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

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

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.

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.

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

More information can be found in our press release here.

The show itself was pretty busy and we met with a vast range of people, from journalists right through to school kids.  Interestingly, within the Mobile Applications Forum, there were very few companies showing tools and technologies for productivity, but those that were – including us – were given strong attention.  The iPhone is increasingly being considered a tool for work and My.tel 2.0 as well as Superbook was well received.

There’s still a barrier we’ve recognized when talking to many people regarding their expectations and hang ups of what a domain name is and what it does, but we’re starting to see people actually focusing on what .tel does differently.  Even technology media are starting to listen and take notice of the phrase ‘but it doesn’t host websites’!  It’s this crucial bit that journalists have been missing in their continued high-pressure environment.  Indeed, Jake Widman from ComputerWorld wrote a great piece after our meeting and we had a great discussion with him regarding how innovative yet ‘utility-like’ technologies are being missed in the echo-chamber of technology columns that seem to be filled with Google, Facebook and Twitter and the challenges and announcements they make on a daily basis.  At the same time, we’ve been working hard to make the look and feel and experience of .tel useful to the end user who is not technical, hiding the complexity through applications like My.tel, enabling them to get the power of having a domain name with all of the discoverability that this entails, but also minimizing the effort it takes to get something up and running quickly that can be easily managed in a way they feel comfortable with.

Where I could, I asked people to comment on video about their thoughts about .tel – and yes, there were people there including Will Snow who already use .tel (Will is at http://willsnow.tel), and it’s always great to catch up with members of our community who are getting real benefit from it.  Additionally, talking to people in their various careers – from architects through to those working for higher education institutions – and really seeing their eyes light up at the ease of use and functionality within a very low price is a great experience.  What struck both Henri and myself was that many people are now increasingly looking at their personal brands online, whether they’re in a job or seeking new opportunities.  People were walking away and coming back 30 minutes later with their .tel names purchased, set up and resolving with a real sense of excitement.  Take a look at the video below for some of the comments we managed to capture.

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