Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Once on the Net, always on the Net

Okay. Time for some substance I guess. Otherwise what would have been the point of this blog?

A few years ago I was getting tired of co-location air conditioning issues, scalability challenges, APIs and language wars.  I was thinking it was time for a change.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I'm smack in the middle of the buzzword-laden Web 2.0 "social networking" mesh stuff that every blogger feels she needs to discuss. I'd sworn off the Internet after selling Shopzilla, but I guess that just when I thought I was out.... they pull me back in.

Not really kicking and screaming though, because I think what we're building is a necessity. The company is called Telnic, and it is the registry for the .tel sponsored top-level domain (TLD). Quick primer: A registry manages the policies for a sponsored TLD and sells domains wholesale at the exact same terms to any accredited ICANN registrar (who then sells to resellers or individual customers).

So what is .tel? It could (and hopefully will) be many things, but at its core, .tel is a way to use the DNS as a key-value pair data store. For example, one could store in abcd.tel:
  • voice:tel, +1 (310) 555-1212
  • email:mailto, joe@joe.com
That's the most basic premise. More on subsequent posts.

No comments: