 Welcome to .telegraph, the monthly .tel community newsletter covering the latest news on .tel features, software and services, as well as useful tips and advice from .tel owners. Why not share this with someone you think may also be interested? More resources are at http://telnic.org/community-landing.html. |  Printer-Friendly |
In this issue:
 | "Those who desire to contact me can easily find my contact info on my .tel to do so. This becomes my digital business card which is much easier & cheaper to keep up to date that paper business cards." |  |
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| Get creative in our new template design competition!When it comes to design, taste can be very subjective. Realizing a design in real-life technology solutions can also be challenging. That said, the team at Telnic always relishes a challenge and there's nothing like a new year (and a new decade) to take a fresh look at things! So, with that in mind, we're kicking off a design competition for the community to submit a new .tel template for computer browsers. This contest is about finding a fantastic new design to match the great features and benefits that .tel is already delivering to owners in over 180 countries worldwide. We know that the .tel community has some great ideas so we're really looking forward to seeing some outstanding submissions. To learn more about the competition and submit your design, please visit our website. |
UBL and Telnic Partner to integrate .tel Domains in UBL offeringsUniversalBusinessListing.org (UBL), the business identity management service of Name Dynamics Inc, and Telnic, have announced a partnership to integrate .tel names into UBL's commercial offerings. UBL provides a single entry point for enhanced business profiles which it distributes to all major search engines, Yellow Pages, social networks, mobile phones, 411 directory assistance, map sites and GPS devices. By integrating .tel names within the UBL service, businesses will now have a distributed and centralized online presence for their contact information, increasing their discoverability online. |  |
| "We are delighted to be partnering with Telnic, which shares our commitment to helping businesses improve their online visibility," said Doyal Bryant, CEO, Universal BusinessListing.org. "The .tel domain offers businesses a highly refined 'contact-us' page with strong visibility and quick indexing in search engines, making it an important tool for managing an online business identity." Read more online. | |
Interview with Lucy Wang, CEO of TelChina
 | Lucy Wang, Chief Executive Officer of TelChina, is no stranger to running successful operations. Her career includes CEO roles in leading online media groups, the role of Secretary-General for the Australian-Chinese Business Association, and most recently Chief Strategy Officer at CNNIC (the .cn registry). This month, Lucy is answering our questions about TelChina's recent launch. Why did you form Telchina? What gap do you see .tel addressing in the Chinese market? My major career experience has been with online marketing. In China, Internet ads are so ubiquitous that viewers get confused trying to find the information they need. When I first heard about .tel, I was very impressed by its clarity, ease of use and branding potential. As a result, I formed Telchina to help people and businesses outreach to their customers efficiency. I believe improving discoverability is crucial for all kinds of online marketing. |
What kinds of people are using .tel in China today? Primarily, business-oriented companies and individuals.
Since its launch in 2010, how has TelChina been accepted? Since its launch, .tel has been very positively accepted by the Chinese market, especially in the corporate sector. For individual users, we still need to educate them and help them use .tel more actively and regularly. To serve corporate and individual users better, we are going to offer unique value-added services to different vertical markets in addition to the core .tel product.
What's the greatest challenge you've faced with .tel? I think the biggest challenge is to improve user engagement and stickiness on .tel, and form more partnerships with leading internet service providers here in China. Any new product takes time to be accepted. It is normal that some people at first mistake .tel for an ordinary domain name like any other. Therefore, we need to educate the market, and more importantly, to clearly differentiate our service.
| Speaking about differentiation, how does your .tel service address the needs of the local market? To fulfil government requirements, we need to provide real name verification services. We have already upgraded our .tel data management system to provide a localized control panel service for our customers, and we also developed a series of new templates. We are going to localize our product further to accommodate a larger Internet community here, conveying more benefits to Chinese speakers. |  |
You've provided some great personalization features for your customers. What are your plans looking forward? We are engaged in building .tel to be a personal hub for communication, connecting to a person's entire digital world. Great personalization is one of the features that users can easily apply themselves to. We are aiming to establish a platform with all the widgets, tools, applications, etc. where users can choose the features they prefer.
We recently heard about theHC International deal—can you explain a little bit more as to how .tel will benefit their customers? The SEO function of .tel pages enables small-to-medium size companies to improve online discoverability; .tel's ability to consolidate multiple pieces of contact information provides users with the means to integrate all their marketing efforts into one platform, and the privacy management feature provides them with some basic CRM function. We have also found that .tel is able to integrate in many online applications. To summarize, companies on HC360 can get benefits from .tel in many aspects.
New quick-start guide for .tel
| In a few weeks, the .tel control panel will include a quick and easy setup tool to help novice users create their .tel pages in minutes. It's as easy as 1-2-3! Simply enter basic information about yourself or your business, key contact information and location, and preview the .tel page before it gets published. Now anybody can create a .tel page in no time! When you visit your control panel once this update has been launched, the setup tool will show automatically if you haven't populated any of your .tels yet. Follow the process and publish information on your .tel to make it visible online and discoverable by search engines. Now you have a basic page that can be improved and expanded further through your control panel or by using one of the mobile apps. The more information your .tel has, the more useful it is for visitors and search engines, and the more discoverable you become online. Look out for more exclusive details on the new version of the control panel in future newsletters. |
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.tel examples from the East
As mentioned in a previous edition of the .telegraph, TelChina, Telnic's partner in China, is now hosting its customers' .tel domains directly and providing localized services including a choice from its own selection of templates. Since the launch of their tailored services, we've seen a number of interesting .tel names being developed by customers. The following examples show how professionals, small businesses, large organisations and even conference organisers are using their .tel names:
 | Nizhengdong.tel is the personal .tel of Gavin Ni, the group Founder and CEO of zero2ipo Group, a leading integrated service provider in China venture capital and private equity industry. Mr Ni was given the honour of being named in China's top 10 CEOs in 2010. He's using his .tel to share his and his company's contact information, and also to link to relevant articles that he's published. |
 | GMIC.tel is the central point of contact for the Global Mobile Internet Conference, one of the world's leading annual events for the mobile Internet industry. Attendees can use the .tel to browse speakers, exhibitors and to find links to register online. This year's event is organized by Great Wall Club, which also has its own .tel name at gwc.tel. |
 | Yanmama.tel is the mobile home of the online glasses and contact lens store Yanmama, which supplies customers throughout China. Yanmama uses its .tel not only to share its contact details, but also to link to its various online outlets. Yanmama is already reporting excellent SEO results for searches using highly competitive keywords within its industry. The structure and design of the .tel has also benefitted it significantly; Yanmama's main website is necessarily image-rich, so the .tel is an excellent lightweight page for mobile users to access important contact information quickly and easily. |
 | 武功山.tel has selected a striking template from Tel-China's exclusive template collection. It is a well-known martial arts travel company and is using its .tel to share information regarding the hotels, restaurants and attractions in the region it covers. |
Interview with Oscar Sousa-Marques, President of ADPAI
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| Oscar Sousa-Marques is president of Asian Directories Publishers Association (ADPAI) and CEO of Directel Macau, the directory service for the island of Macau, where every local business now has a .tel name. In this interview, Oscar is sharing his experiences with .tel. As President of ADPAI, how are you seeing yellow page companies transform themselves in the region? Even though the pace was initially slower in Asia than in Europe and the US, the same has increased in the past year and almost all Asian yellow pages companies are diversifying their offers beyond print yellow pages. Asia is quite diverse and you have some very large markets, such as China and India, where the market is teeming with new online-only companies and others where the incumbent yellow pages company is successfully exploring some niche markets, such as the Philippines. Still, in all Asian countries the good old days of fat print yellow pages margins are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. |
DirecTel has successfully transformed into a multi-platform media company – how are you transforming your services to benefit their customers? Our focus has and will always be our customers. Macau being a very small economy with a comparatively large number of visitors, our first focus after the yellow pages was the tourism market. We currently have several publications addressing that market from guides and maps to online verticals. We also converted some of our print clients into online businesses by first introducing some basic offers that were clearly understood by the market. Currently more than 50% of our print clients are online and we have started to offer other services such as government-sponsored template-based web design, directory assistance services with the 114 China Telecom service and mobile marketing solutions.
What types of customers is DirecTel representing today? The majority of our clients are still SMBs even though we have been increasingly working with some of the large casino companies in very specific areas like mobile marketing.
| What is the most important priority for small businesses when it comes to marketing today? The old rule still applies: they want more customers acquired as cheaply as possible.SMBs in Macau are very price-sensitive and do track their ROI even if sometimes in a rather complicated way. Consequently, we have to keep this in mind when designing our products and establishing our prices. How do you see .tel fit into these changing priorities for both yellow page companies and small businesses? In Macau we have partnered with Telnic to provide all local companies with their own .tel page in what I believe could be a solution to be followed by most of the players in the region. |
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What do you think the main benefits are with .tel? It's a very easy to understand proposal to all our SMBs that delivers measurable results with a relatively low investment.
How important is having a mobile-accessible presence in Macau for small businesses? Mobile is becoming increasingly important especially with the vast number of smartphones in the local market and in use by the 22-plus million yearly visitors to Macau. .tel is a great solution for the local SMBs providing them with a mobile-formatted basic website with all the crucial information about their business.
Where do you see DirecTel's services going in the future? We are now exploring a few new services and will hopefully launch a mobile payment platform in Macau this year that will enable us to facilitate commerce for all local SMBs. A deal-a-day platform, by partnering with some regional player or creating a start-up, is also being considered.
Leading eCommerce provider in China now offering .tel names
| This month, HC360, a leading B2B e-commerce and traditional marketing services provider in China, begins providing .tel names to its 170 thousand small and medium-sized businesses on its Southwest Operations Centre platform. Businesses will benefit from .tel names bundled with their current HC International services, enabling their business to be found in a cross-platform environment as well as improving their communications effectiveness by offering customers different communications choices through .tel, including mobile-optimized micro-sites. Lucy Wang, CEO of TelChina, explained: "We're pleased that HC International is the first leading service provider in China to incorporate .tel names into its E-commerce services. With the growing importance of an online presence for business and increasing use of the mobile web, providing .tel names will enhance discoverability, accessibility and the reputation of their clients, both in China and abroad." See full interview with Lucy Wang above. Khashayar Mahdavi, CEO of Telnic Limited, said: "We are confident that 2011 will be an exciting year for TelChina and .tel, given the rapid adoption that they are experiencing from organisations such as HC International. We fully anticipate an accelerated take-up of .tel names from E-commerce, online marketing and telecommunications companies in the region as the success of this and other deals become apparent." | About the companyFounded in 1992, hc360.com (HK8292) is a leading B2B eCommerce service provider in China. In December 2003, it successfully listed on the Growth Enterprises Market (GEM) of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited, and became the first listed mainland company in information services industry and B2B electronic commerce services industry. At present, it has over 10 million registered users and serves up to 8 million buyers in more than 32 industries, making itself the most influential e-commerce service provider in China.
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Navigating Change—Controlling contact points in a changing marketing environment
A colleague recently sent me a link to a blog post regarding the New York Times' celebration of its 80-year anniversary in 1931. It commissioned the leading business, scientific and philosophical thinkers of the time and asked them to predict what the world would look like in 80 years time, so what 2011 would look like. Whilst a selection of these is only available here and I hope more will be released by the NYT soon, some of those predictions highlights are incredibly close, and I'd encourage you to read them at your leisure.
| What struck me when reading these was, not that each and every one of them had applied their minds to something so far beyond them as to imagine a world that they would never be able to see, but to understand that all of their predictions came from a fundamental notion that the one constant that they could rely on was change. In 2010, we're so used to change, we perhaps forget that it is happening at all! Incremental change and incremental innovation surround us, perhaps nowhere more so than within the technology and devices that are inherently changing our lives at a microscopic level. Gesture-based gaming, internet connectivity in airplanes, touch screen smart phones, self-driving cars (OK, some not so small changes in that last one!) have all emerged and crept up on us over the past two or three years, making us think how on earth we survived before they were around. |
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Read more on Telnic's Blog.
Fuel efficiency and .tel
 | My name is Alex Fraser and I am based in Canada. I am and have been an official independent Bitron distributor of effective fuel efficiency products since Nov 1998 when I joined as an official distributor under N/A/T/O. As most clients contact me via the internet, being discoverable online is very important to me, although customers can also reach me in various other ways - by phone, skype, some advertising, etc. I heard about .tel from George Moen, CEO of Blenz Coffee, in July 2010 and was intrigued, checked it out but did nothing. Then in late October I checked it out again and signed up with my domains alexwfraser.tel and alexfraser.tel. My wife Rhoda is also using .tel with rhodaross.tel and rosswintravel.tel, and these 4 domains are now entwined with each other. |
| I believe most people can benefit from a .tel digital business card in one way or another. For example, .tel has put my name up in the top of the search engines and regularly shows my variety of web sites. In the time that I have had my .tel site, we have had at least a dozen queries on my wife's YTB/ZamZuu site. This has been one result that has been quite noticeable. Keeping things up to date is one of the major benefits of . tel for me, and I suspect that for those who desire to contact me can easily find my contact info on my .tel to do so. This becomes my digital business card which is much easier and cheaper to keep up to date that paper business cards. I think in future, .tel is going to be a good part of advertising on the internet. Getting this fine tuned is another story and effort. Simply said, you can put your contact info on a .tel, keep it private for family access. It can or could be a back up for location of various essential documents, where they are kept. It is secure. It is also great I think for keeping in touch.Tdah libros arte caleruega ofertas casa rural asociaciones tdah personajes tdah libros tdah tdah canarias tdah coaching |  |
If you've got a .tel story that you wish to share, why not get in touch with us atcommunity@telnic.org.
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