Canadian Small and Medium Business get a leg up from Google

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Canadian Small and Medium Business get a leg up from Google Posted: 30 Mar 2011 02:48 PM PDT Yesterday, small and medium size businesses (SMBs) in Canada got a gift from Google to jump start their business presence online. Hosted by Kevin O’Leary of Dragon’s Den at the historical Fermenting Cellar, in the Distillery district in Toronto, Canada, SMBs can now get a website & .CA domain for free as part of the “Canada Get your Business online” (GYBO) initiative. Partnering with Yola inc., CIRA, The Globe and Mail, Rogers, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and Silver Lining Ltd, Google wants to shrink the gap between SMBs lack of online presence and their customers who are using the internet to find them. “Over the next year, we hope to help 100,000 Canadian businesses build websites and reach customers online” says Chris O’Neill, Managing Director Google Canada. According to Google, there are over 2 million SMBs in Canada, and close to half have no presence online. These rock stars of the Canadian economy need the help to be where their customers are looking for them and this initiative gets them one step closer. As someone who has been in online marketing for over 11 years, I am extremely excited to see the GYBO.ca program launched. SMBs struggle with lack of time, resources, amongst other challenges of starting a business and this initiative helps them conquer one important challenge, and that is an online web presence, with a price tag of FREE. We work with many SMBs, as our resellers do, and can relate to the challenges, so having a program that is focused on helping SMBs is fantastic. Congratulations to Google, Yola, CIRA and the other partners who are giving small and medium businesses in Canada a leg up! Also, a special Thank you to Rogers for drawing my name to win a Blackberry Torch! If you’d like more information, go to www.gybo.ca

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Announcing Comodo and Trustwave SSL products, plus Lower Pricing on GeoTrust and thawte

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Announcing Comodo and Trustwave SSL products, plus Lower Pricing on GeoTrust and thawte Posted: 16 Mar 2011 05:59 AM PDT Today we're announcing a number of changes to the OpenSRS Trust Service to make it easier for you to sell SSL and trust products to your customers. Here's a portion of the official news release: TORONTO, Mar. 16 – Tucows Inc. (NYSE AMEX:TCX) (TSX:TC), a global provider of domain names, email and other Internet services, announced today that its wholesale Internet services division, OpenSRS, has added Comodo® and Trustwave® Internet security products to the OpenSRS Trust Service. The addition of these two brands further extends and enhances the choice in trust and security products available to its over 11,000 resellers worldwide. Along with adding new providers, OpenSRS also announced lower wholesale pricing on a number of GeoTrust® and thawte® brand SSL Digital Certificates. This cost decrease allows OpenSRS Resellers to better compete on price in an evolving market for online security and trust. Read the full release… In short, here's what we're doing today: New Vendors – Comodo and Trustwave! Starting today, we now offer SSL products from two new vendors – Comodo and Trustwave – bringing you and your customers much more choice in SSL products. Adding these two vendors alongside our existing products from VeriSign, GeoTrust and thawte means there are now well over 20 different SSL products available across five vendors and at different feature and price points– all available to you through your single OpenSRS account. Lower Pricing on some GeoTrust and thawte SSL Products We're also announcing new lower pricing on some SSL products from GeoTrust and thawte. This better pricing will help you out in what is becoming an increasingly competitive market for trust and SSL. Price charts on OpenSRS.com have been updated with the new, lower pricing, where indicated. More Information We've updated our Trust Service webpages with all the new information including updated product grids for all five brands. You'll also find marketing materials including logos and other information for our new vendors, Comodo and Trustwave, along with existing materials for VeriSign, GeoTrust and thawte. As mentioned, everything is already live in your OpenSRS Reseller account. Just log in to the Reseller Web Interface, then look for the Trust Manager link. Documentation has also been updated to reflect the addition of the new vendors and products.

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New Control Panels Sneak Preview

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New Control Panels Sneak Preview Posted: 10 Mar 2011 11:25 AM PST Be careful! This is no ordinary blog post. You’re going to need some headphones with the volume turned way up and you’re going to want to be sitting down before you look at what we have to show you. This is a post about our control panels. People say they’re ugly. This hurt our feelings at first, until we realized that over the past ten years, we’ve added more and more functionality to the control panels, without giving much thought around around how our resellers use them. Sure, they’re powerful and since we cater to wholesale customers, they have a lot of functionality around the management of bulk domains. But feedback from newer resellers was the learning curve to the system was especially high. We also learned through our reseller satisfaction surveys, that the design of our current control panels have been the majority of the complaints. So that’s what we’ve been working on. These quick video intros and previews are snapshots from our current development environment. That means some things might look different once the control panels are officially released. But we’re coming down the home stretch now and we just couldn’t wait to show them to you. We believe these control panels, once released will go a long way in helping our resellers streamline how they register, renew, transfer, and manage their customers’ domain names and I couldn’t be happier to share them with you today. Introducing… your new Domain control panel:

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International Pi Day Celebration: No Squares Allowed! plus 1 more

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International Pi Day Celebration: No Squares Allowed! Posted: 08 Mar 2011 10:00 PM PST Just a reminder folks that March 14th is fast approaching. Do you have plans to celebrate? We’re not talking about Einstein’s birthday (although I bet he’d be happy to know you remembered). We’re talking about International Pi Day, which happens every March 14 (3.14, get it?) Pi Day has been celebrated by math enthusiasts and other geeks all over the world since 1988. For the past few since we’ve been celebrating International Pi Day at OpenSRS, staffers, realizing the date is near will begin to salivate in what some experts have told us is a typical pavlovian response in reaction to the knowledge that a delivery of delicious pies will soon arrive to aid in the celebration! This year Pi Day falls on Monday and as we gear up for the festivities, we wanted to ask you what plans you have to celebrate. If you’ve been a little pre-occupied, then this post can serve as an important reminder, because everybody likes pie! If you’re having trouble thinking about how best to celebrate Pi Day, may we suggest a quick visit to your friendly neighbourhood app store for some reasonably priced Pi apps that might help put you in the Pi celebration mood? And if the mood still doesn’t strike (or if you’re using a Blackberry), give walking in circles a try. It worked for us! Here’s wishing you  a safe and Happy Pi Day! iPhone and iPad Pi apps Pi App: Unleash your inner nerd by testing how many digits of Pi you know! Pi Cubed: Pi Cubed is a visual math application designed for a touch-based interface. Pi Cubed lets you construct, typeset, and instantly evaluate mathematical expressions using an interactive menu system. Pi Search HD: Quickly and easily look for phone numbers, birthdays, lottery numbers, names and more, in the infinite numbers of Pi. piClock: piClock scrolls through a ribbon of digits from the number pi to find the current time and date. Pi Apps for Android SpeedPi: How fast is your Android? Find out now using Speed Pi! Pi (3.14159…): How many digits of Pi can you memorize? Pimorize Pi Memorizer: Test your ability to remember the digits of Pi. Helps memorizing pi. Also shows days remaining until PI Day. Pi Trainer: Learn pi or test your memory with Pi Trainer by piday.org. Pi Trainer is a simple game produced by piday.org as a tool to spread the knowledge of Pi. Pi Apps for Blackberry Sadly, we couldn’t find any Pi apps for the Blackberry. The app store also told us we should be running Windows to properly use the store. Not sure what that’s about. Sorry Blackberry fans, we tried! More Pi Resources Wikipedia entry for Pi Day. The official Pi Day website at piday.org. Pi Day photos on Flickr.

.TV Marketing and Promotional Videos for Resellers Posted: 08 Mar 2011 12:50 PM PST Did you know that we have a series of excellent promotional videos for you that will help you explain the value of .TV domains to your customers? We worked closely with VeriSign, the .TV domain registry operator, to create these great videos that explain why .TV domains are the best choice for hosting video content online. They're available to download and use for all OpenSRS Resellers. Six Videos in All There are six videos all together, including four interview-style videos with some interesting people who are using their .TV domains to do some really innovative things with web video. The other two videos in the series are tutorials – the first helps explain the unique value of .TV domains in identifying sites with video content, while the second provides some great tips and techniques for your customers to consider so they can put their .TV domains to good use. As you'd expect, these are unbranded, white-label videos that are ready to be used in your marketing efforts around .TV domains. Visit the Marketing section of the Resource Center to see what's available and download the full set. Look for the .TV Marketing Videos section. Here’s a sample video to give you a sense of the content you’ll find: Get .TV Domains at a Great Price Keep in mind that we also have a .TV domain pricing promo going on right now. Last year we lowered the cost for new .TV domains to $19.00/year through the end of May, 2011 (regular price is $35/year, and that discount is paid through a monthly rebate). But in addition to that promotion, we also rolled out an opt-in promo that allows you to save even more. Sign up and do some promotion around .TV domains – and these videos are a perfect way to do just that – and you'll get new .TV domain registrations for just $12/year! Click here for full terms and conditions and to signup for this promo.

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Domains Industry News Round-up

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Domains Industry News Round-up Posted: 08 Mar 2011 05:41 AM PST It has been a busy start to the year across the domain name industry. A couple of registries have already reached significant milestones this year, and the industry as a whole continues to grow at a steady rate. .COM.AU and .ORG Hit Milestones On the ccTLD-front, AusRegistry reported that they reached two million .com.au domains under management this week. There are some pretty tight rules surrounding the registration of .com.au domain names, so the figure represents an impressive milestone for Australia. Given it's relatively small population, it's clear that Australians see value in .com.au domain names and that the extension provides a sense of trust for both those using .com.au domains and also for Internet users in the country. Public Interest Registry (PIR) who operate the .org registry also hit a milestone, announcing recently that they had surpassed nine million domains under management. They also noted that growth in 2010 was 10.3% for the extension. The .org domain has added more than five million domains since 2005 and is the third largest generic top-level domain (gTLD) in the world. VeriSign Domain Industry Brief February also saw the release of the latest issue of the VeriSign Domain Industry Brief. This quarterly report looks at all sectors of the domain world and identifies interesting trends and stats in gTLDs and ccTLDs, and provides a good evaluation of the health of the industry as a whole. The latest brief showed continued growth in domains under management with 205.3 million domain registrations across all TLDs. That's a year-over-year growth rate of about 6.3%. In ccTLDs, a total of 80.1 million domains are registered representing a year-over-year growth rate of 0.3%. Its important to note that growth in ccTLDs was affected by a contraction in the number of .cn domains under management as a result of significant restrictions placed on new and current .cn registrations by the Chinese government. Strong growth seen in .org and across a number of ccTLDs Of the 205.3 million total domains registered, 105.2 million are .com or .net, showing that those two gTLD extensions still command some impressive numbers despite the rise in ccTLDs over the past few years. On the ccTLD side, .de leads the way, outpacing even .net to stand as the second largest registry in the world. Second amongst ccTLDs is .uk, followed by .cn and then .nl, .eu and .ru. Growth wise, a number of larger ccTLDs experienced better than industry-average growth this year, including Poland (.pl), Australia (.au), Canada (.ca) and Switzerland (.ch). How to Take Advantage While these numbers and reports make for some interesting reading, it's also important to note that they can be a great help in identifying potential growth markets, and in evaluating your own businesses. ccTLDs with above average growth rates are often indicative of countries where the Internet industry as a whole is seeing expansion. You don't have to look far to see opportunities in places like Poland, or in Central America and Mexico in particular. Currently the top 10 ccTLDs represent 61% of all ccTLDs registered, but as countries and economies emerge, expect to see that number drop as the Internet penetrates new, growing markets. To evaluate your own business, look at industry renewal and growth rates. Renewal rates for .com and .net rose slightly to about 73% in Q4, 2010. Is that in line with what you see in your business? Keep in mind that your rates should probably exceed that as the renewal rates for domains "in use" or attached to hosting tend to be higher than the overall average. All in all, it has been another good year for the industry as a whole. Based on early news from registries like .au and .org, 2011 is looking solid as well.

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