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A startup named Donuts has raised US$100 million in venture capital and has applied for 307 generic top-level domains in the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' open gTLD application process, the company said Tuesday.

Donuts' gTLD applications are for generic, dictionary terms, said Jon Nevett, a cofounder and vice president of corporate affairs at the company. Donuts, based in Bellevue, Washington, will serve as a domain-name registry, a wholesale seller of domain names within the gTLDs it buys, he said.

ICANN launched the new gTLD program in January amid objections that the sale of new domains would cause headaches for trademark owners. The new program will allow new TLDs such as .hotel or .bank, as well as gTLDs in non-Latin characters, in addition to current gTLDs such as .com and .info.

Donuts expects few problems in the process of buying the gTLDs, Nevett said. The company has not applied for gTLDs featuring any trademarked names, he said. If there's more than one legitimate application for a new gTLD, ICANN can hold an auction.

"We'd be increasing the real estate on the Internet," Nevett said. "We think they're good, generic terms that will give consumers more choice and benefits."

The new domains will be targeted toward specific services, he said. Donuts gave an example of .tickets, a gTLD where Web users could expect to go to buy event tickets. "There will be more names geared toward what consumers are looking for," he said.

The new gTLDs would likely go live in 2013, Nevett said.

Donuts' announcement, the largest application made public so far, shows pent-up interest in new gTLDs, said Alexa Raad, CEO of Architelos, a TLD marketing consultancy. "The smart money has already followed some of these opportunities," she said.

Applying for multiple domains may be smart, as it gives Donuts bargaining power in the long process after the ICANN reveals the applications June 13, she said.

As of last Wednesday, ICANN had about 1,900 applications for new gTLDs, and several gTLDs will likely have multiple applications, Raad said. Companies with multiple applications may be able to partner with others that want the same gTLD or make agreements to drop some competing applications, she said.

Original post:
Startup applies for 307 generic top-level domains

BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Donuts Inc., a registry for new top-level domain names, has moved assertively to expand Internet namespace with 307 applications for new and varied generic top-level domains (TLDs) in various character sets. The expansion will bring significant new industry competition and fresh choices for Internet end-users who need better, more specific domain names for their products and services.

The companys efforts are funded by more than $100 million in capital from multi-billion dollar private equity and venture funds. Donuts executives say they intend to deploy capitaland raise additional funding if necessaryto secure and operate each applied-for TLD.

Donuts effort will expand currently constrained namespace

The now-concluded application period for new Internet names follows the Internet communitys six-year, multi-stakeholder effort to expand consumer choice and competition in top-level domain options beyond .COM, .NET and other extensions. The current namespacethe fulcrum of commercial online navigationis badly constrained, and consumers and businesses need new options for Internet identities.

Finding a usable Internet address is a real problem. There are more than 125 million total names in the top five TLDs, with three fourths of them in .COM alone, said Donuts CEO Paul Stahura. The Internet was opened for worldwide use almost 20 years ago, and weve had only 22 generic names made available since then. Were overdue for expansion.

Stahura also anticipates strong competition to the currently dominant .COM extension. This expansion is going to be disruptive in a positive sense. Theres no question competition is coming to .COM and other TLDshow much of the market the new TLDs will take from them is what remains to be seen.

A well-resourced company

Donuts has raised significant capitalmore than $100 millionfrom notable sources, including:

Donuts has further obtained a senior secured revolving credit facility with Comerica Bank, one of the United States premier banking organizations.

Link:
Donuts Launches Domain Namespace Expansion with 307 gTLD Applications, More Than $100 Million in Funding

04-06-2012 19:12 *Play In 720HD* New York-Got Barz #1 6-4-12 Artist: Chris Miles

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Chris Miles - Dial Tone (Got Barz #1) "Jc Dolla Dot Com" - Video

Cisco's ASR 5500 mobile packet core will help make networks more intelligent and allow operators to charge differently for various types of content.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- By 2015, more people will access the Internet from mobile devices than from conventional PCs. A year later, in 2016, 19 billion devices and gizmos will be connected to the mobile Internet -- not just your smartphone and tablet, but your washing machine, cars and clothes will be connected too.

That's a giant problem for wireless carriers, which are already struggling to keep up with surging data demand. Trying to innovate their way out of the crunch, the industry is using new tools and tricks to optimize every bit of infrastructure.

Cisco (CSCO, Fortune 500) added a key piece to the puzzle on Tuesday, releasing a new tool that will let carriers sift through and prioritize the traffic flooding their networks.

It sounds pretty geeky -- "mobile packet core" product launches don't inspire iPhone-like frenzies -- but this back-end upgrade has some significant implications for everyday users.

The problem: Everyone has experienced the frustrating effects of wireless network congestion. Your video buffers forever, a website takes minutes to launch, or you can't get Google Maps to load when you're late to a meeting and don't know where to go.

Much of that pain comes from the way that today's networks give more or less the same priority to all kinds of traffic. Ads running on Angry Birds are treated the same as a Netflix (NFLX) video -- not a good thing, if a bunch of ads on other people's phones are causing your movie to stall.

The user experience would be noticeably better if the network were able to speed up streaming video at the expense of a slightly slower load time on an ad in a game. The typical wireless network doesn't know how to do that.

The solution: Cisco thinks it has a fix with its new ASR 5500 mobile packet core. It's a kind of gateway between the mobile network and the larger Internet that gives networks the intelligence to handle different traffic differently.

Verizon, for instance, could set different priorities for video services, phone calls and apps -- particularly during peak download hours -- to ensure that all services run as smoothly as possible. That way, Netflix or YouTube videos might not get interrupted if Verizon makes websites take a second longer to load.

Read more here:
Cisco creates a smarter Internet

So Sean "You know what's cool? A billion dollars" Parker just declared the Internet boring! Then Brian Lam said non monsieur, you're the one who is boring.

Attention conservation notice: If you're not asleep or clicking over to Buzzfeed already, the boring one is you.

Parker just launched the last thing anyone should expend resources on given the limited time we have left on this dying planet: a Chatroulette clone called Airtime. Like its predecessor, it's about to fill up with people's genitals, because apparently its genitalia-detection algorithm doesn't work.

About the only thing of value to come out of this bonfire of investor cash is the inevitable pile-on that will follow Parker's comment. So, is the Internet boring? I say yes.

The Internet is both a utility and a medium. Only one of these things is exciting.

I have the luxury of writing for geeks whose job it is to get excited about complicated systems like the Internet, but let's face it, the more mainstream it becomes, the more the best part of the web, "geek culture," will be divorced from the web itself. In ways large and small, it's already happening. TMZ is the traffic monster, not Slashdot.

As a generator of profoundly new ideas, the web is dead. Reading Techcrunch these days is an exercise in postmodernism. (A startup that gamifies the job search gets $21 million in funding. Really?) All the innovation is in mobile, which is why Facebook is boring but Instagram is cool and therefore worth almost as much as a company that puts robots on top of thousands of pounds of high explosives and successfully flies them to the International Space Station.

As a medium, the web just kind of replaced all the other stuff that came before. If you were excited about magazines in the 90's, well, they still exist! Yeah, they're kind of different, and people who write for them have to put up with trolls in the comments, but otherwise, it's not as different as all the navel-gazing media writers would have you believe.

On the other hand, as a utility, there's hardly been a more exciting time to be on the web. It's the universal glue that binds everything else together, and mastery over its increasingly arcane ways is the ticket to participating in whatever remains of the middle class after we're done socializing all the costs of our Internet-speed financial system. But like I said, this utility function of the Internet is increasingly irrelevant to the ever large swath of humanity that relies on it. It's like asking people to get excited about civic infrastructure. (Which is awesome! This book changed my life.)

So, Internet = boring? Yes, absolutely. Now that the novelty has worn off, all we've really got is each other, saying the same ridiculous and mundane things we've always said. It remains the case thathell is other people.

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How the Internet Became Boring