.Tel travels into “renewal valley”. How will it come out on the other side?

The folks at .tel registry Telnic are certainly sweating this week: .tel domain names registered during general availability are hitting their first renewal period.

I call this period — when new top level domain names hit there first renewal period — the “valley of renewals”. Renewal raters during this critical time are a barometer for how the TLD is doing as a whole, and the rate can often signify the future of the domain.

When dotMobi hit its first renewal period it lost 10% of its registration base, similar to many other domains.

At the end of last year there were about 275,000 .tel domain names registered. With $35 million invested in Telnic, the base of registered domain names will hardly support the valuation the company must have reached. It needs to grow and it needs to grow quickly. Pay attention to this renewal period to see where it’s headed.

My guess is that many of the people who registered domains this time last year will renew for another year before making a judgment call. I renewed 100% of my .tel domain names: all one of them.

Domains that aren’t used for web sites to get Google ads.

It was only a matter of time, right?

.Tel registry Telnic announced that .tel domain name owners will soon by able to integrate Google Adsense into their domain names. That means they’ll be able to add Google’s pay-per-click ads to their .tel domain names through the .tel management interface. The net effect? You’ll be able to turn a .tel into a parked domain name full of ads.

Technically, .tel users have been able use ads on their domains for awhile, thanks to TelAds. This system allowed users to add their own sponsored ads, but not take advantage of a vast ad network such as Google.

Of course, .tel domains get little type-in traffic. But with other content modules inside .tel, a user could conceivably add content, get ranked, and earn some advertising revenue.

Google Adsense will be enabled on .tel domain names by the end of March. Telnic may ad more ad networks in the future.

.Tel is also working on a page redesign for March. Here’s how the new pages will look.

New gift card lets retail shoppers pick up a domain name on impulse.

You can register domain names through web sites, twitter, and text message. So why not buy one with your latte?

A new gift card from Canadian domain name registrar WebNames.ca lets customers buy a voucher for a .tel domain name at the cash registrer and then redeem it online. The card is apparently being offered (or soon will be) at CanTalk Wireless and Blenz Coffee in Canada.

A number of domain name registrars, including heavyweight Go Daddy, offer online gift cards. But I’ve yet to see domain name gift certificates offered in retail stores, at least not in the U.S. If you’ve seen something like this elsewhere, please post a comment.

By the way, it’s too late to register DomainNameGiftCertificates.com.

Photo link.

.Tel registry asks ICANN to let it register IDNs.

.Tel registry Telnic has sent a letter to ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom requesting permission to issue internationalized domain names (IDNs). The letter (pdf) from Telnic CEO Khashayar Mahdavi requests ICANN authorization to release domains that contain hyphens in the third and fourth positions from the pool of reserved domains in the .tel registry agreement. This would enable IDNs.

In his letter, Mahdavi writes that Telnic will follow the “Guidelines for the lmplementation of the lnternationalized Domain Names” as published on the ICANN web site.

.Mobi recently released Chinese IDNs, resulting in a quick growth of the registration base by 100,000 domains, or about 10%.

Yahoo picks up .tel domain name.

An arbitrator with National Arbitration Forum has awarded Yahoo! the Yahoo.tel domain name. Yahoo was the first major tech company to file arbitration for a .tel domain when it filed its case back in August.

The respondent in the case did not file an official response. Instead, he challenged the authority of UDRP proceedings in Spain.

Through correspondence dated September 23, 2009, the Attorney of Respondent submitted a written communication to the National Arbitration Forum, by means of which said party emphatically insisted that this Panel lacks of competence to rule the present case, pursuant to internal provisions of the procedural Law of the Kingdom of Spain.

Regardless of the foregoing assertion, Respondent is hereby reminded that it expressly consented to be bound to the jurisdiction of the UDRP when it executed the Registration Agreement with the Registrar implying this that Respondent is legally linked by the ARSYS INTERNET SL d/b/a NICLINE.COM registration agreement. Thus, Respondent is compelled to revise it and be properly informed of its content and implications, before making pointless contentions.

There was another procedural issue in the case: the registrar agreement was in Spanish, so technically the case filings needed to be in Spanish. However, the domain owner’s registrar delayed its response to the UDRP, resulting in the case commencing before the panel knew that the case should be in Spanish:

Upon notification of the dispute, the Registrar refused to verify the Respondent’s identity. Upon subsequent request, the Registry did verify Respondent’s identity, and the National Arbitration Forum commenced the case. Then, after the commencement of the case by the National Arbitration Forum, correspondence was received from the Registrar that stated that the language of the Registration Agreement was in Spanish.

In view of this fact, because the pertaining information was received from the Registrar only after the case was commenced, the Panel decides to continue the case with the English-language submission of the Complaint, pursuant to Rule 11 of the Policy.

Of course, Yahoo could have claimed the Yahoo.tel domain name during the .tel sunrise period for about $300, much less than the cost of arbitration. Will we see a lot of this scenario — company doesn’t get domain during sunrise but gets it through arbitration — when new top level domains roll out?