With the .com domain name space getting crowded with no viable alternative agreed upon yet, companies are struggling to find ways to enable users and potential customers to find them without having to resort to web search engines. We reported back in February on an innovative approach from a non-profit UK-based organization, INternet ONe (In One) that had taken a little-used country-specific domain name and turned it into a workable way to find companies quickly, but more usefully, to find details within web sites quickly. An alternative commercial operation has recently popped above the parapet called centraal Corp that uses a different approach. In One uses the country-specific top-level domain of the British Indian Ocean Territory, which gives it the .io domain space, to map companies original URLs with their .io alternative. If more than one company has claimed a certain .io name, In One will list each one with a brief description to enable users to choose which one they want. However, centraal does not work at the DNS level. It plans to strike up partnerships with major websites and recently signed with Digital Equipment Corp’s AltaVista search engine-based portal as its first partner. But company founder Keith Teare has bigger ideas. He says he has one deal in the pipeline, much further advanced than all the others, with one of the browser companies, which he confirmed means with either Microsoft Corp or Netscape Communications Corp. The idea will be to integrate centraal’s software into the next generation of browsers in order to simplify the internet’s address system. Centraal has what it calls Real Name System, which, for $40 a year enables companies to maintain a Real Name that maps onto their websites. They pay $40 for each mapping, so each page on their site requires a separate mapping if needs be, plus they can also map multiple Real names to the same page to cover their various brands. The customer can log on to centraal’s site and change the mappings themselves and centraal also provides real- time statistical analysis detailing such things as performance by visitor domain origin; during specific hours, days or weeks etc; or by each particular Real Name. However, the $40 is only an introductory offer and the price is likely to double in the near future, says Teare. Another company, called Netword LLC has a similar technology, which it launched last year. Drilling down, centraal stores each Real Name as an XML file on the customer’s web server – not on its own – and it is then replicated back to centraal. It is also based on Unicode, so it can cope with any language characters set in the world. Teare thinks this is another key advantage over In One, which is restricted by the 60 characters permitted in a URL. Also it could be argued that having to type in .io is somewhat counter-intuitive. More generally Teare believes the internet domain name system (DNS) is fine when applied to email and SMTP, which was its original use, but when HTTP emerged, it should have had its own naming system. Paul Kane, the general manager of In One says one of the main advantages it has over the competition, apart from only costing $30 for two years to registrars – what they put on over and above that is up to them – is its legal status, whereby companies must sign a declaration proving they are who they say they are. Centraal’s approach is more pragmatic – it acts as judge and jury, deciding whether or not companies and individuals have the right to use a certain Real Name. Once one is granted there is a 60-day period during which centraal verifies the authenticity and rights to use the name before the subscription is confirmed. Kane says In One has just signed its 100th registrar, but acknowledged that its target of 100,000 registrars by the year end will not now be attained – he said it would have to have got more than one thousand by now to be on target for that. He is also in the awkward position of not being able to say who the partners are for fear of favoring one over all the others. It is up to the registrars them selves to publicize the service, something they have not done very well up to now in our opinion. He said Japan in particular, and Europe have been the biggest markets so far for In One, with the US proving much more difficult to penetrate. Centraal’s Teare was the co-founder and technical director for Easynet Group Plc, now the third largest ISP in the UK and with a significant presence in the rest of Europe, and of Cybercafe Ltd. He sold his shares in Easynet at the end of 1996, which has funded the first year of centraal’s operation. It recently got $4m first round funding and will be seeking a second around July, says Teare. Centraal also counts among its staff Bill Washburn, the first executive director of the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) and is the person adjudicating on whether companies can keep their Real Names or not. And the name? It’s Belgium, Dutch and Afrikaans for ‘center’ – Teare says he wanted something that signified in the middle, yet invisible and all the obvious names were gone, ironically enough.
