One of our primary goals with the Tucows Email Service is to be competitive with the best email services, and to be the best wholesale offering available for service providers.

Just like we do with all of our services, it comes to you as a “white label” service, with no Tucows branding anywhere. This past month we’ve been working on making the webmail interface much more extensible so you can brand it and make it even more like your own.

Here are some highlights of what we’re prepping for release:

• Single sign-on - do your users log into a portal? Do you want them to automatically access the email service without logging in twice? You can do that now with the single sign on feature inside the Tucows Email Service. By passing a token, you can authenticate as that user, without having to know their password. That means seamless logins from your portal and an improved user experience for your customers.
• We’re making the branding tool more flexible - if you put in a logo bigger than our “webmail” logo, it will automatically expand to the size of your logo. The front login page will pick up the logo from webmail, along with your background colour. You can also add your own support links, and customize the window title bar.
• Support for ads - some of our resellers like to have ads in their webmail, or they want to totally overhaul the header and footer of the webmail. In order to meet everyone’s needs, we’re making it very flexible. The header and footer will support images, and iframes hosted on another server (including target urls). We’re also adding the ability to have an ad in the bottom left-hand corner of webmail.

There are a number of other changes that are outlined in the release notes, including usability enhancements, and more. Updated documentation is available as well.

The email team is excited to get this release out. The UI changes to webmail and single sign-on is already in our Test Environment, and the branding enhancements will be promoted to both Test and to Live on March 4th. Existing brands won’t be affected by the update.

Stay tuned - there’s more to come including more branding, more flexibility for service providers and more features for end users!

If you haven’t checked out our webmail yet, try it out! We can provision you a demo account — all you need to do is fill out a quick form here and we’ll set you up.

As mentioned last week, Tucows was proud to sponsor PodCamp Toronto 2008 which took place over the weekend. A few hundred people attended the two-day event, taking in a multitude of sessions ranging from learning how to embed your podcast into Facebook to how to get stuff free from PR people. It was an international event with attendees from both sides of the Canada-U.S. border. Participants who couldn’t make it to Toronto could take in the event via streaming video wherever they were.

It was a great opportunity to hang out with people who are exploring and innovating on the leading edges of multimedia and the Internet. There was a good mix of experience levels - from teens with their own successful audio podcasts, to mainstream media types like Mathew Ingram who writes about technology for Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail.

On Saturday, I had the pleasure to talk to a room full of people about how we’re exploring some different ways to better communicate with our customers here at Tucows. It was a good chance to both share what we’ve learned over the past year or so, and also to learn from others.

Part of my presentation dealt with how we’re in a learning mode with many of these techniques. We’re trying lots of new things these days, from screencasts to webinars, to audio and video podcasts. The goal is to help get the information you need out to you in the most useful ways.

We’d love to hear your comments and suggestions about what is and what isn’t working. After all, if what we’re doing isn’t working for you, then we need to look at something different and better. Drop us a line in the comments or you can get me via email at jkoole [at] tucows.com

PodCamp Toronto 2008 happens this weekend and Tucows is a proud sponsor of the event. PodCamp got its start in Boston in September of 2006, and since then the event has spread to other cities including Toronto.

This year marks the second year for PodCamp Toronto and the first year for Tucows as a sponsor. PodCamp is a 100% volunteer organized and sponsor supported event where people can get together and learn more about audio and video podcasting, new media and more.

It’s a great example of people helping people figure out ways to make the Internet better and more useful. That meshes nicely with our own mission statement at Tucows.

On a personal level, I’m attending PodCamp both as a presenter and even more because it provides a wonderful opportunity to learn from others, and pick up some new and better ways to communicate with our Resellers.

If you’re in Toronto, PodCamp is worth checking out, and is totally free. More information can be found at the PodCamp Toronto wiki or the PodCamp Toronto blog.

This morning Tucows released some information about our domain portfolio. The highlights are:

• 150,000 domains in the portfolio as of Feburary 14th, 2008
• Over 1,000 “Gems,” or domain names Tucows considers to have the highest potential value in the portfolio
• 39,000 Surnames that form the basis of our Personal Names Service
• 22,000 Brandable Names and 88,000 Direct Navigation Names

You’ll find much more detail in the news release, including a select listing of some of those “Gem” domain names.

As a company that powers the services of many large web hosting and ISPs, we are acutely aware of how competitive these areas can be. In fact, one of the most frequently asked questions I receive from our customers is, “how do I make my company stand out?” Historically, the answer has largely been price, service and marketing. While these factors will always be important, I’m extremely excited to introduce a new service that will give Tucows resellers another competitive edge.

It’s our Personal Names Service and it’s all about giving people the chance to own their own name.

In 2006, we purchased a Colorado-based company named NetIdentity, which has an extremely successful service offering email and web addresses based on some of the most popular surnames in the world. These names include Smith, Johnson, Brown, Chavez and nearly 40,000 other names. All told, about 66 percent of the population of the United States will find a match for their name in the portfolio.

Today, I’m extremely excited to introduce a wholesale version based on this model, which we’re calling our Personal Names Service. This service lets our resellers offer email and web addresses based on our extensive portfolio of surnames. Each name purchased includes:

• An email account, powered by the Tucows Email Service, which includes our easy-to-use AJAX webmail, forwarding and anti-spam/anti-virus.
• A-Record and CNAME control, allowing users to host these domains wherever they like.
• Management for both email and DNS within OpenSRS, our domain name management platform.

Our Resellers are free to offer this service as an extension of their existing offerings, or even introduce a completely new “identity”-based service. I’d strongly encourage our resellers to look seriously at offering this service for a number of reasons:

• It gels well with the existing offerings.
• It’s available to Tucows Resellers only, giving them an advantage over many of their competitors.
• With close to 40,000 popular surnames in our database, the majority of their customer’s names will be available.
• It taps into the very real desire for high-quality domain names as consumers seek to secure a personal digital identity.
• It’s extremely affordable.

This is a great opportunity to get on board with a trend that will gain huge popularity in 2008. If you’re a Tucows reseller, be sure to check out the service. And if you’re not a Tucows reseller, sign up today!

The spring T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Conference is getting underway in Las Vegas today. Bill Sweetman, General Manager, Domains Portfolio for Tucows is taking in the show. As he did with DOMAINfest, Bill will be providing news and notes over the course of the four-day event.

The speakers list for T.R.A.F.F.I.C. reads like a who’s who of the domains industry including Kevin Ham, who Business 2.0 called “The Man Who Owns the Internet.”

For those in attendance, a reminder that Bill Sweetman will be part of a panel discussion taking place on Wednesday, February 20th, at 11:00 A.M. From the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. website:

Also of note are the domain auctions taking place throughout the week. Once again, Tucows is participating in the auctions with a total of five names up for auction this week including both the Live Auction on February 20th, and the Online Extended Auction.

Check back throughout the week for updates from T.R.A.F.F.I.C.

Thanks to the Provincial Government in Ontario, Canada, we’re celebrating the first ever Family Day this year. It’s a new holiday that falls on the third Monday of February and we’re all encouraged to spend time relaxing with family.

Here’s a list of departments along with any special holiday hours for Monday, February 18th, 2008:

The Internet co-operated this morning and I was able to get a Skype call going between Toronto and New Delhi, India where Adam Eisner, our Product Manager, Domains, has been participating in the 31st ICANN General Meeting. Adam and I had a brief chat about what’s been going on at the meeting this week including a bit about the experience of being in New Delhi.

Adam has promised a more extensive report on what happened at ICANN once he gets back. Expect that sometime next week.

To listen, either use the embedded player, or you can download an MP3 version.

Click the play button to listen.

Tuesday was “Constituency Day”, when ICANN’s supporting organizations (like the Registrar Constituency and the Registry Constituency) each meet individually to discuss important policy developments and determine Constituency positions on key issues. As a member of the Registrar Constituency, Tucows was represented by myself and Elliot Noss, our President and CEO. We spent the day discussing a wide range of issues with our fellow Registrars, including topics like domain name tasting and domain transfers. The Constituency also met with key members of ICANN to discuss recent developments in areas like budgets and compliance.

Today was what I like to call “meeting day” — now that I’m registered, settled in, and with the all-day Registrar Constituency meeting overwith, it was time to meet with some of our suppliers. These days can get quite busy, as we offer Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) and Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) from many different suppliers. This can lead to a lot of meetings! In most of these meetings we discuss the newest developments at Tucows, learn about new products and services at each Registry, and try to get a good feel for where each product, as well as the market in general, is headed. While a litany of meetings may sound boring, they’re actually a great opportunity to gather data which will have an important impact on product and marketing strategies.

There are more meetings in store tomorrow, as well as some interesting ICANN sessions. I’m particularly interested in attending a session on the changing gTLD environment, which will cover important topics like the evolving Registrar-Registry relationship structure, Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), and new gTLDs set to enter the market in the next couple of years.

As a reminder, even if you aren’t in New Delhi for ICANN, you can still take part in the Meeting thanks to online streaming of many of the sessions. Check the full schedule for links to sessions and webcasts.

Just a few weeks back we wrote about the sale of the domain name ireport.com to CNN which netted an impressive $750,000US for domainer Rick Schwartz. This week we have the reason why CNN was willing to pay big money for the name - they plan to launch iReport.com shortly as an online destination for user-generated news.

It speaks to the value of the brandable domain name — a domain that will stick in the heads of users and doesn’t necessarily reflect the purpose of the site it anchors. Think Flickr.com, Gizmodo.com and BoingBoing.net as opposed to onlinephotos.com, gadgets.com and quirkystories.net. iReport probably had little value in terms of direct navigation, but as a brand, it’s a clear winner for CNN.

MediaWeek reports that CNN uses only about ten percent of the user-generated iReport content it receives. Those reports include everything from test, to photos and video of breaking news as it happens. iReport.com will provide a home for all that content (and, presumably, ads to go along with it).

There’s no word yet on just when iReport.com will launch and the site currently shows a simple “under construction” notice.