The number of .co domains is growing.

About 600,000 .co domains have been registered after nearly four months of availability. While that is paltry compared with some 90 million .com addresses spoken for already, the new domain is proving to be popular with startup entrepreneurs.

One San Francisco-based entrepreneur, who’s starting a travel-related site and is pitching angel investors to raise capital, told me that the .com domain she wanted was already taken. The domain owners wanted $80,000 to sell it to her.

“I’m in the middle of starting VC and angel funding pitches and including $80,000 in the financial plan looks ridiculous,” she told me.

So the budding online travel entrepreneur bought the .co version of her company name instead.

“The new domain has an edge to it that .com doesn’t,” she says. “It looks sexier and cooler, and it’s a lot cheaper than haggling for an existing .com domain.”

Naval Ravikant, an angel investor and an early investor in Twitter, says that the registry is here to stay. Ravikant says he encourages all startups to register using the .co domain. And he recommended to Twitter that it register the t.co domain for its URL shortening service.
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The First App for Smartphones That Works with the “Domain Dialing” Concept and Allows People to Make a Phone Call to Domains is Now Available

International internet and mobile technology company Siter, LLC is launching Siter, the first app for smartphones that allows people to make a phone call to any domain name registered in its system rather than to a phone number. Welcome to the domain dialing concept!

For example: to call Apple using Siter, the user simply dials apple.com. Siter currently has a growing database of 25 million names registered in its system. The app is available for free download and is compatible with iPhone, Android and Blackberry (selected models*).

Siter’s technology works as a collaborative platform that is in constant evolution and working towards growing its database by inviting companies, domain owners and users to register the phone numbers that best meet their expectations for inbound calls at www.siter.com.

By downloading the Siter application for FREE to a smartphone, users will be able to enter a domain name— words rather than numbers— to call any company or organization anywhere in the world as long as the entity has a domain name.

Some of the advantages for Companies using Siter are:

Branding

* Siter helps to enhance branding. When a company publishes its domain with Siter, it is promoting its brand. A phone number rarely defines a company’s brand.

No Numbers

* Companies will no longer need to publish an enormous list of telephone numbers in each state or region. With Siter, companies simply publish and promote their domain.

Goodbye 1-800

* Siter replaces a company’s 1-800 numbers with the company’s domain.

About Siter, LLC

Siter, LLC is an international internet and mobile technology company, and the developer and distributor of a new concept for the phone calling process: domain dialing (Patent pending).

*Selected BlackBerry models: Pearl 8100, 8120 and 8220, Curve 8310 and 8520, Bold 9000 and 9700