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Registering a new domain to cost $100,000-$500,000

The websites using new names could go live in late-2009

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New York: Online addresses could soon look a lot more diverse as the organisation that oversees web identities may approve a proposal to create an unlimited number of so-called top-level domains — the familiar suffixes such as ‘.com’ at the end of Web addresses.

Under the plan, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will allow organisations to apply for any top-level domain, a report said. Businesses, for example, could use brand names such as ‘.ibm’ or ‘.ebay’ in their Web addresses. Cities could sign up for names like ‘.nyc’ or ‘.berlin,’ The W all Street Journal reported.

It will be possible to apply to use more general terms, such as ‘.news’ or ‘.sports,’ to define sites associated with categories of information.

ICANN, a non-profit group that acts as regulator for the Internet, expects the change to spur the creation of more websites — and to allow individuals and organisations to express their identities in new ways, the report said.

“This is the biggest change to the way people find each other on the Internet since its inception,” Paul Twomey, ICANN’s president and CEO was quoted as saying.

Registering a new top-level domain will cost somewhere between $100,000 and $500,000, the group said.

When the current addressing structure was first developed in the 1980s, few anticipated that the Web would grow into the global communications and commerce network it is today.

At the time, it was believed that a handful of categories — ‘.com’ for commercial sites, ‘.edu’ for educational intuitions, and ‘.gov’ for government — were enough, the Journal said.

Today there are more than 160 million websites, about 70 million of which end in ‘.com.’ Another 80 million end in country-specific suffixes. These categories do not reflect the Internet’s myriad uses, said Mr. Twoney.

ICANN increased the pool of available top-level domains in 2001 and 2003, but limited the names it made available to a handful of suffixes that include ”.aero” and ”.mobi.”

Mr. Twoney said the expansion is akin to the land grants the U.S. government made in the 19th century. “What we’re effectively doing is opening up huge amounts of online real estate.”

ICANN is also making it possible to register domains using non-English characters — such as Chinese or Arabic — which has been a big issue in some parts of the world.

ICANN, the Journal said, has spent years preparing for the change and has invested around $10 million in technology.

If the proposal comes through, organisations will be able to apply for new top-level domains starting around April 2009. The first websites using the new names could be live later that year

Microsoft offers the largest-ever online storage where users can upload and store up to 5GB files in three folders. There is a limit of 50 MB for any one file. If you have portable hard drives and large-capacity memory sticks that you lug on your travels, prepare to shed them now.

Microsoft is offering free personal and secure storage on the Web of a whopping 5 gigabytes to users registered for its Windows Live services. Users of its Hotmail e-mail service can access this virtual hard drive on the web using the same name and password.

The service, which was in a beta form with limited storage and went live last week across the world, can be accessed at http://skydrive.live.com/.

Users can upload and store their files in three folders: “Personal,” which they alone can access; “Share with friends,” which will be open to designated friends who are also registered Windows Live users; and a “Share with the World,” where one can place files that are open to the wider public to view.

Possibilities:

This is arguably the largest free virtual storage offered so far by any Web player and opens up a lot of possibilities for us, lay users of the Internet: One can upload photos or documents for public consumption... useful for those, like teachers or public speakers who like to quickly share the text of their talks, courses or even PowerPoint-type presentation material.

Many uses:

There is a generous limit of 50 MB for any one file. In fact, frequent speakers can store their PPT archive so that they can update and give any of their lectures as and when required, without having to carry their material on CDs or thumb drives.

One can post photos or travelogues for a limited circle... ‘shaadi’ albums for the viewing pleasure of close friends and relatives.

The personal store will be particularly useful to keep copies of important documents — copies of e-tickets, short duration insurance policies, hotel booking records, visa references, scans of important documents such as degree certificates and birth or marriage records — which can easily be retrieved if the originals are lost.

Security:

Microsoft’s Windows Live head in India, Samir Saraiya, says that the level of security is similar to that of online banking... all file transfers are protected using what is known as Secure Socket Layer.

There have been other online store services, mostly for virtual photo albums and the like, but the flexibility of Skydrive makes it a formidable offering and the size of the storage makes it comparable with what one would get on the solid state drive of an Ultra Mobile PC today.

The mobile is the next frontier for Internet based search tools.

When one seeks information using one of the many Internet search engines “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find,” a biblical expression assumes a special mention here. Searching successfully on the net is an art itself and does not always end with successful findings. The sharpness of one’s search terms often dictates the relevance of what the search tool returns. In other words” what you search is what you get”.

Most searches on desktops end up as wasted efforts, the tolerance factor being high in a desktop user. But when a user searches on a mobile phone or a hand held WIFI device, users are less tolerant. Rates’ being higher plays is a major part and users do not want to pay good money for undesired results. They know what they want and expect to receive it swiftly, economically.

Guessing the mobile information seeker’s intentions and coming up with the fastest, most accurate algorithm to do this has therefore become a challenge for the search engine industry. Mobile Internet is a “Different medium“. It’s big business, many of the Net’s search leaders have found out, creating a mobile version of search tools originally designed for the desktop is not just a matter of customizing mobile, it is an entirely different medium.

One of the first and more agile among Internet search leaders making this difficult transition has been Yahoo and in early 2007, it unveiled “oneSearch”, a mobile sibling of its desktop offering that tried to understand the difference between what a mobile and a tethered searcher sought, even when they entered the same search term.

Mobile users don’t want to do research. They are looking for one piece of information. We need to realize that no matter how wide the net a search engine spreads to trawl available information and how diligent the ‘crawlers’ it sends to dig them out, there is simply no way it could accumulate the sum of all knowledge that searchers would seek. So a solution would be make its users, part of its knowledge bank.

These are often such local in content that no global search engine could hope to provide the answer from its owned cached resources. Yet somewhere out there on the worldwide web, there were good samaritans ready to take the time to provide an answer based on their own local knowledge. .

The larger message “blowing in the wind” is that the world’s 3 billion mobile phone users — 210 million of them in India — expect to search and find with ease and accuracy the information they need while on the move. Meeting this expectation is likely to be the biggest challenge, as well as the most exciting opportunity in the coming months, for enterprises rooted in the Internet.

We at Fixity Technologies are ready to face the .mobi revolution taking over from the Internet left off.

With the number of Internet users expected to cross one billion by the end of 2007 and recent developments such as enabling web addresses in non-Roman scripts such as Chinese, Hindi and Tamil are expected to double this number quite quickly. This is good news for the nascent Net-driven commerce but the wide-spread unease of many lay users with security issues might dampen the whole business of buying and selling.

A newly available technology adopted by e-biz players such as banks and Web commerce sites is stepping in to solve this security issue. This new Unified Authentication tool integrates the secure transaction needs of customers with multiple sellers. A tiny device known as a One Time Password or OTP token generates a new six digit password for every new Net transaction like booking a train/air ticket or buying a book/CD. If the payment gateway typically a credit card agency or a pure Internet pay service such as PayMate or PayPal has signed up for the Verisign Unified service, it will pass the payment only if the randomly generated token number keyed in by the customer matches the number at the payment end.

This is an additional level of security over and above the normal user name and password combination used by most consumer e-business sites today. This added security technology enables secure payments to be made even from devices such as a mobile phone.

The technology is already being used by banks and credit card players but only for their corporate clients. Companies like Verisign hope it will soon be available for the rest of world.

AOL has added new language portals to it’s the Indian edition of AOL search engine among eight introduced after six months since its launch in India. Global Web services giant AOL added two new language portals in Hindi and Tamil to their India-specific English language portal.

The www.aol.in/Hindi page offers news, Bollywood, Gossip and culture. With a canny eye for regional appeal, the Tamil portal www.aol.in/Tamil has localized the movie pages to Tamil cinema and added a section on astrology and religion. Both the language portals are linked to AOL’s main India site www.aol.in in English.

AOL also launched eight country-specific editions of AOL’s new video search engine Truveo, for the U.S., France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Spain, Taiwan and India. The India site (http://in.truveo.com/) offers Indian-interest video clips in categories such as news, sports, entertainment, music, movies and viewers’ choice.

AOL seems to have chosen not to compete with video hosting services such as Google’s ‘You Tube’ or ‘Yahoo Video’ but instead based on the user’s request aggregates and searches for videos, trawling all such sites.

Microsoft is adding more personal computer applications on the web rather than take up space on user’s hard disks. It has integrated more than a dozen applications geared for Windows software users under the brand name ‘Windows-Live’ and made them available as a single 130 mb download. The package includes multiple email account integrator, an instant messenger, photo sharing and management tools, It also has software to help users publish blogs and to enable parents to set browsing limits on individual family members. Also included is an event planning service as well as specific browsing options for mobile phone users. The family friendly features are aimed at parents who agonize over the dangers lurking on the web yet are loath to hamstring their children’s creative Net -enabled pursuits. The Windows-Live feature can be mixed and matched to create a personalized feel at www.windowslive.com .