it take to get all my print customers up live with a .tel so I can announce that we’ve led the entire customer base deeper into new media?” I replied, we as the global .tel registry are ready and willing  to support any partner wishing to move fast in that direction.  Our joint kick off operational planning meeting starts Monday and we expect to be registering names within a few weeks.

Ian Bowen-Morris, CMO, Telnic, the .tel registry.

Current .tel smartpage for a UK florist

Google Mobilize landing page

Example .tel branded for a Yellow Pages publisher

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.

Hotel with a link to .tel directory in Google Maps

This integration has become possible due to the support for the hCard microformat  built into .tel pages. All the relevant information you enter into your .tel is marked up with corresponding hCard format fields, such as geo position, name and address. Google’s services support hCard as well as other microformats and rich data snippets in a bid to provide users with “the most useful and informative search results”.

Not to miss out on the fun, Telnic launched .tel Superbook for Android at the show. This new Android version now incorporates the .telpages search engine into the application, meaning that people can both search for and type in a specific .tel domain to look up.  Additionally, we refreshed the my.tel for Android and launched a new version of my.tel for the iPhone (remember them?!), all of which are in the relevant app stores and market places.

Stand 1D68 in Hall 1 was pretty much a hive of activity for most of the four days (even though the picture was taken in the calm before the storm!).  With 60,000 attendees, up 20% on last year’s numbers, it was an extremely busy show.  As part of the UK Trade & Investment community at the event, we managed to meet a whole host of companies from hardware manufacturers through to VoIP providers, distributors through to mobile payment providers, infrastructure companies through to developers, all of whom were intrigued by the use of the DNS as a publishing platform.  With some, immediate benefits were obvious and we’re looking forward to continuing those conversations and making some announcements later in the year as these come to fruition. With others we’re sure it will take a little more time as they begin to understand the opportunities and new services that they might provide their customers.

With significant changes in the mobile industry from big players getting together, the demise of Symbian, mass adoption of tablets and new operating systems emerging, discovery becomes an even bigger problem with more devices and more ways of communicating than ever before.  This year, many in the mobile telecommunications industry agreed that functionally, .tel is an ideal solution for this problem.

The first are two tools from developer Arthur Guy – thanks Arthur.  Arthur has basically created a simple way for people who are browsing websites to quickly pull .tel contact information from .tel names linked to the site.  The first is for Google Chrome and the second is for FireFox.  Both plug-ins are easy and quick to install (with Firefox requiring a re-start).  Both have an icon that shows that .tel name information is available (Google’s indicator is in the browser bar, whereas FireFox’s is down in the bottom right-hand side of the browser window) and both list all of the .tel names available having automagically verified that they are indeed real by doing a DNS lookup.  Both of these plug-ins make it really easy for people to find and utilize contact information from .tel if website owners have linked their websites to this contact information, providing a really easy display of a live ‘contact us’ page integrated with a website but without the user having to navigate to another page to find the information.  We’re really pleased that developers are starting to take an interest in .tel and really getting the idea of simple-to-pull contact information being useful to end users.

The Chrome extension can be found here:  http://bit.ly/91DZ7k

Chrome extension showing .tel name lookup

The Firefox extension can be found here: http://bit.ly/cRR2FL

Firefox extension showing .tel lookup and button in browser bar

The second development is one that we’ve developed and which we are testing on our site.  We’ve developed some code that will enable anyone trying to contact us to auto-populate a contact us form if they input their .tel name in the correct field.  Of course, this is best demonstrated when there are more fields to fill in, so the sign up form for new resellers is a good one to play with (although please don’t submit the form unless you are interested as you will get an email back!  There is a requirement to ‘confirm email’ so as long as you don’t fill this in and do accidentally press submit you should be safe).

Here’s a link to our partners sign-up page: http://telnic.org/partners-signup.html

The ability to sign up to further information simply by putting your .tel name into a form and it auto-populating would save a significant amount of time and hassle when filling out forms, dramatically increasing your chances of getting new customers.  It could also be extremely useful for public sector services, charitable bodies and other service providers to help them keep up-to-date with current contact information by collecting their .tel names.

Technical bit:  I’m told that the service is written in PHP and Javascript, and is available on request. The lookup is embeddable into existing web pages with only a few lines of javascript and HTML. Externally to the Telnic website, the service uses the Yahoo! YUI Connection Manager to allow data transfer between the service and your web page over Flash. Hosted on your own servers means you can use AJAX, making it work in devices like the iPhone and Android. The PHP requirements are Apache with mod_php (PHP 5), and Net/DNS.

If you’re interested in developing more tools for .tel, check out our developer resources at http://dev.telnic.org.  Of course, it’s not just limited to the web – there are opportunities for mobile devices, voip and DECT phones also.

Additionally, they’ve got a great mobile app built at http://voipgate.mobi for smartphones and iPhones which provide low- and no-cost call back if you’ve got an account, again providing direct integration of .tel into the apps.

There’s more exciting work going on behind the scenes which I’m sure we’ll be blogging about in the near future.  Great work voipGATE!  The software can be downloaded here: http://voipgate.com/site/en/softphone/view-category.html