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

VeriSign reports seven per cent increase in registrations

Over 196 million new domains were created in the second quarter of 2010, according to the latest figures from VeriSign.

The web registry said that registrations of new domains rose seven per cent compared to the same period last year, and two per cent on the first quarter of 2010.

VeriSign reported that users logged an average of 62.5 billion DNS queries each day, reaching a high point of 83.6 billion. The daily average was up 28 per cent over the 2009 quarter.

Outside the .com and .net domains, Germany’s .de was the most popular for new sites. Second on the list was the UK’s .uk, followed by China’s .cn, The Netherlands’ .nl and the European Union’s .eu.

VeriSign also posted the results of a report commissioned by the company on the use of the DNSSec security protocol.

The study, conducted by Forrester Research, found that only 43 per cent of businesses had heard of DNSSec.

Some 88 per cent of those that had heard of the protocol plan to budget, or have already budgeted, for DNS security measures, while 51 per cent reported being targeted by attacks on DNS servers.

“With so many factors pointing to the need for widespread DNSSec adoption, one of the greatest obstacles lies in building awareness of the technology and its value among the internet community as a whole,” said Ken Silva, senior vice president and chief technology officer at VeriSign.

“The path toward global deployment is a long one but, with the implementation of DNSSec at the root, and the growing call for DNS security measures at companies and organisations, the community has taken a significant first step.”

Source : http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2270174/domains-top-196-million