Speednames sees huge opportunities in Korea
The company has also inked at least three reseller agreements with Korean telcos and Internet service providers, said Speednames vice president of Global Marketing Martin Roll.
Roll declined to name the partners but said that an annoucement will be made in due course. "Korea has the potential to outpace the rest of the (Asian) markets in domain name management and applications. (It) currently has 21 million Internet users," he said when contacted.
Speednames provides a one-stop online shop for registering generic domains (.com, .net and .org) and those ending with country codes (.sg, .nz, .uk or .ch for instance). Customers do not have to go to different registrars for different types of country-specific domains as Speednames has partnered Network Information Centers (NICs) in over 110 countries.
Speednames also offers multilingual domain name registration in simplified and traditional Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
In January, it started a "registration queue" for new Top-Level Domains (TLDs)--.info, .biz and .name. The three new top-level domains were approved last November by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a technical coordination body for the Internet.
By "queuing up", customers can have a better chance of securing a preferred domain name as the queue operates on a "first filed, first served" basis, Speednames claimed on its Web site.
To allow companies to protect their trademarks online, the registrar yesterday launched an Intellectual Property (IP) claim service for those who have queued or want to queue up for .biz domain names. The service will run until July 9, 2001.
"The claim filing will not guarantee the claimant their domain name, but it does help warn off so-called cybersquatters and others who might unknowingly infringe on another business' intellectual property," Speednames said in a statement. It will cost US$140 per IP claim.
Should more than one company file an IP claim for the same domain name, Neulevel will verify who owns the rights to the name, according to Speednames. Neulevel is the registry for .biz domains.
Speednames employs 80 staff in its three offices in Copenhagen, Singapore and Munich.
Note: We had earlier reported that VeriSign Global Registry Services is the registry for .biz domains. The registry should be Neulevel. We apologize for the error.