Dot Whatever - Some Thoughts on the ICANN Announcement

In what may be the biggest development concerning Internet address spaces to date, this week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced its plans to approve new top-level domains (TLDs) to expand the current set of domain suffixes like .com, .net, .org, as well as country code suffixes (such as .ca .us .uk). A request can be made for any custom suffix that you desire, and can afford to pay for.

At $185,000 a piece and a 200-page application for approval and $75,000 maintenance fees, there are significant barriers to owning your desired top level domain, but this won’t stop the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Google and Coca Cola to register a multitude of suffixes for their products and services. For these large corporations that already spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on defensive tactics to register domains just to prevent others from using them, we can expect to see a further increase in their spend on TLDs that are closely linked to their market offerings. There will also probably be a surge in registration requests for generic suffixes like .cars and .systems in a bid to command a greater mind share leading to superior brand equity. Unfortunately, such tactics will remain out of reach for the smaller players who won’t have the resources to register the same site for every conceivable TLD.

From an end-user perspective, it will be a difficult and tricky road ahead for ICANN to create awareness around these TLDs. Most businesses and end users still operate in a dot-com-centric environment, and even previous attempts to augment the .com TLD with others like .biz and .info have been rather unsuccessful. Additionally, the introduction of multiple domain suffixes can result in a relatively flat namespace configuration as opposed to the current hierarchical structure of domain names, and this can lead to confusion among end-users. Ultimately, a search engine might be the best bet to get to the end-user’s target website. While this goes somewhat against the TLD expansion philosophy, recent research shows the importance and use of domain names to be already diminishing as larger proportions of end-users use their browser search bars to seek website addresses of their online destinations, either by directly typing in the business name or by conducting a generic term search. So an argument can be made that actual site addresses and domain names are becoming less relevant with our increased dependency on search engines.

Whether the introduction of new TLDs offer people new ways to express themselves and enable higher levels of customization for brand management is something that we’ll have to wait and observe.  What’s clear though is the need for sound governance and careful implementation of new TLDs to facilitate an efficient and equitable Internet experience for all.

Free Google Mobile Phone Services

I recently offered a graduate seminar course on Mobile Commerce at the University of Ottawa, and it was pretty surprising to see how many mobile end-users still don’t use third party applications and services that exist outside the realm of their service provider’s portfolio. This end-user behavior is highly representative of the Canadian mobile services landscape where our industry structure is highly vertical and the service structure is highly integrated. In Canada, the operators exercise a lot of control over the entire mobile value chain. Companies like Rogers, Telus, and Bell provide services including voice, messaging, internet, and email functions as prepackaged bundles. The customers have little choice in selecting the specific modules that they might be more interested in. Furthermore, the mobile portals on handhelds are usually preconfigured to link to the service provider’s solutions, and do not offer other choices – even free service choices. Many students in my class hadn’t even heard of the following google services that are offered for free (barring the operator’s data transmission charages):


Google 411 (1-800-GOOG-411) Website Link

Google’s voice local search service for local businesses uses speech recognition technology to allow users to query for and connect to businesses. Users can search for businesses by name or category (which is a definite plus in comparison with the traditional 411 service offered by operators). The service then generates a list of businesses that match the user’s query, and allows the users to select an entry from the list. Following the selection, the user can either directly get connected to the business or ask for a text message to be sent with the relevant business details. For users with internet access and google maps, the service also accepts the “map it” voice command to show a map of the business neighborhood.

So not only is the service free to use, but it has advanced features not available through the directory assistance service offered by many operators. For Canadian users, until we get something like TellMe.com, this is the next best thing – store 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) in your contact list and start using it !



Google SMS (46645) Website Link

This is Google’s fast information response service (SMS number 46645), and it lets users send quick queries to Google via SMS and get back responses. Rather than using your data quota in accessing different search engines or websites, the service allows users to quickly get back the information they’re looking for. The service supports specific types of queries such as weather reports, movies, stock quotes, directions, and local businesses by name or category. See this page for examples of queries. To get started, you can try some queries on the online emulator provided here and get familiar with the results. Again, it's not just a free service, but something that’s much easier to use in comparison to its alternatives (e.g. browsing the internet on your handheld to get the information) – store 46645 in your contact list and start using it for SMS queries.

Do you know of any other useful free mobile phone services? If so, leave your comment below, or send me a note.

I-News? Sorry – Not Me

There’s no denying that traditional print newspapers are slowly becoming a thing of the past – but a “new” initiative by the MediaNews Group, the fourth-largest newspaper chain in the U.S., seems all primed to take us even more into the past… say around 1939.

According to a recent article in the NY Times, the MediaNews Group is planning to test market its new idea of having household readers print out their personalized newspapers at home using a proprietary printer. The company has trademarked the term Individuated News (I-News) to refer to the media-delivery system, and it will be testing these systems with the Los Angeles Daily News this coming summer.


Actually, this is not the first time such an experiment is being conducted. Check out this web page on Modern Mechanix - in 1939, radio fax units were tried out in homes to allow people to receive news through radio signals and have their bulletins printed at home on a continuous sheet of paper.

click to enlarge

I don’t know about you, but I don’t see this specific idea as a solution to the woes of the media empires trying to protect and hopefully boost their readership and revenue through innovative means. I suspect most of us would not want to have a printer at home dedicated to printing newspapers.


Personally, I see the short to medium term future of newspaper readership in the use of portable electronic readers such as the Amazon Kindle and the Sony e-Book Reader devices. flip between articles, making it faster and easier to browse and read the morning paper. In fact, the Kindle already offers several user-friendly features for newspaper readers such as ta flip page modality for reading articles just like paper versions of news papers, and moreover, the ability to bookmark, clip and save articles for later reading. The truth is that online news readers have already adopted various technologies and practices to aggregate and personalize the news they want from multiple sources through customized news feeds, and if mobility and portability are really important to the readers, they can get the same feeds through portable reader devices. There is great potential for newspapers in the active matrix electronic paper displays (EPDs) technologies which are fast improving in their capabilities and will soon be able to provide good color reproduction functionalities. What I don’t get is why don’t the media giants invest more seriously in technology projects which would allow them to reposition themselves more effectively in the print media value chain. By occupying positions as content creators, publishers and technology providers, they’d have a better chance at sustaining themselves over the long-term. Also, given the rapid adoption of web 2.0 by organizations, news media companies can position themselves as distributors of trusted research content, and offer this content via syndicated streams through certified APIs, web services, and enterprise mashups.