How to convince Telcos about name dialing?

Whenever I speak to technical skilled people about name dialing they get very excited about the idea and start thinking that could become the greatest innovation of telecommunication.
It just takes a few minutes to explain what is the great benefit of .tel domains.

Why it is so complicated to convince the management boards of Apple, Google, AT&T and Vodafone about it?

Any ideas?

TelTalk wrote:Why it is so complicated to convince the management boards of Apple, Google, AT&T and Vodafone about it?

Any ideas?

YES - Lack of "critical mass" - simple as that really !

Assuming 20% of all .tels were populated with phone numbers (probably an overestimate at the moment) I really doubt that Telcos etc would even be slightly interested without at least 1 million populated domains - which would mean 5 million registered domains.

With .tel registrations dropping month on month (see http://www.dottel.net for today's figure) that level of total registrations is clearly not going to happen at all without a dramatic change of strategy.

The best solution, given where we are 3.5 years after .tel's launch, is to take a leaf out of Facebook's successful formula and give .tels away for free (see *) with Telnic making money from advertising and perhaps a premium (ad free) chargeable version.

Advertising brings in billions a year for Facebook from their "free" accounts and this approach has made an incredible number of Facebook staff multi-millionaires and at least one under-30 year old a billionaire !

But do you expect Telnic to make any major changes to their current strategy which has so far not achieved anything like the desired results ?

I don't !

And I would love to be proved wrong !

http://MikeSeaton.tel

* "free" for a minimum of 1 or 2 years, possibly indefinitely depending on ad revenue.

Yes, I have read this argument from Telnic before, but honestly I still don't get it.

Why I need critical mass for a new technology before I start selling it for the purpose it was created for?

.tel as communication interface offers free accessibility to DNS data what can't be found anywhere else!

Shouldn't it be possible to see the potential of name dialing also in case registration numbers of .tel domains are still zero?

Telnic try to reach critical mass by selling .tel as a (mobile) website, but in general .com provides better design for websites than .tel.

On the other hand .tel websites have huge advantages in comparison to .com websites (i. e. the simplicity, the saving of time and the speed of publishing).

But these advantages are very difficult to sell to newbies (which are the targeted customers), because newbies just don't know the differences between .com and .tel.

Therefore newbies tend to buy what everybody else is buying, too - and that is not .tel; it is .com (or .net and so on).

Why Telnic don't sell .tel domains instead as what it is in cooperation with a big partner?

I could imagine some potential Telcos / cell phone manufactures will understand the concept and the scope of it, too - just as many of us did!

But if Telnic still want to continue on the current road, then you are absolutely right with your suggestion that offering free services (time limited) is indispensable.

Otherwise we won't see critical mass but shrinking mass.

TelTalk wrote:But if Telnic still want to continue on the current road, then you are absolutely right with your suggestion that offering free services (time limited) is indispensable.

Otherwise we won't see critical mass but shrinking mass.

And so it continues, 265K a few days ago, today http://www.dottel.net shows a total registrations figure of 263,723

For comparison purposes the figure for 1st January 2012 was 313,359 - a drop of 49,636 this year so far (source http://www.hosterstats.com/DomainNameCounts2012.php) despite the launch of Telnames !

When will the message get through that the current strategy for generating "critical mass" for .tel simply isn't working ?

http://MikeSeaton.tel