We are happy to announce the iWantMyName affiliate program! Start referring customers or blog readers looking for international domain names or domain registrar alternatives and you will get rewarded on each sale originating from your links.

The iWantMyName domain registrar affiliate program is ideal for:

• Bloggers and website owners
• Hosting companies
• Web apps and services
• Application developers

Just place a text link, domain search box or banner on your site. When visitors register or transfer domains using the affiliate link from your site, you get 10% commission on each order for 90 days. The program is also valid for promotional offers, unless marked otherwise.

It's free to join: Become an iWantMyName affiliate today.

• International domain registration for over 80 extensions.
• Friendly and personal customer support. We care about you!
• A simple, fast and uncluttered domain name management dashboard.
• Easy setup for the most popular web apps with your own domain name.
• The best mobile application to register domain names from your iPhone.

Popular URL shortening service bit.ly is launching an open beta of its long-awaited Pro version with custom domain option soon. This will allow you to use your own domain name for a personally branded URL instead of the standard shortened addresses starting with bit.ly or j.mp.

• bit.ly Pro is completely free and has the following features included:
• 10,000 requests / day for your custom short URL
• Access to the bit.ly Pro dashboard with detailed statistics on your branded links
• bit.ly button to allow users share links on Twitter / Facebook with your custom domain

There will also be an Enterprise edition with support for multiple domains, advanced dashboard features, full end-to-end branding and a customer service support plan.

Short URL Domain Name Ideas

We have some domain name ideas for you to find a memorable short domain. You should try to keep it simple yet still readable. Do not obsess to much about the length, 5-7 characters will still work fine. It is not so much the brevity that is important but the recognition value of your brand.

1. Use abbreviations / misspellings
   
   - Company: comp or cmpny
   - YourDesignBlog: yodebl or yrdsgn
   - iWantMyName: iwmn
   
   
2. Play with initials:
   
   - FirstnameLastname: FL or FiLa
   - New York Agency: NYA
   
   
3. Find a domain hack:
   
   - iPeople: ipeo.pl
   - Youtube: youtu.be
   - YourName: yrna.me (domain hack / misspelling combined)
   
   
4. Register a boutique domain extension
   
   - .ME (It's me...)
   - .IM (I'm)
   - .IO (Input/Output)
   - .TW (for Twitter!)
   
   
5. Get creative using Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)
   
   Symbols / special characters: ✪df.ws or 20°f.la
   Upside down domain names: ǝɯɐu.name (name.name) or ʇɹoɥs.com (short.com)
   
   

With iWantMyName you can easily find and set up domains for bit.ly. Start branding your links and register your own short domain today!

Related articles:

• 10 Tools to run an URL Shortener on your own Domain
• The Art of Finding a Domain Hack
• List of 100 Available Ultra-short Domain Names
• Short & Brandable Domain Name List

As of February 1, 2010, it will be possible to register the Luxembourgish .LU domain name extension without a local address in Luxembourg. This means that anyone worldwide can register .LU domains for personal or business use.

This new rule allows us to reduce the price for our valued customers. All new domain registrations and renewals will be reduced from $59.00 to $49.00 USD.

The .LU registry also announced the introduction of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) starting in April. More details on this coming soon.

As you may have heard, China recently changed the rules for .CN domain registrations blocking overseas registrars, excluding individuals from registering a domain name and requiring extensive documentation from businesses before domains are accepted. Thus, we have removed the .CN domain extension from our website completely until further notice.

If you would like to secure your online identity in China, we recommend registering a .COM / .NET Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) or soon to be available .ORG IDNs with Chinese characters instead. The registry for .ORG, PIR, is allowing IDNs with the Chinese and Traditional Chinese character sets from January 23rd 2010, 19:00 UTC. Please note that .ORG Chinese IDNs registered in the first 30 days, will have restriction placed upon them by the registry to allow for intellectual property interests to file UDRP actions if warranted. You will not be able to delete, transfer or update a domain during this time.

Chinese character .ORG domains can be registered through our standard domain search which is already fully IDN enabled.

中文国际域名 (IDNs) .ORG 很快开放

中国当局最近更改了.CN 域名注册规则。由于这些变更我们不得不暂时将 .CN 域名从我们的网站上移除。但是，如果阁下希望确保您在中国的在线身份，我们建议阁下用中文汉字注册 .COM / .NET 域名。同时 .ORG 域名也将作为国际域名 (IDN) 很快开放。敦请阁下注意，中文 IDNs 的 .ORG 域名自注册之日起30天内会受到限制。期间您将无法删除，传输或者上传。中文汉字域名 .ORG 可以通过我们的带有完整 IDN 功能的标准域名搜索来注册。例如 阳光.org

You can now download an auto-generated QR code for every domain name in your iWantMyName dashboard. QR codes or 2D barcodes are square images that can contain different data, e.g. URLs, an email address or phone numbers. The "QR" stands for "Quick Response" and was created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. They are very common in Japan already but start gaining popularity in the western world as well with the wide adoption of the iPhone and Android-powered mobile camera phones such as Google's Nexus One.

QR Code example for the iWantMyName homepage:

Your domain QR code can be obtained by clicking on the respective domain name in the iWantMyName dashboard. Feel free to download, print or put it on a sticker.

There are many use cases for QR codes. One of our favorite blogs ReadWriteWeb had an excellent article series on "The Scannable World":

• Mobile Phones As Barcode Scanners
• Scanning Your Web Printouts
• Barcode Scanning In The Real World
• Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things: Barcode Scanning

The iWantMyName crew will be at the LCA2010 Open Day on Saturday 23rd January at the Wellington Town Hall. Be sure to stop by our booth, supply us with your favourite URL address and we will print a free QR code sticker for you.

After a very wet and stormy weekend here in Wellington it was with a palpable sense of relief that the heavens parted and sunshine once again blessed the city as delegates filed into the Convention Centre for the opening of the Australasian Linux Conference LCA2010. As locally based event co-sponsors, we are especially keen for visiting delegates to enjoy a taste of the natural environment in our scenic hometown.

So why is a commercial developer of domain registrar software supporting an open source event? Perhaps that question is best answered by our chief technologist Lenz Gschwendtner who will be speaking at the LCA Miniconf on Parallel Computing 10.30am Tuesday 18th January. Lenz recently wrote an article explaining how we managed to roll out the iWantMyName platform into three new destination markets in the short space of just a few weeks. Being a modular platform, we make use of some fantastic open source projects (such as CouchDB, RabbitMQ, Catalyst) to implement and run the system. But we also give back to the community, by adding various source libraries to CPAN and GitHub as we extend our skill set and progressively develop the platform further.

The business of open source is an important theme that cuts across the entire conference this year and that is another reason why iWantMyName is supporting this event. We think it's cool that the acceptance of open source technology is growing across business and government in Australia and New Zealand. Not only will it lead to greater business productivity, but it will almost certainly allow much greater innovation and diversity as developer communities flourish. In fact our parent company ideegeo set up an Erlang user group in 2008 and we are very active in other ICT groups around Wellington. No doubt many new ideas will be born in the conference hallways this week as various global communities come together.

To help these ideas along we are running some great offers on our newly launched Kiwi iWantMyName site. Of course we have a great deal for our homegrown and much loved .geek.nz domain or if you need a domain for a community project, check out what we can offer for .org or .org.nz domains. For perl hackers we offer .pl and for the enthusiasts amongst you .io (input/output) or .sh (shell). Use our domain search to run a name check on over 80 different domain extensions - the best selection available by far Down Under. Then you can use our great management dashboard to hook your new domain up to any of the popular hosted services we feature such as GMail, Zoho and Blogger. Bingo! Your own customised office within a few minutes.

We are very keen to get feedback on our site and meet some of our customers in person. So please look out for the big red and white iWantMyName banner at the LCA2010 Open Day on Saturday. You can also find us at Monday evening's Tweetup at the Green Man pub or catch us on Twitter @ideegeo & @iwmn.

With the successful launch of iWantMyName as a global domain registrar site and then into Germany and the Netherlands last year, we felt it was now time to turn our attention to home. We have had so many requests from our friends to establish in the New Zealand market, because of our unique service offering, friendly user interface and great customer support. Finally we had to say yes and we now have a dedicated Kiwi site at http://iwantmyname.co.nz offering fixed prices in New Zealand dollars.

The Kiwi iWantMyName has New Zealand's widest range of domain extensions, many of which are unavailable from other local domain registrars. Examples of exclusive domains include the recently launched .TEL and .ME suffixes plus interesting country code top-level domains from all over the world such as .LI (Liechtenstein), .IO (British Indian Ocean Territory) and .FM (Federal States of Micronesia). Customers from the existing site can use the same login details to access their accounts across the iWantMyName platform suite. We also offer the same free services on our Kiwi version so that you can hook up your own domain to customise a wide range of great web applications such as GMail, Blogger and Zoho. In the very near future we also plan to add some cool new Kiwi-made services that we really want to support.

We think it is appropriate that the launch of a new product should be celebrated with some special offers. So until the end of February we are offering new .COM, .NET, .ORG and .NAME domains for only $19.90 NZD plus .INFO for $9.90 NZD. We are also able to offer a FREE one year extension if you transfer your existing domains across to iWantMyName NZ. Transfers can be handled from your personal dashboard once you join up. Please note that all domain prices quoted on the Kiwi site are GST exclusive and that we provide full GST invoicing to all our valued customers.

In addition, we are supporting the Australasian Linux conference LCA2010 which rolls into our hometown Wellington on 18-23 January. Look out for the iWantMyName crew at our stand at the Open Day on Saturday 23rd. We would be happy to demo the new site and discuss how we are supporting the open source movement and other technology communities in New Zealand.

What better way to begin the new year 2010 than by receiving notice about price reductions from several registries? And since we always strive to pass on better prices to our customers, we are happy to announce the following new prices for the Russian, Polish and Czech domain extensions:

• .CZ Domain Names: $59.00 --> $39.00 USD
• .RU Domain Names: $49.00 --> $39.00 USD
• .PL Domain Names: $79.00 --> $39.00 USD

The Eastern European country code top-level domains are growing fast and can be found amongst the top 25 most popular domain extensions worldwide with .CZ (Czech Republic) having 591,000, .PL (Poland) 1.53 million and .RU (Russia) 2.31 million registered addresses in total. At iWantMyName we are fully enabled to search and register Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) which are now possible for both Cyrillic characters under .RU and the Polish alphabet letters within the .PL namespace.