IT News - Tamil Net domain names with i-DNS
BUSINESS LINE/Silicon India
Tuesday, February 08, 2000
CHENNAI - I-DNS.NET International Pte Ltd, the Singapore-based company specialising in multilingual Internet domain names, has introduced the technology to register domain names in Tamil. It has so far introduced this for about 30 languages including Chinese and Arabic.
According to company officials, it has so far registered about 1,400 domain names in Tamil and will activate them from March 1. The technology is the result of over two years of research at the National University of Singapore conducted under the auspices of the Asia Pacific Networking Group.
The company planned to introduce the registration of domain names in other Indian languages including Telugu, Kannada and Hindi, for which it would hold discussions with both State and central government officials. It was able to launch the Tamil domain name facility first because the Tamil Nadu Government had standardised the encoding and the font, Mr. S. Maniam, Business Development, and Dr. S. Subbiah, Director, i-DNS, told a press conference here on Saturday.
i-DNS, which is headquartered in the US, planned to provide language support in all major languages. It had servers in the US, the UK, India, Australia, Korea, China, Japan and Singapore. It had secured a (USDollar) 4-million assistance from General Atlantic Partners, a major investor in the software business. i- DNS would work in partnership with global connectivity providers like AboveNET and PSINet.
Dr. Subbiah said multilingual domain name capability provided a freedom of choice which was hitherto not available. For registering a domain name in a language other than English, i-DNS would charge an upfront fee of (USDollar) 70 and an annual fee of (USDollar) 35, which was the same as charged for English domain names. The company would share the revenue with its registrars, with the registrars getting anything between 60 and 90 per cent of the amount. |
