6 ms·

Reminds me of "RealNames". Dot-com era company. $130 million in funding. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames RealNa

by arn 13y ago

Reminds me of "RealNames". Dot-com era company. $130 million in funding. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames RealNames was a company founded in 1997 by Keith Teare. Its goal was to create a multilingual keyword-based naming system for the Internet that would translate keywords typed into the address bar of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser to Uniform Resource Identifiers, based on the existing Domain Name System, that would access the page registered by the owner of the RealNames keyword.

pessimizer 13y ago
So intensely patent encumbered, then? :)
byproxy 13y ago
Also, AOL Keywords.
- eli 13y ago
  And new.net, though I think that was basically malware. There were a lot of "DNS Alternatives" in the early 2000s.
  - swatkat 13y ago
    New.net was terrible. It used to inject DLL into IE, hijack Winsock LSP and whatnot!
    - eli 13y ago
      Yup, a bad idea implemented poorly.
- akurtzhs 13y ago
  Google Plus has the same deal now. Search for +Pepsi on Google and it takes you to Pepsi's Google Plus page. I'm certainly glad they stopped treating + as a search operator so we could get that feature in return.
  - MichaelGG 13y ago
    Any more info? I opened a private tab, went to Google.com, searched on +Pepsi and the results look like what I'd find for Pepsi.
    - akurtzhs 13y ago
      Really? Searching for Pepsi gives me www.pepsico.com, www.pepsi.com and the Pepsi wikipedia page as the top three results, while +Pepsi gives me Google Plus pages for Pepsi as the top three results. The name for this is Direct Connect, and they announced it in 2011. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-pages-connect-with-all-things.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-pages-connect-...
sanjayparekh 13y ago
Thanks for the reminder of the name of this company. I was racking my brains to remember the exact name. I visited them back in the day (we were going to sell them IP location technology - deal never happened). They had awesome offices (foosball tables, nice cubes, etc.). Unfortunately they had zero ability to create user adoption. The lesson? Doing a proprietary thing that competes with a universally accepted thing is hard to be successful at. Even with $130 million in funding.
voyou 13y ago
My favourite alternative domain name startup is "Bango," which back in the early days of the mobile internet wanted to make domain names easier to type on phones by replacing them with numbers: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/20/numeric_domain_name_system_launched/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/20/numeric_domain_name_...

by arn 13y ago

pessimizer 13y ago

So intensely patent encumbered, then? :)

byproxy 13y ago

Also, AOL Keywords.

eli 13y ago
And new.net, though I think that was basically malware. There were a lot of "DNS Alternatives" in the early 2000s.
- swatkat 13y ago
  New.net was terrible. It used to inject DLL into IE, hijack Winsock LSP and whatnot!
  - eli 13y ago
    Yup, a bad idea implemented poorly.
akurtzhs 13y ago
Google Plus has the same deal now. Search for +Pepsi on Google and it takes you to Pepsi's Google Plus page. I'm certainly glad they stopped treating + as a search operator so we could get that feature in return.
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  Any more info? I opened a private tab, went to Google.com, searched on +Pepsi and the results look like what I'd find for Pepsi.
  - akurtzhs 13y ago
    Really? Searching for Pepsi gives me www.pepsico.com, www.pepsi.com and the Pepsi wikipedia page as the top three results, while +Pepsi gives me Google Plus pages for Pepsi as the top three results. The name for this is Direct Connect, and they announced it in 2011. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-pages-connect-with-all-things.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-pages-connect-...

sanjayparekh 13y ago

Thanks for the reminder of the name of this company. I was racking my brains to remember the exact name. I visited them back in the day (we were going to sell them IP location technology - deal never happened). They had awesome offices (foosball tables, nice cubes, etc.). Unfortunately they had zero ability to create user adoption. The lesson? Doing a proprietary thing that competes with a universally accepted thing is hard to be successful at. Even with $130 million in funding.

voyou 13y ago

My favourite alternative domain name startup is "Bango," which back in the early days of the mobile internet wanted to make domain names easier to type on phones by replacing them with numbers: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/20/numeric_domain_name_system_launched/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/20/numeric_domain_name_...