Domain Convergence 2009 Toronto Conference Day 1

Posted By Max Trunov in Domain Names, What's Buzzing on 2009-08-14

The annual Domain Convergence conference was held in Toronto on 13th and 14th of August 2009. The main objective of this event was to bring together domain name owners, investors, entrepreneurs and developers throughout Canada in order to share ideas and experiences.

The keynote address of this year’s conference was presented by Michael and David Castello (CEO and COO of the Castello Cities Internet Network) and was titled “The Future of Domaining – Building Your Brand”. The Castello brothers highlighted the importance of memory retention in branding. They emphasized the importance of creating and building a brand that visitors are able to remember so that the site is not reliant upon search engines to direct traffic.

Justin Hayward (Communications Director of Telnic) then gave a very interesting presentation regarding new TLDs and .TEL. The .TEL service is a communication hub that enables businesses and individuals to store and control their keywords and important contact information in a real time database. It does not require hosting, coding or managing a website, however all the information is accessible over the web. This new service has already proven to be very popular with 100,000 new .TEL domain names being sold within the first 72 hours since .TEL extension became available on March 24, 2009 and a further 200,000 new domain names were sold in the following two months.

Mr Hayward also detailed the new technology that is being developed by Telnic and their innovative plans to hold user community events. The first of these events will be “TelCamp” which will take place at the Royal Ontario Museum on 15 August 2009. The objective of TelCamp is to exhibit the attributes of the .TEL domain and the TelCamp.tel site. This is a newly created site that facilitates event management by automating registration, attendee lists and agendas.

Rick Silver then spoke about Domain Development 2.0. In particular, he discussed a business review site called “n49″. This is a site that allows community members to review local businesses and share their opinions with other members. The site utilizes many generic .CA domain names by forwarding the domain name to a relevant category of the site.

In the afternoon of the first day of the Domain Convergence Conference the Domain Owners Association of Canada (DOAC) held its General Meeting. The DOAC is a new organization (founded in 2009) that was established to represent the corporations and individuals in the domain industry in Canada. This includes domain owners, parking providers, the media, registrars, advertising agencies and lawyers. They aim to promote the use of .ca domain names and enhance their value, as well as protect members from fraud in relation to domain names. Membership of the DOAC is increasing, however they are still looking for ways to increase member sign-ups and this was the main focus of the General Meeting.

Looking forward to day two of the conference.

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