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By: Ben Lucier on December 19th, 2010
Posted in: General
Tags: Copyright, Creative Commons
Comments: 0

Last week Creative Commons celebrated its 10th birthday. To help celebrate, Tucows issued a challenge to Creative Commons donors: do what you can to donate to the Creative Commons cause, and we’ll match contributions up to a total of $10,000.

At Tucows, we strongly believe that openness drives innovation.

For those of you not familiar with the kind of work being done at Creative Commons, they are a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. They provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

Thinking about licensing in a way that promotes discovery and sharing goes against the grain of some organizations, but not here at Tucows and OpenSRS.

For most of us, the desire to share is almost instinctual– A default switch, set to on.

Our entire business has been built on leveraging open technologies wherever possible. This was true back in the early days as a shareware software mirror, and continues today as one of the world’s largest wholesale domain name registrars, under the OpenSRS brand.

“We support Creative Commons because all of our business philosophy is based on the open Internet. For the Internet to really flourish and remain an open, healthy, and great platform for innovation, we need to adapt old sets of rules to new paradigms. Creative Commons is one of the first and best examples of that.”  -Elliot Noss, Tucows President and CEO

It didn’t take long for donors to step up to the challenge. Just two days later, on Dec 17, Creative Commons, on the CC blog, Allison Domicone wrote they had reached $10,000 in donations. With Tucows contribution, this brought the total donation to $20,000.

Here’s wishing a happy 10th birthday to Creative Commons and the awesome work being done by its staff!

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By: Ben Lucier on December 17th, 2010
Posted in: Announcements, Events
Tags:
Comments: 0

Happy Holidays from the OpenSRS team!

Most of our offices will be closed from the afternoon of December 24, 2010 through to January 3, 2010. We’ll be back in the offices on January 4 ready to serve you in the new year. As always our dedicated team of Technical Support reps continues to be available 24/7 to assist you.

Here are the hours by department:

Please note that during this closure, there will be:

• No orders or requests processed for the following TLD’s: (.at, .fr, .ch, .li, .it, .dk, .mx)

Happy Holidays to you, your colleagues and your families during this holiday season and the new year!

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By: James Koole on December 16th, 2010
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags: goMobi, Publishing Service
Comments: 0

dotMobi has updated the goMobi mobile website publishing service to version 1.2. In this release you’ll find some new localization and translation options, along with a new event calendar feature and the ability to remove the goMobi branding at the bottom of the goMobi website (something a few people had requested).

We’ve put together a page that takes you through the new stuff, and shows you how to enable it on a goMobi site if you want to check it out.

Try it out for Free!

Remember that goMobi subscriptions are free for the first month–if you haven’t yet given goMobi a try, then take some time over the next couple of weeks to see what it’s all about. You can view a short screencast showing how to get your own goMobi site up and running for free.

Marketing Resources in More Languages!

And for those resellers looking for marketing materials in languages other than English, we now also have a full range of materials and resources available in Spanish, French, German and Brazilian Portuguese. All are available in the goMobi section of the OpenSRS Marketing Resource section of the Resource Center.

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By: Dave Woroch on December 14th, 2010
Posted in: General
Tags: reseller-friendly
Comments: 1

I’ve written several posts over the past few months about the reseller-friendly choices we’ve made in our products, our pricing and our policies.

ccTLDs provides another great example.

There are a few approaches that a registrar could be tempted to take on ccTLDs…

You could essentially avoid them. Offering a wide selection of ccTLDs means integrating with a wildly diverse set of registries around the world. They speak different languages and code in different languages. They have different legal constraints and policies. A registrar could satisfy a reasonable percent of the market by offering gTLDs and a few of the simplest ccTLDs and calling it a day.

You could seek to differentiate yourself by offering every ccTLD in the world. Build an awesome list of “trophy TLDs”. Spend months integrating with registries that have a few hundred domain names under management, potentially sacrificing your core services along the way. Hang a bunch of international flags around the office.

You could embrace ccTLDs as an opportunity to pump up your profit margin. The industry tends to compare registrars by gTLD prices. The registry fees on gTLDs are well known. A registrar could bring in resellers by reducing gTLD prices and then make up for it on the ccTLDs.

Needless to say, OpenSRS has a chosen a different path.

We survey our resellers regularly and watch the global trends closely to determine which ccTLDs could help our resellers grow their businesses. That criteria has shaped our current list of 23 ccTLDs, including 11 out of the top 15. It inspired us to add .au in September and is driving us to consider some exciting possible additions in 2011.

We maintain a high standard of reliability and usability across all our products. So, we do not add a ccTLD if we don’t think it offers the sort of experience our resellers expect and deserve. And we weigh seriously whether launching new ccTLDs (or any new products, for that matter) will in any way compromise our maintenance and support on existing products.

And, as the chart indicates, we offer competitive prices, allowing our resellers plenty of room for their own margin. (In fact, this chart would look even better if we brought our .uk price down a bit. So we’re working on that.)

A product offering shaped by reseller demand, focused on reseller satisfaction and priced for reseller profit.

That’s our reseller friendly approach to ccTLDs.

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By: James Koole on December 14th, 2010
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags: .IT, ccTLD, Domain Service
Comments: 1

In late January 2011, we will be transitioning .IT domain registration services in OpenSRS to the Extensible Provisioning Platform (EPP) that the .IT Registry provides. Once that transition is complete, .IT domain registrations will be fully automated in OpenSRS and completed in real-time. No more manual processing or signed documentation will be required.

As a result of the switch to EPP, there will be some changes to how you register and manage names in the Reseller Web Interface, and also via the API. We’ll have more information about any required changes to existing API implementations early in the new year.

In the meantime, there are no changes required and .IT registrations and management will continue to work as expected.