.tel set to take flight

It’s still early days for the .tel domain extension, but according to Webnames.ca Chief Operating Officer Cybele Negris, .tel is building momentum and will create a tidal wave of opportunity for those with the pluck to capitalize on its virtues. Not only that, says Negris – but .tel has the potential to eclipse .com in volume.

Unlike the slew of domain extensions soon to be approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), .tel is a unique extension, designed to store and unify contact information in an easy-to-remember name and enabling one-click dialing on mobile phones.

Like the .com gold rush of the ’90s, those first in will have the greatest opportunity. From her perch at Webnames.ca (whose co-founder and CEO John Demco helped found the .ca extension in 1987), Negris explains the workings of .tel and how some forward-thinking Vancouver companies are already staking their claim in an effort to leverage their .tel names.

Why should people care about .tel?

I see .tel as a virtual business card. Imagine meeting a contact or business associate at a function. You hand them a business card. What are they going to do with that business card? They have to take it home or back to the office. They either give it to their assistant or type in all that information into Outlook or in their BlackBerry. With .tel, you just give them your .tel name and all your contact information is attached.

These days, people have so many different contact points. You can reach somebody on one of their many phone numbers, by e-mail, Skype, texting, or through any other of the growing number of social media points out there. A business card simply isn’t designed to hold all of the new points of contact that we use today. If we add a contact point or change our information, a business card is out of date.

What is your .tel?

Cybele.tel. And that has every way to contact me, including the link to my LinkedIn profile, my Twitter ID, website, e-mail, fax and phone numbers. I use the privacy feature to hide my personal information, like my home telephone. People who want to see information that I’ve marked as private send me a friend request. That way, I can accept only the people I want to give my private information to.

What’s the value of securing your .tel early?

There is definitely value in getting in early because you get the name that you want, instead of Cybele1999 or JohnSmith56. That’s what we are seeing right now, companies and individuals jumping in. Even if they don’t understand all the different functions and utility of .tel, these early adopters recognize the value of saving their name. This is especially true if there’s some personal brand value attached to their name, which is becoming increasingly important because of social media and networks.

Is .tel built on a different architecture than the web?

.tel uses the same underlying architecture as other domain extensions. The domain names system, or DNS, is highly reliable and has been proven over two decades of use. But .tel extends the use of DNS, so that instead of just pointing you to where the information sits on somebody’s server, data are written directly into DNS. This not only makes the data size very small by comparison to a website; it makes it very fast because there’s only one round trip. It’s the difference between calling someone direct and phoning directory inquiry to get their number first.

People have seen some of the communication about .tel, and mistakenly think, “Oh, it is just another domain extension,” but nothing could be further from the truth: .tel is revolutionary.

How does .tel work on mobile?

You can view a .tel name in a normal Internet browser, but it’s on a mobile that you really see the power of .tel – especially on one of the free .tel applications.

So, at Webnames, we built an application for the BlackBerry called Hornet. If you go to Hornet.tel and you download the application, you can put in anybody you know with a .tel name. When you do that, you will see all of their contact information pulled into your BlackBerry. The next time you need to contact that person, you just click on that .tel name. It is one click to connect from your BlackBerry, without having to look up a phone number and so forth. And, when that individual changes their contact information in their .tel, you are automatically updated.

What about the business development side? What opportunities are there for people to develop an application for .tel as you have done with Hornet?

There is definitely an opportunity for development. There are a number of people out there developing different tools for managing .tel names, integrating them into popular systems like Twitter, promoting their names and helping to drive traffic to their existing sites. We are currently in the process of launching a new .tel directory.

.tel is a technology, so it can continue to be extended to have even more uses. In the future, there will be the ability for a company – let’s say, Blenz Coffee – to use the .tel information. Using the Global Positioning System (GPS) function, they can send out a promotion through the Blenzcoffee.tel to all of their customers who are walking by.

Is that different the Blenz Twitter, for example?

I’m not sure that Twitter currently taps into GPS. But because .tel is so extensible, you could offer redeemable coupons that can only be used once for the current promotion, for example. And, another function that may be useful to charities is that people can click on a 1-900 phone number and donate.

So the key advantage .tel has over other domains is that it is specifically designed for mobile devices.

Mobile is so critical nowadays that this is a very important aspect of .tel, but in fact, .tel is designed to be available to any Internet-enabled device or software. It could be read into Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc to keep your contact details up to date automatically from your .tel. Outlook already has a plug-in that integrates .tel. We are also starting to see more and more soft phones and VoIP. These can use your .tel data directly from a global directory.

I would say .tel complements other domains. It is not designed to be in competition. The .com has the rich website content, while your .tel is the critical information people want, fast. It’s easily accessible on mobile. If people want a store’s hours, phone number or maybe the map for where it’s located, all that information is in a set format in the .tel. But, if you go to the .com, you’ll have to go to the contact page and look up the phone number. Then you look up yet another page for the store hours when it is a lot easier to have all that information in one place.

Beyond the information capacity of the .tel, is there any other kind of unique functionality?

You can set up directories within .tel. BlenzCoffee.tel is a really good example. They have all the contact information for their corporate store on the main BlenzCoffee.tel page. But you can also link to their Okanagan franchise and all the various other locations. Under each location, you then have the map to that place and the store hours and so forth. So, it can go pretty deep in terms of how you set it up.