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Auckland New Zealand start-up firm Domain
Numbers is betting that mobile phone users will find
it easier to key in numbers than letters when they access
the internet with WAP (wireless application protocol)
handsets. Director Graham Saywell said his company had
spent about $500,000 registering numeric internet domain
names and was now seeking to license them worldwide.
The idea works on a similar principle
to alphanumeric 0800 numbers. For example, instead of
keying in the domain taxi.com as text, users would type
8294.com, which is one of 1200 .com domains belonging
to Domain Numbers. Mr Saywell said the traffic could
then be passed to individual taxi companies who had
licensed the domain in individual mobile phone coverage
cells. "Eventually, it could mean that you'll be
able to get off a plane anywhere in the world and call
a taxi company by entering the same four numbers. "In
around 18 months, when most handsets will include built
in GPS [global positioning system] chips, you won't
even have to talk to the taxi firm because they will
already know where you are." Mr Saywell said he
came up with the idea two years ago when he attended
a conference on the mobile internet.
Domain Numbers has also registered the
numeric equivalents of 100 core generic words as .co.nz,.co.uk..com.au,
.biz and .info domains. At present, users must key in
the suffixes after the first dot as text, but Mr Saywell
said mobile phones would soon offer soft keys which
could be programmed to spell out a suffix with one press.
Mr Saywell believed that some domains, such as 6397.com
(news.com) would be licensed globally. Others would
be licensed in one or more territories only. To demonstrate
the system, Domain Numbers had already set up some numeric
domains which link to working mobile websites. For example,
69437253.com would take people to the Herald's mobile
website. By MICHAEL FOREMAN - 06.11.2001
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