Business Week Covers .Tel: How Telnic Will Revolutionize Dialing

An online article just published by Business Week gave glowing reviews to the idea of the new .Tel extension.

Some of the more interesting comments from the article are:

.Tel will allow you to store the full range of your contact details online and then give chosen people access to it.  Phone numbers, e-mail addresses, Facebook and Twitter accounts just to name a few.

“It is a bit like an interactive business card that you can change and give to anyone, so they can reach you,” says Justin Hayward, Telnic’s communications director.

The service is slated to go live in December.

Telnic, which has so far raised about $35 million in financing, first applied to ICANN to commercialize the .tel domain in 2000. Permission finally came six years later, when ICANN awarded Telnic exclusive use of .tel. In the intervening time, the startup has spent about $15 million on the years of engineering needed to perfect the technology, Hayward says.

The technology developed by Telnic uses the Internet addressing system in an entirely new way.

Until now top-level domains have been mapped to Internet Protocol addresses for Web sites or other servers. The .tel scheme is more like a virtual directory, not associated with a specific site, containing all the contact information that individuals, companies, or other organizations wish to publish.

Since .tel information isn’t tied to the Web, individuals can post their contact information without having to put up and maintain their own Web sites.

The information can be retrieved from all manner of devices, including cell phones.  Since the data is in a standardized format easily downloadable, people will no longer need to enter and update their contact information on lots of different sites nor search painstakingly through a corporate Web site looking for a contact number.

On Oct. 22, Telnic announced that 100 registrars have already signed up to sell the .tel domain name in Europe, Asia, and the U.S., including a new one, Digitrad, a Paris-based voice-over-Internet communications software company.

If a consumer agrees to include his location information, Digitrad will leverage the .tel information by providing a “multimedia phone number” that will ring wherever the person happens to be at his desk, in the office, or on his cell.

A call can also be put through directly to a person’s computer whenever or wherever they are connected.

For each purchase of a .tel domain by a business customer, Digitrad will provide a vanity phone number, a virtual switchboard, a unified voicemail system, click-to-call solutions, and voice-over-IP services.

Registration opens on Dec. 3 for businesses with registered trademarks.

From Feb. 3 to Mar. 23, the so-called “land rush” period, businesses and individuals can sign up for an elevated fee that will differ from registrar to registrar. Digitrad, for example, plans to charge $397 for a one-year subscription. But after Mar. 23, Digitrad’s price will drop to just $1.32 per month.

The advantage to signing up early is that names are doled out on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Other registrars may charge differently, but the range is expected to fall within $15 to $25 a year, says Telnic’s Hayward.