On the afternoon of Friday 24th October, the world leader in Chinese domain names, TLD Registry opened its new China headquarters in Beijing's Zhongguancun, also known as "China's Silicon Valley". Home to an overwhelming majority of domestic and international tech and internet industry leaders, Zhongguancun is a thriving high tech district and the perfect base for our China region operations. Our opening ceremony was attended by VIPs including the Embassy of Finland's Minister Commercial, Mr Mikko Puustinen, the Service Delivery Center of the State Council Office for Public Sector Reform's Counsellor Mr Yu Yang, and the China Network Information Center's Deputy Director for Registrar Administration and International Business, Ms Chen Ting. Also honoring us with their presence were representatives from many of our China registrar partners, and China's media. Following speeches by Mr Yu, Ms Chen, Mr Puustinen, our CEO Arto Isokoski and our new China General Manager Mr Jin Wang, all guests enjoyed a Champagne toast and a banquet. Click on any of the photos below to open a full-screen slideshow! [AFG_gallery...

We were so happy to partner with the NamesCon organizers and .io Registry for a great party during ICANN 51 in Los Angeles. On the evening of Wednesday 15th October, at Beverly Hills' Rocksugar, we welcomed about 120 of the domain name investment elite for a wonderful night of networking and fun. Thanks go to our partners at NamesCon, Jothan Frakes, Richard Lau and Jodi Chamberlain. Thanks again for the opportunity to support what will be the largest domain name investment event in history! Find out more about NamesCon 2015 at namescon.vegas. Click any image below to open into full-screen gallery mode! [AFG_gallery...

On the afternoon of Sunday 12th October, TLD Registry, the world leaders in Chinese domain names, warmly welcomed many prominent and influential participants in this year’s ICANN 51 Los Angeles meeting, hosting an exclusive lunch party at Beverly Hills’ Chin Chin restaurant. Leading up to Sunday's "Welcome to Chinafornia!" party, the TLD Registry China Strike Team Crossed the southwestern United States desert all the way from Austin, Texas, to Phoenix, Arizona, and finally rolled into Beverly Hills in style in the original and first-ever “Chinese Domainmobile.” The location of the restaurant in the ritzy Beverly Hills neighborhood set the tone for a wonderful afternoon of hand-shaking, food-eating, and wine-and-beer-sipping. Our 70 guests attended to experience the sounds of a traditional Chinese music trio, a surprise lion dance performance throughout the restaurant, and to take home a framed original of their own personalized Chinese name, ink-brushed on tasteful rice paper by our professional Chinese calligrapher, Master Joyce Lin. Our partners at .CLUB Domains co-hosted the party, and we are confident that this afternoon’s festivities have provided a nice preface to the heavy schedule of ICANN’s agenda, in terms of awareness and opportunity in both IDNs and new gTLDs (Chinese script is fully supported by the world's favorite ASCII new gTLD, .CLUB). We are honored and excited that such influential leaders in the domain industry attended our lunch party to kick off what was a very busy week at ICANN 51 Los Angeles! (In the gallery below, click an image to open large and browse all pics in the gallery) [AFG_gallery id='2'] To view all our photos from around the world, please visit the TLD Registry Flickr page!...

REPRINTED FROM CIRCLE ID On the morning of Wednesday 15th October, the The Domain Name Association (the DNA) held an important working group meeting during ICANN 51 Los Angeles. The topic was to discuss several operational issues between registries and registrars. The meeting's unofficial ongoing name is the Registry-Registrar Operations Working Group. The meeting was a continuation of an inaugural meeting that was held back in June of this year, and covered in a Industry Association: An Implementation Model circulated by the DNA from September 17, by Executive Director Kurt Pritz. The rationale behind the inaugural meeting as well as Wednesday's meeting was to formulate discussion between the groups on how to improve the domain name registration process for registrants and businesses, as well as discussion of other operational issues between registries and registrars. These issues and discussion points were brought to light by several members of the group, such as GoDaddy, Donuts, ARI Registry Services, Neustar, Google, 1&1, TLD Registry, andRightside. The meeting was held and the discussion points were raised because of two main issues within the registry-registrar relationships and how it affects the registration process. Kurt Pritz's CircleID article stated that those issues are (1) Registry-registrar operational issues are being solved on a one-off basis as each new registry operator paired off with its set of registrars, and (2) resolving these issues in an industry-wide collaborative manner is preferable in order to create operational consistency and save time. Wednesday's meeting highlighted several points of emphasis, such as developing concepts for formal registry-registrar collaboration methods, how to implement those concepts and action points, and the actual issues that need to be worked through as a basis for the creation of the Registry-Registrar Operations Working Group. The concept for formal registry-registrar collaboration raised produced action items that the working group has undertaken to implement into the methodology. It was noted that there is arguably an urgent need for more efficient collaboration between registries and registrars due to the increasing pairs from new gTLDs (there will be millions of permutations). It was also noted that the DNA's registry-registrar operations Working Group essentially creates what may become a "best practices" guide between registries and registrars. The implementation process needs to have a community approach, circulate fast-acting discussion and provide leadership and participation within the community as well. The DNA's momentum is strong, and is delivering across a multi-stakeholder group. The DNA encourages both DNA and non-DNA members to participate in the working group, which creates a sense of neutrality for the DNA which and guides discussion in a non-biased manner. The main issues can be worked through by harmonizing premium name services between the registries and registrars, standardizing the registry implementations, and find common ground on operation models, such as tiered...

ICANN 51 kicked off this week in sunny Los Angeles, and TLD Registry has already made its way into the possession of thousands of participants’ hands this year, as CEO Arto Isokoski is featured on page 10 of the October edition of the domain industry's IoN Magazine. Arto's interview addresses important questions about the Chinese market and TLD Registry’s IDN’s, Dot Chinese Online and Dot Chinese Website. See the interview below (courtesy of IoN magazine): Q&A: Arto Isokoski is CEO of TLD Registry, operator of two new gTLD IDNs in Chinese, .在线 (Chinese Online) and, .中文网 (Chinese Website). He talked with us about the Chinese domain market. Q: There’s a report that just came out from the United Nations on IDNs that said they were heavily localized and closely coupled to regions where that language was spoken. Has that been your experience with your IDNs? A: Yes, I would agree with that. The value of Chinese IDNs is throughout the entire Chinese-speaking world. We’ve seen a 50-50 split on domains registered on the Chinese mainland and those outside of China. There are satellites around the mainland like Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, but then you have Chinatowns in every part of the world. We see our IDNs as being of service to Chinese language groups all over the world- and that’s what we’ve seen in our registrations. We’ve sold 53,000 so far in the four months they’ve been available. Q: Can you explain why you chose the Chinese characters for “Chinese online” and “Chinese website” rather than straight words? A: It’s because that reflects what Chinese users actually type into their browsers. If for example Chinese users search for “Nissan,” they’ll be directed to the Japanese version or the English version. So they have become adept at typing the phrase, “Nissan Chinese language website” into Baidu. And that phrase is our TLD. It is an easy way for non-Chinese companies to be found online. As for “online,” that’s the most commonly used term for Chinese users when they are searching for an online product or service. Because of the size of the Chinese Internet, it is so much harder to find online services that through, say, Google and the English language. “Online” adds really valuable context. Q: In English, shorter domains are more valuable. How does that work with the Chinese language? A: Chinese is already an incredibly compact language so we’re not all that worried about whether IDNs are short in the same way you are when you have English words with multiple letters. The big difference is in how domains are typed into a browsers. The fastest way is to talk into a phone. Chinese voice recognition is...

IoN Magazine, standing for “Internet of Names”, is the first-ever glossy domain name industry magazine. The inaugural issue was released on June 26, 2014 coinciding with the ICANN 50 conference in London. The premise of the publication is to provide news, opinion, interviews, and analysis about the current ICANN conference - it even includes a schedule of events, local restaurant guide, and an entertainment feature with humor, cartoons, and even crosswords. Spearheaded by the DotAsia Organization and domain name industry enterprises, IoN offers a great opportunity for companies in the domain industry to collectively share information about initiatives, data, and announcements. In the note from the editor and industry leader, Kieren McCarthy states that the idea to create IoN Magazine was driven by the recent general availability of 200-plus new gTLDs that are expanding the internet community. TLD Registry took advantage of the IoN launch to initiate a new series of full-page advertisements, “The End of ASCII” - dedicated to bringing awareness to a digital divide manifested from the lack of universal access (and partly solved by our fully-Chinese domain names!) Our ad in the first issue of IoN shows a young boy looking at a mobile device, representing a typical rural Chinese child using the most common method to access the internet -- through mobile devices. The ASCII (English) requirements for inputting domain names has made internet access challenging for users such as our boy. With the new widespread availability of fully-Chinese domain names -- such as our Dot Chinese Online and Dot Chinese Website domains -- our boy has now scaled the digital divide. He can write the Chinese characters for his favorite cartoon character, for example, with his fingertip, and those characters are the domain name for the website he seeks. The message is clear and imminent. ASCII is not helpful for the next billion internet users. Fully native language IDNs are, on the other hand, enablers. The Internet is often portrayed as a universal platform where the communication of ideas are easily accessible and immediately transferred globally. If this is true, then why does a digital divide still exist? An English speaking Internet user understands the concept that domain names have correspondence to the landing page. For example, “internetregistry.info” is going to bring the browser to an Internet Registry page. This concept does not exist with Chinese Internet users. Because IDNs were not initially implemented, Chinese websites are often a consolidation of lucky numbers or random ASCII characters. Even with an ASCII based phonetic system, the Chinese language is too complex to give a specific meaning to ASCII domain names. The digital divide limits communities that do not have an ASCII character based language, preventing...