Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Developments in OAuth and OpenID

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Two of the things we’re working on at present to enhance .tel services are integrating OAuth (Open Authentication) and OpenID into .tel.  I’m personally excited about this as I think that this will bring huge benefits to many people and realize a vision for .tel that encourages people to see it, not as a traditional domain name, but as more of a communications solution.

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.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted by Justin
in Uncategorized
1 Comment »

Is 2010 the end of ‘free’?

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

With the global recession’s milk teeth dropping out, some much sharper ones have replaced them, or so it seems.  As economies struggle with sovereign debt, there’s a general sense that we might be getting to a stage that there’s not enough money to go around.  And it seems to be starting to impact on the services that many of us take for granted – and take for free.

Some social networks that were the shining example of social media just two years ago are struggling.  Take Bebo in the UK for example, which at one stage was larger than MySpace UK and which was subsequently acquired by AOL.  Founder Michael Burke sold Bebo in 2008 for 850 million dollars.  Having invested so much, it has been left to wither on the vine, prompting an announcement from AOL earlier this year saying that it was looking for a buyer.  If one is not found by the end of May, it’s likely that Bebo will be shuttered and will join the dead-pool.

Other social networking sites are taking heed in this change of temperature.  It takes revenue to create a momentum, and that revenue was missing from Bebo after it was acquired.  It also takes a business model to get acquired in the first place, and some are finally waking up to the fact that their users are the ones that are the low-hanging fruit.  Take for example the recent announcement from Ning, the platform that enabled anyone to set up their niche social network for nothing.  Unless you’re an educational institution, it’s the end of the free ride, with fees from $3 to $50 per month to run a platform for your members and no free starter option.  This is a complete about-turn and has had some strong impacts on the favourability of its brand online.

Whilst this is a transparent move into a commercial business model, and one that is of course necessary for organizations to succeed in the long term, moving from a free to a paid-for model without any prior indication is a huge issue for people relying on the service to communicate with customers, partners or friends.  Ning however is not the only platform making this move.  This week, after purchasing and releasing ‘official’ Twitter apps for a number of different devices over the past month or so, Twitter also announced a change to its terms of service, stating that it would be blocking the injection of paid advertising into the twitter stream.  At present, this remains undefined and could quite possibly be used as a step into generating revenue from businesses using twitter in any way to profit from its services.  The difference with Twitter is that many have seen this move coming and others even speculate that a paid model by end users who don’t want to see adverts in their Twitter stream might also be a possibility.  Even so, with the success of Twitter and its increasing penetration in countries that don’t use the computer as the first point of entry to the internet, this business model by stealth again has a reputational issue and the uncertainty may turn both developers and ultimately end-users off.

There is of course another organization that is trying to create revenue from its users ‘by stealth’.  One cannot help also see Facebook’s flip-flopping over its privacy rules, “features” and controls, as well as its recent security scares with the integration of the Like button, sharing information with other sites on the web.  We know how it makes its money, and any attempt to close down information about users is going to impact on that ability.  If the issues are big enough to focus the attention of many Governments around the world, Facebook may just become – along with Google – this decade’s equivalent of Microsoft in the previous decade for legal wrangles.  These can be quite expensive and long-fought battles, and the revenue needs to be found to fight these from somewhere.

But do all of these signs add up to the end of ‘free’?  It’s perhaps a little too early to tell quite yet.  Certainly, there are many different services that provide basic free services with additional paid-for access to additional features or other low-cost communications channels.  But these again don’t command the same level of interest that ‘the big guns’ do from the media and consequently struggle to gain a large enough base in order to become a de facto standard that a majority of people can use as their main communications channel with confidence.

What this does lead to is that 2010 is going to be the year of further disruption in terms of communications choices.  As those disappointed that services are shut down (Bebo users are, it seems, very loyal) or charged for (the jury is still out from Ning’s users’ perspective), many are looking around for alternatives.  The question is, how willing are people to get burned by free services again when it comes to making a choice?  How easy is it for them to port their social graph to other services?  How important is it now to people to be discoverable through more than one service?  And how much investment have they made in terms of their time in investing on those services that the now, for one reason or another, cannot use?

So perhaps whilst this still may not be the end of free, it may well be the beginning of the end of trust in free to be around for as long as people want it to be.  And that trust is an important factor in being able to commit to services with time and value invested in those services.  At the end of the day, it’s interesting to note that recent statistics showed that US teens now prefer texting over any other form of communication with their friends.  Certainly not a free service, but one that’s established a level of trust worth the investment.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted by Justin
in Uncategorized
2 Comments »

What’s your online reputation like?

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

Currently, a number of eminent thinkers are releasing thoughts on reputation and engagement online. In past few weeks and months, books and businesses which have obviously taken time to gestate in the minds of people coming from several different directions have been announced.  What is interesting is that they seem to be converging on a central thesis, explicit or otherwise, that, like Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, search is becoming, if not has become, the central player in understanding and defining what is true. That truth, whether it be about the collective listing of information about who a person is, or the collective sentiment about what people feel about a particular business or product, is being defined by trust developed on the basis of search rankings, the popularity of the sources and the ability to interpret individual pieces of information within the context of the sum of search.  This means that, whether consuming or promoting, everyone is in the search business, either pulling or pushing, these days.

The most recent piece to emerge is from ex-Financial Times journalist Tom Foremski, who postulates that ‘Every Company is a Media Company’ (EC=MC) in his new thesis which he writes about here.  His position is clear; regardless of the business you are in, you’re also in the business of media publishing.  Content, communications through social media, advertising in the non-traditional sense, open customer services models letting the world see you deal with your customers in a transparent way, reacting and acting online to maintain positive feeling with your existing customers and utilizing fan pages to grow your potential customer base.  All of these are employed with increasing energy as businesses transform into what they need to in order to survive in the competitive marketplace that has become global and virtual.  And if you’re not publishing, and controlling, what you want people to see, or engaging in the conversation, you’re not long for this world in business terms.

From a completely different angle, taking the individual and non-technical perspective, Antony Mayfield, an ex-PR man and now VP of i-Crossing here in the UK, has come up with a constructive discussion of the importance of managing one’s own ‘web shadow’ – the sum of the parts of the internet that you once played with and forgot, blended with the sum of the parts of the internet that other people played with tagging you in a photo of a drunken party, with a dash of some of the professional stuff you might have done or still do, all served up without empathy on Google’s front page.  Luckily for most, Antony also outlines what you can do about it even if you’re not technical, in his excellent and thoughtful book Me and My Web Shadow.

Stuck in between the large organizations and the individuals, are 90% (if not more) of the rest of the business world.  Small and medium-sized businesses at a loss to understand how to deal with all of this reputation and search stuff, knowing the importance of being found online but struggling with the time-poor aspects of developing and growing business from a day-to-day perspective.  Luckily again, another book This is Social Media, written by business journalist Guy Clapperton, outlines in a very simple way, what can and can’t be achieved with various social networks and technologies.

What it comes down to is this.  No longer can you take the chance to ignore search results.  There’s little or no time to be able to retrospectively fix negative customer sentiment already on the web, but it’s not too late to begin to engage.  Skins need to be thickened.  Sleeves need to be rolled up.  Taking control is not out of the reach of the individual job-seekers concerned about employers finding negative impressions of them on social networks, nor is making sure that you can be found as high up the search results in order to be the authoritative source of information about you.  Businesses can take control of all of the ways in which they can interact with different constituents and be more open on the internet whilst maximizing their investments in their social media channels.

The time is definitely right to look at a .tel name as a way to help with all of these issues, especially, but not exclusively, if you’re not technically inclined.  Online reputation matters – it’s time to do something about it.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted by Justin
in Uncategorized
No Comments »

The Digital Election?

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

So the UK election date has finally been announced.  Commentators are saying that this will be the year that the internet will impact on the citizens of the United Kingdom and their choice of their new leaders.  Whilst television debates between party heads is something new to the UK, it is likely that the post-broadcast scrutiny will be conducted through social media channels, with the content quickly edited and re-framed to paint the participants in a different light for all to see.

It will be interesting to see whether Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs) will engage positively with their constituents online and whether the debates, policies and manifestos will be open and transparent.  How accessible will PPCs be prior and post election?  What long tail content will be exposed to heighten or damage the reputations of individuals intending to represent the views of the country in Parliament?  And how savvy will PPCs be when it comes to managing what i-Crossing VP Antony Mayfield calls their ‘web shadow’ – their online reputation as defined by what is found by searching for them?

Here at Telnic, we commissioned Kipper Williams to put together a fun cartoon to imagine what it would be like if all PPCs were to think about how their constituents can find and contact them easily, so that they can interact with them in their daily lives through the channels that they use.  There is still an incredible diversity of communications channels and technologies that are being employed by residents of the UK, matching the diversity of the country’s inhabitants.

With a .tel name, PPCs can be easily found, can communicate with their constituents using different languages, and quickly update them on the location of their next surgery or other meetings, as well as having a central place online under their control in order to manage their online reputation.  With time pressures and focus on communicating, as well as the diversity of PPCs skills in the online environment, a .tel name can be an incredibly useful and easy to manage resource to help them in their campaigning.

For PPCs that would like to find out more, please email Aled Williams.

Tags: ,
Posted by Justin
in Uncategorized
No Comments »

Growing Your Own Business Event – Resources

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

Thanks to all of those that attended my talk at the Growing Your Own Business event in London on Saturday.  As promised for those of you that didn’t get a resources sheet, please find some useful links below.

http://www.loudmouthman.com/2008/10/26/you-should-fire-your-web-agency-when/ - things to ask a web design agency before you hire them

http://posterous.com – Free easy-to-use blogging platform that can be updated from email

http://ping.fm – Central distribution point to multiple social networks

http://getbusinessonline.co.uk – Free domain name, design and Google Local listings

http://twitter.com – free micro-blogging message network – 140 characters, globally!

http://www.slideshare.net/hasseily/seo-on-a-budget - SEO on a Budget

http://clapperton.tel – Author of ‘This is Social Media’

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/ - Excellent blog from online (and offline) marketing guru

http://gapingvoid.com – Building a global micro-brand

Posted by Justin
in Uncategorized
No Comments »

More Awards for Telnic

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

We were delighted to pick up yet another award this time at CeBIT in Hannover from the European Multimedia Forum (EMF).  The European Seal of e-Excellence Award has been given out since 2003 and awarded to companies that have been pioneering and marketing innovative products and services.  Fiona McKeown, our Chief Financial Officer, was present to receive the award.

More information can be found in our press release here.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted by Justin
in Uncategorized
1 Comment »

2009: The Birth of a New Platform

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Looking back at 2009, a seismic shift has occurred in internet usage, both for businesses and individuals, one that it is very hard to imagine will be reversed. With more smart phones, mobile applications and services establishing themselves as the points of access and services of choice for those wishing to communicate or interact with each other, the line between traditional web services and mobile-based widgets is blurring.

The pace of change and development is often unnerving as the media hype up the ‘next big thing’ in technology. Yet the speed of adoption also seems to be accelerating, with the older generation and those on Main Street, traditionally more conservative in their adoption of technology, embracing new services more rapidly, leading to the conclusion that technology, finally, is becoming mainstream and more accessible.

It’s hard to remember however that all of this has been developed over a long period of time. 2009 saw the 40th anniversary of the development of the internet, as well as the 20th anniversary of the development of the World Wide Web. The first generation mobile telephone from Motorola was demonstrated in 1973. And the first domain name was sold commercially in 1985.

Everything today has been made possible by the long-term development in infrastructure and devices that have taken decades to refine, re-engineer and be made robust. The products, services and applications that sit on top have been brought to market through a process of incremental innovation, using development tools and languages that are bringing standardization, essential for different services to talk to each other better, to enable a more consistent experience.

And yet, there is still a huge amount to be achieved, as meaningful services that contextualize and understand people’s business and social life begin to emerge. Location-based services, that are aware where you are and where your friends or potential destinations may be; augmented reality applications that provide further, layered information over real-time visual data, helping you get to where you want to be or provide a new and fresh learning experience; and new, low-cost and more user-friendly communications solutions that enable you to communicate with people how they and you want to communicate.

It is within this context that .tel was born. Until 2009, .tel was very much a theoretical ‘what if?’. What if people could use names instead of numbers to connect with others? What if people could simply and securely publish all of the ways that others could reach them under one universal point of contact? What if you didn’t need to learn how to build a website simply in order to be found online? What if you could access this point of contact from any device – PC or smartphone – with a browser and automatically see it in the right format? And what if all of this could be done using the system behind the web, storing the information as data, so that it was cheap to access, quick to download and simple to update?

2009 realized Telnic’s vision in bringing this incremental innovation, built on standards and using proven technology, to anyone who wished to be found, no matter where they were and what services others were using. Internally we refer to .tel as ‘Web 0.0’ as it uses the system behind the web – the DNS – to provide a personal, fully-owned platform from which an individual can share all of their traditional and Web 2.0 communications methods. But at the same time, we have stripped away and simplified the ability for people to have a place online from which not only can they be discovered but also, as more developers see the power of one single place under a users own control, a place where in the future individuals can better manage their own personal web experience.

.tel has been alive for nine months and we’re proud to have an extended family that spans the globe. Individuals and small businesses from all walks of life and professions are telling us their stories of how they use and benefit from .tel, simply either as a point of contact or in a more complex manner. Some of these uses are already saving lives, such as clamptime.tel, which provides medical professionals with essential information regarding organ donation.

.tel is still very young but Telnic is committed to helping it develop and grow into a strong, vibrant and helpful service. As the proud parent, we are not too internally focused to know that we have all of the understanding required to bring a socially-aware new entrant to an ever-changing community. We have been listening over the past nine months to opinions, advice and concerns from you, and we continue to be grateful for this, as we help .tel develop. In the next few issues of .telegraph, we’ll be talking further about how .tel will change in its looks, become friendlier and begin playing well with others.

We’ve learnt that it’s important to make sure that .tel can walk before it can run. However, we’re confident that it is learning quickly and its speed of development will accelerate. We’re looking forward to 2010 and the challenges and opportunities that it will bring, and we hope that you are too. Once again, thank you for your support and we hope that you will be proud of the development you see next year.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted by Justin
in Uncategorized
No Comments »

“SEO On a Budget” Presentation

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

I just gave today a presentation on “SEO on a budget” at the Business Startup Conference in London, UK.

The presentation touches upon many SEO issues (and fallacies) and describes a number of practical steps to take to improve one’s positioning on search engines. It also describes the use of .tel domains for SEO.

The presentation can be found online on slideshare or in a live recording as a Flash download.

Posted by Henri
in Uncategorized
6 Comments »

Official Statement by Telnic Limited on Digital Economy Bill

Friday, November 20th, 2009

Telnic Limited (http://telnic.tel) is the UK-based Registry Operator and Sponsoring Organisation for the global communications-focused Top Level Domain (TLD) .tel. It operates as the Registry for all domain names ending in .tel, acting under the aegis of ICANN, the body tasked with governing the security, naming and numbering on the Internet globally. The UK government has direct influence on ICANN, as it is a member of ICANN’s Government Advisory Council.

As a UK Limited company, Telnic abides by all relevant UK and European laws currently enacted, including any consumer protection or business law, as does its contracted sales channel in the UK. ICANN specifies that, for the TLDs under its control, the sales channel consists of only those registrars that it separately accredits. This is the case for Telnic.

Regulation by ICANN does not apply to the operators of Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs, such as .uk) or their sales channels.

The UK government informally notified Telnic one week before the announcement of its intention to legislate for powers to regulate all domain registries in the UK. Telnic is dismayed at this proposal. In it, the UK government proposes giving itself the power to dismiss and replace the management board of any Registry operating in the UK.

The Bill appears to be intended to regularise relations between the UK government and the operator of the .uk ccTLD, Nominet. However, the Bill’s phrasing is so general as to apply to all existing and new Registries, not just the one operating the .uk ccTLD. All other registries based in the UK are thus “caught in the crossfire”. These others are or will be already regulated by ICANN, as are the Registrars that act as their sales channel.

The unintended consequences of the generalisation in this Bill are severe. No commercial company could accept the risk of the UK government taking over managerial control. Current legislation does not place such a threat on other service providers; it is unimaginable that this kind of power would be applied to Vodafone or any other communications service provider, despite the large volume of regulation in that area.  This bill as currently proposed would reduce the UK’s innovation and competitiveness in this market at a stroke.

The fact that no dialogue regarding this legislation was offered prior to this Bill is unfortunate. The industry that operates within ICANN’s global control already has a regulatory framework in place.

Recently, as a result of the decade-long evolutionary process, ICANN, the international governing body in charge of Telnic’s regulatory oversight, has been given ultimate regulatory powers by the US Department of Commerce precisely because there was concern internationally about any one government having actual or perceived control over the Domain Name Space. As currently phrased, this Bill may be misunderstood as an attempt by the UK government to overrule ICANN’s authority, without any attempt to canvas the views of the industry such a move would affect.

UPDATE:  We’re pleased to say that through consultation with the House of Lords representatives as well as representatives of the BIS, the wording of the Bill has been modified to relate to only those TLDs that refer or imply a direct link with the UK.  We are grateful to all those members of the House of Lords and MPs that took the time to review and feed back to Government, and to those members of the community that raised this with their own MPs.  We belive that this addresses any issues that Telnic may have faced and, if the Bill is passed, the changes will protect all of those members of the .tel community from intervention.

Tags: ,
Posted by Justin
in Uncategorized
No Comments »

Welcome to the official .tel Blog

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

We’re now launching an official blog to cover news, events, features and discussions around .tel domains, and to keep the .tel community informed on the latest news. We hope this will grow into a lively and useful resource – looking forward to exciting posts!

Posted by nadya
in Uncategorized
No Comments »