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An American with Taiwanese roots, Tsai plans to get into the name game by turning Global Name Registry, a technology infrastructure company in London started by four Norwegians, into a multimillion-dollar global business.
Last November GNR beat dozens of other applicants — including Nokia, Lycos and Novell — in a competition to control one of seven new top-level Internet domains, additions to the ever-popular .com suffix that designates companies.
To create more competition, the U.S. agency icann designed new top-level domains — including .biz and .museum. ICANN also approved GNR’s proposed suffix .name, which will allow individuals to set up personal home pages using their first and last names (for example, jane.doe.name).
Sign-up will go through more than 80 official registrars around the world, such as France Telecom, Britain’s BBOnline and Germany’s CSL Computer Serve. The registrars can set their own fees but must pay GNR a minimum of $5.75 a year for every individual registered.
Deadline for the first applications for .name is Nov. 22. GNR plans to generate additional revenue by transforming .name addresses into multipurpose digital identities that can also serve as cell phone numbers and even electronic credit cards. Tsai plans to leverage his background in finance and Internet start-ups to help GNR: he previously worked in asset management and in fixed-income trading and at Urbanfetch, the now defunct U.S. Internet convenience store.
The Vision Thing: "We expect to be a key player in the industry by rolling out digital identity services that rely on the domain name system."
Forward Spin: Digital IDs will become a hot area in the next 12 months, and owning the “.name” tag will make GNR a global player. Competitors include Microsoft, which has already collected 16 million personal profiles through its Web-based e-mail service Hotmail.
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