GPM Group

100Mb and 300 Mb Broadband from BT launching in the UK

gpmgroup — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:35:45 +0000

BT Openreach is looking for around 1000 buildings to take part in a pilot scheme to deliver the company’s fastest available broadband speeds to apartments within their building.

Participants will gain access to Openreach’s Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) technology which delivers super-fast broadband speeds. End users will initially have access to downstream speeds of up to 100Mb/s but these will rise to give users the option of up to 300Mb/s in the spring of this year (2012), the fastest commercially available download and upload speeds in the UK for residential connections.

Building owners can register their interest here and
users can register their interest here.

More details can be found in the BT press release.

5th Annual .INFO Awards – Chance to Vote

gpmgroup — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:13:33 +0000

There are some excellent sites in the final for the 2011 awards. For example one of the finalists in this years .info awards trafalgarsquare.info has a crazy video which has vienna.info advertised throughout.

The 10 finalists for the 2011 .Info awards have just been posted for public voting. (Voting open until next Tuesday (Dec, 13)

www.docma.info
www.frauenundhiv.info (“Women and HIV”)
www.hotel.info
www.mailworx.info
www.opentype.info
www.solicitor.info
www.trafalgarsquare.info
www.typografie.info
www.visitwhitemountains.info
www.wien.info (“Vienna)

Voting at www.info-award.info/
Press release can be found here www.info-award.info/node/951

5th Annual .INFO Awards

gpmgroup — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 12:20:08 +0000

Afilias is holding its 5th annual INFO Awards program, where .INFO domain owners can submit their great site for the chance to be named the Best .INFO website of 2011!

http://info-award.info/about

Submission deadline November 24, 2011

A panel of experts with experience in the fields of website design and media will review submitted sites and determine a shortlist of the ten best .INFO websites, based on the following criteria:

• Presentation of content
• Functionality of the site
• Design
• Usability
• Originality

Chinese IDN versions of .info TLD announced by Afilias

gpmgroup — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 12:47:46 +0000

Afilias has annouced plans for a Chinese IDN equivalent of the .info domain.

Ram Mohan, Executive Vice President and CTO, Afilias said “Given the global presence of Afilias, Internationalized Domain Names — informally known as IDNs — have always been of great interest to us. We were the first company to launch IDN email, and believe that having IDN equivalents of .INFO for the world’s most populated country, in its primary languages, will be a major benefit to all Internet users in China,”

Afilias press release

New gTLDs and Branding Strategy

gpmgroup — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:58:30 +0000

Interbrand have just released an interesting guide on domains and branding strategy. In 8 pages it covers a lot of ground; well worth the read if you have moment to spare. What’s in a domain? (Pdf)

US Internet ads reach $15,000,000,000 in first half of 2011

gpmgroup — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 20:02:40 +0000

Interactive Advertising Bureau and Pricewaterhouse Coopers are reporting Internet ad revenues rose 23.2 percent—to a record $14.9 billion in the first half of 2011. The rate of growth more than doubled year on year, as 2010′s first-half year ad revenues of $12.1 billion had represented an 11.3 percent increase over 2009.

The IAB report shows the incredible growth in internet advertising since 1996 together with a table which breaks out where the 2011 ad spend is concentrated.

Internet Ad spend since 1996

HY 11 … $14,941,000,000
HY 10 … $12,127,000,000
HY 09 … $10,900,000,000
HY 08 … $11,510,000,000
HY 07 … $9,993,000,000
HY 06 … $7,909,000,000
HY 05 … $5,787,000,000
HY 04 … $4,599,000,000
HY 03 … $3,292,000,000
HY 02 … $2,978,000,000
HY 01 … $3,720,000,000
HY 00 … $4,013,000,000
HY 99 … $1,627,000,000
HY 98 … $774,000,000
HY 97 … $344,000,000
HY 96 … $82,000,000

2011 Internet Ad spend by category

Search 49%
Banner ads 23%
Classifieds 8%
Digital Video 6%
Rich Media 5%
Referrals/ Lead Generation 5%
Sponsorship 3%
Email 1%

UK Internet space in 2011

gpmgroup — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:54:55 +0000

The UK Government’s Office for National Statistics has just released their Internet Access – Households and Individuals, 2011 report (.pdf)

Key findings:

77 per cent of households now have Internet access

45 per cent of Internet users used a mobile phone to connect to the Internet

6 million people accessed the Internet over their mobile phone for the first time in the last year

The use of wireless hotspots almost doubled in the last 12 months to 4.9 million users

.co domains : Namespace Analysis

gpmgroup — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 14:44:13 +0000

HosterStats.com has investigated how domains are used within the .co name space. .co domains are interesting because .co is the country code for Colombia, and has traditionally been structured in the same way as the United Kingdom’s is structured with a defined group of second level domains allowing people to register a third level domains.

In Colombia
.com.co .org.co edu.co gov.co net.co mil.co and nom.co (private persons)

In the UK
.co.uk .org.uk .ac.uk .sch.uk .gov.uk .net.uk .mod.uk .nic.uk .nhs.uk
.ltd.uk .plc.uk .parliament.uk .police.uk and .me.uk (private persons)

A year ago the .co registry was persuaded to allow the second level to be opened up for open registrations anyname.co aimed primarily at the international market. HosterStats has analysed how these new domains are being used a year after launch.

The uses vary from company names like www.google.co who use it to redirect to other sites rather than a Columbian search engine which can be found at the www.google.com.co, to PPC pages, to holding pages, to non resolving sites etc.

PPC Parked pages 48.5%
Holding pages 13.8%
Active Use 12.9%
Redirects to domains in other TLDs 8.2% (Exact match 3.5%)
Redirects to other .co domains 2.8%
Brand Protection 2%
Forbidden/ Not found 1.4%
For Sale 1.1%
Expired 0.7%
Registry reserved premium domains 0.7%

The British Library and Google to make 250,000 books available online

gpmgroup — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 10:26:25 +0000

Google has announced a partnership with the British Library to digitise 250,000 out of copyright books dating from 1700 – 1780 from the Library’s collection.

Once digitised, these unique books will be available for full text search, download and reading through Google Books, as well as being searchable through the Library’s website and stored in perpetuity within the Library’s digital archive. It is also planned to make the works available via Europeana, the European Digital Library.

Researchers, students and other users of the Library will be able to view historical items from anywhere in the world as well as copy, share and manipulate text for non-commercial purposes.

Recently, the Library announced a partnership with brightsolid to digitise up to 40 million pages of its newspaper collections and previously the Library partnered with Microsoft to digitise 65,000 19th century books, some of which are now available as an App on Apple’s iPad.

Datacenter.com sold for $352,000 at Sedo Great Domains Auction

gpmgroup — Thu, 26 May 2011 18:35:47 +0000

Datacenter.com has just sold at Sedo’s Great Domains Auction for $252,000. (The reserve price range was $25,000 – $49,999).

Bidding in the last 5 minutes of an auction at Sedo automatically extends the auction and this resulted in the auction ending 1 hour and 37 minutes after the scheduled 12:00 EST end time.