Centraal Corp, a start-up company which aims to make navigation of the web easier, got off to an embarrassing start when people who attempted to use its service to access a Walt Disney web site found themselves at an adult site instead. The company’s chief executive Keith Teare had told Reuters last week that his company’s technology would allow a user to type the word Bambi into a web browser and immediately access a Disney site devoted to the animated character. When a number of people tried to do exactly that, they were shocked to find themselves whisked away to a site devoted to hardcore pornography at the address www.bambi.com. Centraal says the problem stemmed from the fact that the reporter who wrote the Reuters story didn’t make it clear that users must go first to the Centraal web site to have the shortcut work. The Palo Alto, California-based company has a service, called the Real Name System, which is designed to do away with lengthy and complicated web addresses. The system allows users to type a natural language word or phrase – such as a product name, a company name or an advertising slogan – directly into a browser command line. The web page for that product, company or campaign is then delivered instantly. The system is not yet fully functional and for now, Centraal says, catch words must be typed into a command line at its own web site. Within a couple of months, the service will be ready to use from standard browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape. Companies who want to use the Real Name System to provide easy links to their sites have to register with Centraal, which will charge $40 per year, per real name address. Centraal will also offer larger corporations who want to register multiple names an appropriate pricing model for their sites. On the other end, web users must go to the Centraal site and download the MyNames plug-in to use the system. The company, which introduced itself at Internet World in Los Angeles last week, was founded by Teare, a co-founder of UK internet service provider the Easynet Group Plc and Jean Marie Hullot, former chief technology officer at NeXT Software Inc. Several corporations have already signed up for the service including Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Digital/Alta Vista, Federal Express, Honda, Mercedes, Visa, and Volkswagen, among others. Centraal intends for the Real Name System to become a standard part of future operating systems including Windows and MacOS, and browsers including Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer as well as being available on high profile web sites. Also, deals are being negotiated with a number of companies about becoming registrars – resellers of the service which are licensed to enter addresses into the Real Name System registry. Registrar announcements are expected during the second quarter. At launch, the Real Name System will support all Roman-based languages as well as Cyrillic, Greek and Turkish. Within a year, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Thai characters will be supported. The company says part of its mission is to make the web so easy to use that children can type in simple names and arrive at a web site. In light of that claim, Centraal says that after the unfortunate incident, it probably won’t use the Bambi example to promote its service in the future.
