Mr. Michael Ng, chief executive officer of i-DNS.net International, a software development company from the USA, said the company was cooperating with three Thai Internet Service Providers, KSC Internet, Loxinfo and CS Internet, to be the Thai representatives providing the service of Thai-language domain name registrations.
The system has been tested with i-DNS software, a software developed by the company to provide this service in many languages from THNIC, the organization already responsible for domain names in Thailand. This is one plan in expanding the Asia Pacific market, because there is demand for the use of local languages, which is very complex.
In the first three months after this launch (until this March), the company will give the registration service for free. After that in the next month, the customer will pay a service fee of US$30-35 per year, which the company will share 50% with the ISP doing the marketing.
The company has invested US$10 million to set itself up and provide the service of domain name registration worldwide, both in English and another 36 local languages, including Thai. The service has been open for six weeks and there are already over 100,000 names. Over the next 2-3 weeks, there will be about 30,000 web-sites to open the real service.
As for internationalized domain name system (i-DNS) technology, this is a technology developed by this company for use with domain name registration systems which enable a web-site to be named in over 36 local languages besides English, such as Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian languages, Arabic, French and German. The software can also be used with generally used Internet browsers.
Besides this, the company's services have been developed to an international working standard. Users can change information and have as many sub domains as they like at no extra charge.
Mr. Viriya Upatising, vice president in research and development at Loxley Information Services Co., Ltd, said that at present, Thailand had about 5,000 Web-sites, which increased over 1999 by about 1,000. The company expects to have about 3,000 web-sites which will register domain names with i-DNS technology.
-- Translated Article