Why dottel?: Reach me, the exact me you were looking for!

If I had a nickel for every time I've missed an opportunity to get to know a good looking woman on a train because my email is hard to spell or my phone number is too long and random to remember, like the situation in this video, I'd be only slightly richer at this point in my life. In all seriousness though, there is real value in controlling your online identity and providing one easy to remember/shortened mechanism for people to interact with the data that you want them to interact with online. This is the entire premise behind the .tel top-level-domain (TLD) available to everyone via Telnic. A little background as to why this is significant for me. You see the unfortunate thing is this; I have a doppelgänger that lives in South Dakota. I'm quite positive he's not my evil twin however when it comes to sorting out our identities on the Internet things get a little confusing. The "other" Brent Kastner looks similar, likes technology, is a photographer, and loves to waterski. All similar activities that one could mistake for my activities. He also owns brentkastner.com; how that happened I'll never know. This is precisely what I like about .tel. With .tel I can assemble all of the stuff that is "mine" into one page about me along with my picture, bio, interests, and contact info. This in turn will get picked up and indexed by search engines; hopefully above his. Check and Mate other Brent Kastner; we meet again!

Some details about my experience with it:

In the span of about an hour yesterday I set up http://brentk.tel for my personal contact information and ramblings and http://brentkastner.tel for my professional contact information and business affiliations. I registered my domains with name.com and used the .tel profile management tool to add relevant information about me into each domain. Just like creating a regular domain on the Internet I did still need to wait about 24 hours before the DNS changes propagated to DNS servers in my area, but as of this morning it's all up and running fine.

The above is cool, no question about it. What really blew my hair back about this though was the seamless integration of my brentk.tel domain with google apps! In about another 30 minutes I have mail, chat, voice, docs, and calendaring (to name a few apps) for me and up to 50 people that want a @brentk.tel address... For FREE! For me, this takes the capabilities of the .tel concept to the next level of cool. Now I can confidently use a google voice phone number (that isn't my actual cell phone number) as my "global" contact me phone number. I can screen calls, emails, chats, etc all through my .tel email account hosted on google without fear of exposing myself to unwanted spam, cold calls, etc.

Now, the next time I'm on a train I can confidently give brentk.tel for my contact info. She'll be totally impressed! I think I'll order some business cards, plain white, with just brentk.tel on it. Think of this for a moment. Introductions can now be part intro, part research project :).

My wishlist for additional capabilities:

1.) I think it would be great to have a twitter widget that links with my account on my .tel page subject to the same privacy profiling that .tel does so well now. I'd like to show in real-time whats happening in my world as I update it.
2.) It would be awesome if friending features could be integrated with friending in say LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning networks, etc? I'd really appreciate an integrated friends management approach vs. having to maintain a new separate list of friends.
3.) I'd like people without .tel accounts to request to see my information. See point 2, even telfriends is a bit weak in this regard.
4.) I'd like to be able to hang a blog off of blog.brentk.tel, create html content, or do other basic website related stuff here. Envision a day when I don't need any personal site at all, just the stuff contained here.
5.) I'd like to be able to "share" articles, websites, documents, anything available on the web via ShareThis, AddThis, or other sharing platforms directly to my .tel page

--
~Brent Kastner

.

Business cards with Dot Tel name:



Latest business cards with dot tel name arrived from http://goodprint.co.uk. Nice quality and service, as usual.

-------------

.

How to spice up your Dot Tel domain:

Here are the available templates, from which you can select:
















How to set colours for the header and background for Dot Tel domains, using the .tel control panel:

When you are at your controll panel, respectively, dashboard, you go top left and click on the card "Design", and go from there. It is self explaining...

Which brings you up this controll panel:








Select a colour space number (1, 2 or 3):

The colour customising mini panel, that will pop up, looks like this:





In the vertical colour bar, you select a basic colour, for aditional fine tuning:

Then (within the left window) you place the cross on the ring, and move the ring to the right area, that brings up the colour you wish to have. Your selected colour then shows in one of the two small windows, top right within the small controll panel. --> Save your colour choice, with the "save" button, bottom, right side.




To add a logo, you must go back to the main control panel.







However, there are two tutorials. One in french, and another one in German (which will be continued):



1.) http://www.toutpointtel.fr/index.php...mode-d-emploi/



2.)

http://www.tel-blog.de/domaingestalt...reigeschaltet/

.


.
And this is what is possible to create, within the limits...:

An Example of a Beautifully Designed Dot Tel Domain

We are all aware of the major design shortcomings of Dot Tel Domains. I, for example, will not use anything but the single colour Retro template. However, this Dot Tel Domain organictea.tel, is an excellent example of what can be achieved. It's the best one I have seen yet. Click on the image to see it full size. I like the attention to detail, the rouge on the girls face is the same colour as part of the template. 10/10!

The Love Train

Adding to the Dot Tel launch hoopla was the infamous Ben.tel video depicting two hormone-laden Brits fighting for the attention of an uptown blonde – all while riding an intercity train. The one who scribbled “Ben.tel” on the window with his opponent’s latte won the girl.

Click to Call concepts

Here is a idea:

1.) Dot Tel web page.

2,) Link to Lady Nastya: nastya.russiangirls.tel

3.) Link goes to picture with click to call option, smilar to the concept of "Ting!"

But my idea, might enable people to decide, if they want to make a call, or not:



"Ting!" shows a full screen slideshow of a caller’s pictures during incoming calls. So the caller can assign to a particular contact several (or at least one) photos. And when this person calls the user can enjoy full screen photos of the contact.

Actually there are apps that act as a full screen caller on the market, but they mostly show just one picture. I assume that the ability to see several contact’s pictures during incoming call at once brings some fun and personalization to Symbian devices.

The application is written in Symbian C++ and consists of 2 parts: service and UI. Service is hidden and used to catch incoming calls, get incoming call number and check if it is added to the application database. If it is in the database, the application starts the slideshow with predefined pictures. The UI part is used to communicate with the application database and manage contacts.


Where to get the app?:

The most exciting thing in making mobile app is ability to use telephony functions and improve user experience in using mobile phone. This has led a developer to "Ting!", being recently launched. More of "Ting!" below.




At the same time the developer has realized, that since he is an independent developer and do most of the work himself, so there is no sense in trying to work with all possible mobile operating systems. In his situation, the only way to succeed as a mobile software vendor is to concentrate on one operating system and to do my best, developing high quality products for this platform. As you may expect he has chosen Symbian, since it is the only operating system which gives him as a developer deep access to telephony and device functions and at the same time gives him as a software vendor access to a really huge audience.

He was lucky enough to realize early that software development is the most easy task in selling product. What really takes most of your time is application promotion.

Implementing license manager, getting publisher id, signing, getting agreements with distributors, etc. That’s why his first product was partly aimed at building essential distribution relations like Handango, Ovi Store, Nokia Download, local Nokia stores here in Russia, etc. But at the same time it was a serious product called Blacklist Mobile which is very successful at the moment.

While working on Blacklist Mobile and it’s modification Whitelist Mobile, he had managed to gather all the telephony-based functionality you can gather using S60 APIs (including some Nokia’s partnering API’s). After that, he started to think how to use this in his next products. And how to use it in a product that can be targeted at a wide audience that has entertainment value. That’s how the idea of Ting! came to his head.


Read more, about "Ting!":

http://blog.symbian.org/2010/01/25/4463/

"Ting!" blog:
http://dtarasov.ru/ting.html

.

.Tel in eine gleichlautende .Mobi einbinden

Soeben habe ich eine neue Theorie ausgedacht, bei dem man eine .Tel-Businesskarte in eine gleichlautende .Mobi Handywebsite einbinden kann:
Die Kosten für das Einrichten und Unterhalten einer .Mobi Domain, wären somit so tief wie nur möglich, und das kann man als Laie selber bewerkstelligen.
Der .Mobi benutzer bekommt dann eine .Tel-Website zu sehen.
Der Benutzer wählt eher eine .Mobi, weil ihm diese Domain bereits vertraut ist. Da das Redirekting auf eine .Tel zur Zeit technisch nicht möglich ist (weil man keinen eigenen Host hat), wäre hiermit ein Problem schon gelöst.
Siehe auch die Diskussion:
http://www.toutpointtel.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=222
Fazit: So schnell, einfach und kostengünstig, hat noch Niemand eine .Mobi Webseite erstellt und online eingestellt.

Es macht nun auf einmal viel Sinn, .Tel und .Mobi Domains zu registrieren (vorzugsweise, paarweise, mit je einer anderen Domain-Suffix .mobi/.tel).

In anderen Worten, heisst das, dass man viel Traffic auf seine .Tel-Data erhalten kann, aber nicht auf seine .Tel-Domain selbst. Was auch nicht allzu schlimm ist.

.

Integrate .TEL into your Website using iFrames

Since the release of .Tel last year, many people have asked "what can I do with my .Tel name"? There are many great ways youmcan use it, but here's a new development that got me excited.

Telnic recently released a string of code to easily integrate .Tel on your website using iFrames.

An iFrame tag (eg. <iframe> ) defines an inline frame that contains another document.

The code is EXTREMELY easy to incorporate and took me less than 2 minutes to setup (no joke) on my personal website which uses a modified WordPress blog template. 

Take a look: http://ramifilms.com/contact

By integrating your .Tel name into your website you can effectively change your contact information simply by updating your .TEL. Once it is setup, you just login to your .TEL interface and make changes to your contact information and you are done.

Picture a company with 100 employees who each use a .Tel name. By integrating all their Tel names on one website, you can easily build an online directory that is independently updated by a 100 different individuals.

Can't picture it? Here's an example of a small .Tel directory embedded into a Webnames.ca WebBuilder site.

To embed your .TEL into your website, just follow Telnic's easy integration instructions:http://telnic.org/tools-website-integration.html.
 

Source:
http://blog.webnames.ca/tel/