NameDrive are delighted to announce the launch of NDX Market, a fully-integrated domain trading platform, and a full relaunch of our domain parking front office.

Building on several years’ experience of brokering private domain sales totaling several million dollars, NameDrive now gives all of our clients the opportunity to buy and sell domains on a vibrant, innovative, international trading platform: NDX Market.

Domain owners can list domains as best offer or auctions, both with the added option of setting a BuyNow price – offering the chance to set up your own fixed price domain store.

Domain investors can take advantage of Park&Sell listings which show domains’ parking earnings for the last 30 days on NameDrive, giving you the opportunity to invest in domains which are proven to make real cash.

In addition to launching a comprehensive aftermarket, NameDrive has also fully revamped the homepage and parking front office.
Since August 2005, NameDrive has been renowned for innovation in domain management and parking options. NameDrive were the first company to provide folder management for domains, next generation parking templates, full IDN functionality, global optimization preview, individual letter capitalization and more.

The new Front Office takes this innovation to the next level with full per-country statistical breakdown and settings, dynamic navigation, advanced analytical tools, on-the-fly optimization, virtual folders and customizable log in screens among several new features.

Make sure you drop by NameDrive.com soon to check out the new features, list your domains on the aftermarket and look into expanding your domain portfolio on NDX Market.

You can find video tutorials and tours on our new Video Tutorial Lounge here.

We hope you enjoy using the new system as much as we enjoyed building. We’d obviously love to hear any and all feedback. We will continue to make changes and updates over the next couple of weeks, so this is just the beginning.

The United Arab Emirates will now allow Arabic domain names for websites, which was previously restricted to using only English characters.

The proposal was put across by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority as part of a national strategy to manage Arabic language on the internet. It was officially approved by the Ministerial Council for Services yesterday and will pave the way for future inclusions of UAE domain addresses in Arabic (Emarat).

Presently, most websites in the country use the ‘.ae’ English domain address, which is regulated by the TRA’s .aeDA department that was established in 2007.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) extended top-level domain names in July last year, approving the introduction of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) written in Arabic and Chinese scripts.

According to national news agency WAM, the decision to introduce Arabic domain names will “contribute to increasing the number of surfers to Arabic sites and further promote and strengthen the UAE’s identity.”

source: ITP.net

ITP.net is the Middle East’s leading technology Web site, providing daily IT and business news, product reviews, games and competitions. It is also the online home of ITP’s print publications.

The latest VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief also spotlights how VeriSign and others in the global Internet community are working to provide a way for people of all languages to navigate the Internet. The issue is important, because Internet usage is growing fastest in countries where English and other Latin-based languages are not the primary language.

One method of addressing this is to implement domain names represented by local language characters, such as Japanese Kanji symbols, rather than the ASCII letters and numbers used in English and most European languages. Known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), these TLDs use local language characters to represent the domain name, and then to follow them with a common ASCII TLD, such as .com or .net.

Though more than 47 domain name registry operators support IDNs, concerns over public confusion and ease of use, uneven browser support, and local network limitations have triggered a growing desire in the Internet community to provide a fully localized navigation experience by extending internationalization to the TLD itself.

In support of this effort, VeriSign has joined the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and others in the Internet community to pursue development of Internationalized TLDs. While participants are working to resolve the many complicated challenges that exist with fully internationalized TLDs, the Internet community expects the application process in the New gTLD Program will commence late this year. Tests are already underway, with public participation in usage trials designed to help ensure ongoing DNS stability and security.

“The potential for internationalized TLDs to enable a universally accessible Internet is promising,” said Jill McNabb, vice president, Naming Services at VeriSign. “But it must be done right. A careless or rushed approach will expose the community to a high risk of failure over technical and business issues. VeriSign is committed to working with ICANN and others to achieve a safe, consistent and ubiquitous user experience, while protecting company brands and their customers around the world.”

VeriSign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide Internet users throughout the world with significant statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry and the Internet as a whole. Copies of the 2008 fourth quarter Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained at www.verisign.com/domainbrief.

Internationalization of Top Level Domains

As an increasing portion of the Internet users worldwide are speakers of languages that do not use the Latin alphabet, the introduction of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) has provided a way for these users to navigate the Internet in their own language since 2000. IDNs are domain names represented in local characters using scripts beyond ASCII characters. There are currently more than 47 domain name registry operators supporting IDNs. However, the current implementation of IDNs is limited to the second and lower level(s) (e.g., 한글.com), leaving the Top Level Domains (TLDs) still in ASCII. This has created a desire in the Internet community to extend the internationalization to the top level in order to provide a fully localized navigation experience. For purposes of this brief, such IDNs shall be referred to as “Internationalized TLDs”. A few examples of human factors that can be better served by internationalizing the TLDs (e.g., 例え.テスト) include ease of use in that users will no longer need to switch their input mode from the local script to the basic Latin characters (ASCII) in order to append the TLDs still in ASCII characters. In addition, users of bi-directional scripts writing from right-to-left will be able to enter Internationalized TLDs in one single direction from beginning to end. While the Internet community is working on Internationalized TLDs, the level of interest in Internationalized TLDs from the perspectives of registrants and end users is still unclear.
Continue reading ‘VeriSign IDN Industry Brief’ »

Registry for .ORG domain names seeks submissions from Internet leaders

Reston, VA - December 19, 2008 - .ORG, The Public Interest Registry, the premier domain where people turn to find credible information, get involved, fund causes and support advocacy, announces it is seeking Internet leaders to fill four (4) open seats on the .ORG Advisory Council.

Composed of leaders from a broad spectrum of the noncommercial organizations around the world, the .ORG Advisory Council provides a valuable resource for PIR management and its Board of Directors. The Council was created to advise on issues ranging from public policy to the introduction of new services.

4 of the 15 Advisory Council seats are to be filled by April 2009, each for a three year term. Public Interest Registry is seeking individuals with significant Internet leadership experience within the noncommercial, nongovernmental organization (NGO), and domain name arenas who represent the broad and geographically diverse spectrum of the global internet community. The Advisory Council is divided into working groups who contribute in four areas: Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), Policy, Domain Name Security Extensions (DNSSEC), and Outreach & Awareness.

“Each term, we look forward to nominations from industry leaders who would take a stake in our direction and growth over the next three years,” says Alexa Raad, CEO of Public Interest Registry. “With their expertise these individuals and the Advisory Council are invaluable to our organization.”

Interested individuals are encouraged to submit nominations, including self-nominations. A nomination statement of approximately 400 words should include details of the nominee’s experience with the Internet, commitment to promoting the noncommercial use of the internet, understanding of the technical or policy issues facing the .ORG registry, and perspective regarding the needs of the .ORG community. Within the statement, the nominee must also detail which of the four working groups the individual desires to participate in and contribute to. A current biography and CV are also requested.

New council members will be announced by April 2009. Nominations must be submit by Friday, March 6, 2009, 17:00 UTC. Please submit nominations to [email protected].

For additional information on .ORG and the Advisory Council, go to http://www.pir.org.

About .ORG, The Public Interest Registry

Trusted across all ages, backgrounds and nationalities, .ORG is where people turn to find credible information, get involved, fund causes and support advocacy. .ORG, The Public Interest Registry empowers the global noncommercial community to use the Internet more effectively and, concurrently, takes a leadership position among Internet stakeholders on policy and related issues. The .ORG domain is the Internet’s third largest “generic” or non-country specific top-level domain with more than 7 million domain names registered worldwide. .ORG, The Public Interest Registry, was founded by the Internet Society in 2002. It is based in Reston, Virginia, USA.

Eurid expects to introduce IDN in September 2009. There will only be a landrush, no sunrise. This means that there’s no special protection for the owners of a registered trademark or for the owners of a registered .eu name.

Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) are domain names that contain characters such as letters with accents and characters in non-Latin languages such as Greek. For example, with IDN the registration of the domain name www.café.eu becomes possible while you can now only register www.cafe.eu.

The implementation of IDNs under .eu will not only support all characters of all the 23 official EU languages. Also the complete alphabets of all the official EU languages will be supported. This means that characters of these alphabets, which aren’t used in any of the official languages will be possible. This way, Eurid hopes to be prepared for the accession of new countries to the EU..

source: http://www.tld.sc

After several months of speculation, ICANN have awarded Russia the first non-latin domain extension; .РФ (.RF). This will be available from next July according to Kommersant, the Russian newspaper

The .РФ zone domains are expected to cover roughly 20 percent of current .RU, forecasted Dmitry Ufaev, the managing partner at RBC Hosting Center. Some 1.75 million domains have been registered in .RU, i.e. around 350,000 new web sites will probably appear during two years in .РФ zone.

Is this a good thing? Well there has been an unusually strong push for a “Russian” domain extension in Russia recently. Even Dmitry Medvedev, President of the Russian Federation threw his weight behind the campaign.

As Yakov Sadchikov, over at Quinture points out, Yandex have also just replaced their old logo with an entirely Cyrillic version. Although Yakov suggests this reflects their increasing popularity across Russia, there does seem to be a degree of pro-Russian feelings sweeping Russia. Whether it’s the football, the war in Georgia or the rising affluence, it’s acceptable to be proud of your country and culture again.

Of course, having Cyrillic domains will also let more Russians access Runet. Similarly to the ever insightful Profy though, I worry about duplicate websites and branding confusion. Having three domains for Russia (.RU, .SU & .РФ), plus the usual gTLD options is certainly going to complicate campaigns for Russian marketers.

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Russia Wins First Non-Latin Domain Extension .RF

Dubai: The UAE is set to become the first country worldwide to offer complete internet domain names in a language other than English by late next year.

Currently, efforts to this end by some countries, like in China, have achieved only partial success since the .com part of the URL (uniform resource locator) must still be in English. The new initiative, however, will allow the complete domain name to be in non-English letters.

“In [the] third quarter of 2009, we will start implementing the Arabic domain names,” Mohammad Al Zarouni, chief technology officer at the .ae Domain Administration of the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) told Gulf News.

He added that the UAE “will very likely be the first country” worldwide where a complete non-English domain name would be available.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a worldwide organisation responsible for internet management worldwide, is finalising the process of assigning languages to countries, according to Al Zarouni.

Active efforts

He said that certain countries that are technically ready will be given the chance to start providing the service or domain names in the country’s national language. “The UAE is keen to be one of the pioneers for providing the domain name registration under the Arabic language.”

The UAE is an active member on some of the boards of ICANN and local authorities are working to ensure that they are the first to be allowed to offer complete domain names in Arabic, which would also make them the first country to do so in a language other than English.

Every country granted the permission to offer non-English domain names will be able to offer it in their national language. The UAE will be offering the names in Arabic.

The .ae domain name department of TRA is encouraging companies to adopt the .ae domain name, since they have opened up the market for more than one company to provide domain name registration under the domain name .ae.

source: gulfnews.com

Igor Schegolev, the Russian Minister of Telecom and Mass Communications spoke at the opening of the InfoCom 2008 exhibition in Moscow. Among other things, which made news (for example, that the Russian government will be implementing a free and open source based operating system on all computers in the Russian schools), he also made the following remarks (translated by me in English):

“In the whole society, the Internet resources play major role in securing national standard for access to information. At the same time, in every country, if the Internet is not protected from malicious actions, that causes direct risks for the political and economic stability, and social prosperity, as there are many processes (including business), relaying on the Net.

It is important to state the ‘critically importan’” resources of the national segment of the Internet. We need to define the risks, the weak spots, develop measures for ensuring information security. We need technologies and defense mechanisms from foreign, as well as from domestic actions.

Not long ago, the Internet entered a new phase in its development. Before for writing a domain name, one could use only Latin alphabet, while the usage of national alphabets means multilingual of the Net.

The Ministry has started a program for promoting Russian language in the domain name system. We hope that in the next year we’ll be able to finish the process, and we already have serious allies and partners on that road, and not only from the states of the former Soviet Union, but from other countries, where Cyrillic is being used, namely Bulgaria.”

His talk shows a continuous support for the development of the Russian country-code Top Level Domain in Cyrillic (.рф, .rf for Russian Federation).

The whole process has started in the beginning of the year, as stated in this letter, and has continued after the formation of the new Russian cabinet, under Prime Minister Putin, as expressed in this letter from the Russian Minister to Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO.

Source: CircleID.com

The era of online domination by the Roman alphabet will come one step closer to its end next year when a new top-level domain for China, .中国, is deployed. Xinhua reports that ICANN expects the domain, which uses the two-character modern Chinese word for “China,” will be ready in 2009.

The report also notes that people will be able to use Chinese characters for their mailbox name (the part before the @ sign) as well.

In the future, Internet users (will be able to) use their native languages as mailbox names to send and receive e-mail, which means (the) English-dominant (Roman characters only) era which began in 1982 is about to end.

I hope the encodings will be flexible enough to communicate across deployments of Chinese characters. If someone writes a name in simplified characters and then someone whose computer can only type traditional needs to write an e-mail, this could get challenging.

source: http://news.cnet.com

If you want to review the complete list of domains to be freed and register some of them please check: http://registro.br/info/proclib-l.html

According to the rules of NIC Brazil if the same domain is requested by two companies it will be given to the company that has ID and a trademark registered in Brazil. If there is no company fulfilling this requirement the domain will be blocked waiting for the next liberation process.

If you want to register a domain name and do not have local presence or needs help, please register in our website www.nameaction.com and ask for the domain name you are interested.

Juan Enrique Sánchez S.
President
[email protected]
www.nameaction.com
Domains Latinoamérica