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The emergence of generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) and country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) allowed the internet browsing to become much easier and intuitive. After all, from the user’s perspective, it is so much easier to remember a domain instead of an IP address. This finding is obvious since the numbers have no intrinsic meaning, whereas domain names may have a meaning, and, therefore, may be more easily recovered by the memory. The IP addresses replacement by domain names helps the Internet to become this global phenomenon that we know.
Unfortunately, this revolution that had occurred in the domain market was not followed by other markets. Note, for instance, the telephony market. We still use phone numbers in order to identify in an univocal way a single addressee. The use of number as access key in telephony was established by its technical convenience, since we have already used rotary dials. This choice, besides the technical convenience, is a terrible one from the user’s perspective, and created a great range of mechanisms to help users maintain, recover and remember the useful numbers to them, such as: organizers, phonebook aid systems, yellow pages and etc..
Due to the growth of the smartphones market, a new horizon is coming. Why, instead of using telephone numbers to make our phone calls, don’t we use a domain name as access key? This concept has been followed by some initiatives that has been having difficulties to be adopted by the mass market, since they force the registration of domains in other extensions that will not be the company main domain, and in the users’ head, the domains .COM are already known as the main domain of the institutions. Additionally, it makes no sense to force companies to register auxiliary domains in other extensions; the companies and users are interested in using the main domain of their company or organization.
A new app for iPhone, BlackBerry and Android has been showed as an alternative much closer to companies and users interests, the Siter.com
In the event the user wants to call Apple, he/she dials Apple.com, he/she dials the domain that Apple discloses and that users already know. In the event the user wants to call Voge Magazine, he/she dials Vogue.com. This mechanism is named domain dialing.
Siter.com breaks this paradigm of using telephone numbers as univocal identifiers of the other part, nevertheless, without losing sight of what users and companies want: they want to use their business main domain. The domain that is already disclosed. The domain that is already known. Companies and users do not want to register their auxiliary domains to be found—they want to use their main domain instead!
The domain dialing (patent pending) has countless secondary benefits, for instance: A company may register multiple telephones under a single domain. This benefit, for instance, reduces the mandatory disclosure of long lists of branches and chain stores. Besides, the company main domain disclosure allows the branding of the company, since usually its brand is intimately associated to its domain name.
The domain dialing also allows mobile phone users to easily guess the desired domain to be dialed, reducing the phonebook aid, organizers, yellow pages reliance, and all kinds of things created to solve a technical issue.
The only way of replacing the culture of using phone numbers as access keys to the other part is taking into account how easily these initiatives would be accepted. It does no matter how many initiatives are done to associate the domain registers market to the telephony market. These initiatives need to consider what is easier and more logical from the mass market and users perspective.
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Could you elaborate on how domain dialing relates to the technology used by TelNIC and others? (i.e. NAPTR)?
Telephone numbers and other aditional info can be placed at DNS or in a Database. In my opinion right now this is not the most important issue. What is really important is the domain dialing concept itself, specialy from the end-user’s point of view. Would you place a call using the main domain name of a company ? ex: anywebsite.com
Is it easier ? Better ? We think… Yes it is.
Ricardo, I agree that dialing using a domain name might be useful, but I’m curious about this new patent pending technology. Could you please provide some references?
About the patent: methods used in this technology are protected under Intellectual Property Laws and it will remain in secrecy period until the international publication will be taken place.