Businesses say no to newer domain suffixes
... but the web continues to expand regardless
internet-delivered
services,
like
Knowledge Technology Solutions
(KTS).
With the likelihood of all-in-one home
entertainment systems incorporating
television, radio and the internet entering
many more homes in coming years, the
potential for profit is immense.
So everything is on the up. Or so
you’d think.
his was a fantastic year for many
web companies and websites,
making it the strongest ever for
internet growth. It also has marked
something of a renaissance for the whole
online industry. With the wild success of
Google as a publicly quoted company,
eBay’s meteoric rise that continues
unabated, and our own humble
FriendsReunited being snapped up by
ITV for over £100m, suddenly dot coms
are once again this year’s fashion item.
T
With the proceeds of its multi-billion
dollar flotation, Google has been able to
consolidate its position as the world’s
most popular search engine, offering an
index of eight billion URLs linked to the
74,572,794 websites in the world
(source: recent survey by Netcraft).
It is not just the profits of the well-known
dot com companies like Google and
eBay that are soaring, the whole of the
web is still rapidly expanding. This year,
tens of thousands of new websites were
created every day. In fact, in 2005 to
date, over 17.5 million new sites were
registered. This astonishing rate of
growth is even faster than the height of
the dot com boom in 2000, when 16
million new sites were born in that year.
And it’s not only new online enterprises
or pure dot com plays that have thrived.
Broadband internet service providers
have bagged millions of new users too,
while consumers’ growing desire for
real-time services has contributed greatly
to the success of live news websites and
companies offering specialist real-time
The web universe
is still expanding,
at faster rate
even than during
the dotcom boom
in 2000
But one element of the web that is
lagging behind the rest has been the
reception given by businesses to some of
the newer domain name suffixes.
Launched in 2000, the domain suffixes
.tv and .biz have both struggled to make
a significant impact. Even .net hasn’t
fared that much better. Take-up of the
new suffixes has been limited at best,
with new websites and companies
mainly plumping for the established
.com and .co.uk suffixes.
So why have the newer suffixes failed to
take off? The answer is simple.
Credibility.
At KTS, we suspected part of the
problem is that the newer suffixes simply
lack the established lustre of the .com
and .co.uk equivalents. Therefore, we
tested this theory by running a survey
aimed at bosses of smaller-to mediumsized enterprises.
We asked 182 owner managers what they
thought about how a dot com domain
name suffix impacts on their business’s
branding and image. For the newer
suffixes, a massive 74 per cent of
respondents said they detracted from a
company’s brand image. Some even
described them as sounding ‘cheap’ or
‘unprofessional’.
Of course, small things often have big
impacts in business, so it’s unsurprising
that the suffixes have been avoided if
they carry such negative connotations in
the minds of the senior executives. With
each one of us spending more and more
news
January 2006
The quarterly newsletter of Knowledge
Technology Solutions PLC, provider of
real-time streaming financial data services
of our time surfing the net or buying
goods and services online, how a brand
is delivered over the web is bound to
play an increasingly important role in the
success or failure of any business.
But even before we ran our survey, there
were obvious precedents to suggest that
the newer suffixes wouldn’t take off.
Many websites which began life as .net
sites converted to .com as soon as they
could, long before the .biz and .tv
suffixes were mooted. The Dixons
Group’s first ISP was known as
freeserve.net, but quickly became
freeserve.com when it became a
company in its own right, before being
taken over by French internet giants
Wanadoo. On-line auction site eBay
launched with a .com suffix in America,
and when the time came to launch a
sister site for the UK in 2000, the firm
opted for a .co.uk suffix – eBay.tv,
eBay.biz and eBay.net were rejected, and
eBay.co.uk was born. The eBay
executives would undoubtedly have been
aware of the potential benefits of being a
trendsetter with one of the newer
suffixes, but opted for the established
.co.uk instead.
The fortunes of the new suffixes are
unlikely to get much better. Fifty-nine
per cent of bosses ranked .co.uk as the
most credible suffix in the poll, with
.com taking 35 per cent and .biz the
remaining six per cent of the popular
vote. None of the bosses ranked the .net
and .tv suffixes as the most credible,
according to the poll.
Knowledge Technology Solutions PLC, 8th Floor, Finsbury Tower, 103-105 Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8LZ
tel +44 (0)20 7256 2300
support +44 (0)845 226 0060
[email protected]
www.ktsplc.com
One service to bind them
In order to streamline our services and
simplify client pricing and upgrading, the
New Year sees the end of our UK-only
ktsQuoteTerminal service, as it will be
incorporated into our flagship international
ktsMarketTerminal service.
This benefits clients and KTS alike. For
clients, it streamlines the pricing regime and
makes it much easier to select their preferred
feed options. It also simplifies the process of
upgrading a subscription, in that new feeds
can simply be switched on and the billing
adjusted accordingly.
Previously, if clients wanted to move from a
UK to an international service, they had to
make a large leap from ktsQuoteTerminal to
ktsMarketTerminal. Now, the gap is seamless,
and they can pick and choose incrementally.
For KTS this means we have a much stronger
brand, without the confusion over which
service provides which information. It also
makes our support and documentation more
targeted and focused.
the main reason for this transition is
to open up ktsMarketTerminal for
ktsQuoteTerminal users
In one respect this is a major transition, and to
this end we have sent letters informing users
of the changeover. However, users really
shouldn’t notice any difference in operation:
ktsMarketTerminal operates in exactly the
same way as ktsQuoteTerminal and provides
exactly the same features and UK data.
ktsQuoteTerminal was simply a subset of
ktsMarketTerminal in terms of available
exchanges. The only difference will be the
name ‘MarketTerminal’ used throughout (on
headers and footers and help pages, for
example), and the ktsMarketTerminal logo on
the
Main
Contents
page
rather
than ktsQuoteTerminal.
Hower, to reiterate, the main reason for this
transition is to open up ktsMarketTerminal for
ktsQuoteTerminal users. Therefore, if you
have any queries about ktsMarketTerminal,
such as new international price or news feeds,
please contact your KTS account manager by
calling +44(0)20 7256 2300.
Also, even though the services work in
exactly the same way, if you have any queries
about how to log on or use ktsMarketTerminal
features then, as always, our best-in-class
support team is ready to take your call and
advise you: simply call 0845 226 0060 to
speak to them.
YourBrand: Reach and score
We often promote the benefits of our ASP
(Application Service Provision) technology
in terms of ease of deployment and low cost
of ownership. However, an important aspect
of ASP is the immediacy with which we can
reach our clients with any message. And this
doesn’t have to just be financial information:
by accessing client screens we are making an
important statement about our brand, in that
our services are accessible and professional
and therefore, so are we.
With this in mind, we
recently launched the
Yo u r B r a n d ™
programme.
This
enables
you
to
provide your own
b r a n d e d
ktsMarketTerminal as
a service to your
clients, and carries
with
it
similar
benefits.
Firstly, you improve your brand visibility.
Imagine your client screens all showing your
logo and telephone number for instant
recognition. It’s a powerful statement,
reinforcing the idea that you provide your
clients with the best in financial information.
You also differentiate yourself from your
competitors, in that you provide a bandwidthlight, easily deployed service to your clients.
The beauty of ASP lies in its fuss-free
maintenance and deployment, so you don’t
need to worry about setting up or maintaining
ktsMarketTerminal, and they don’t experience
the disruption associated with the installation
of more traditional solutions.
in recognition that a brand is far
more than just a logo, your brand is
strengthened by association... this
is why we call it YourBrand.
That’s the brand message. However, this
direct approach can also be more tangible, in
that you are able to send messages to clients
via ktsMarketTerminal, analyse client usage
via reports, and enable them to integrate with
other web-based applications. In other words,
empower them, all within the contract of
providing a service.
When combined, these benefits yield a
powerful stimulus to your client relationship.
And, in recognition that a brand is far more
than just a logo, your brand is strengthened by
association: you provide your clients with an
efficient, easily maintained financial service,
and thereby empower them. By implication,
you are seen as empowering.
This is why we call it YourBrand™ – reach
your clients and promote your brand. We call
it YourBrand™, you call it a result. For more
details, visit yourbrand.marketterminal.com.
The Knowledge: Excel
The current edition of The Knowledge (the
supplement to KTS News) focuses on an
important aspect of ktsMarketTerminal –
integration with Excel.
Everyone needs to link with Excel and other
applications, particularly Word for producing
reports and Powerpoint for presentations.
Therefore, The Knowledge discusses exports,
chart exports, live price streaming, the stock
screener and the clipboard.
clients can have their spreadsheets
set up by our best-in-class service
team, or we can even come round
to take you through this
Between them, these methods offer immediate,
versatile and powerful ways in which to pull
both active, real-time pricing and static,
historical information from different areas of
ktsMarketTerminal.
The clipboard is probably the easiest to use,
being directly analogous to the Microsoft
Office clipboard, in that you can copy and
paste the KTS symbols for the page you’re
looking at, into any other application. Exports
offer a customisable Excel file export feature
of fundamental data, which you can run
quickly and easily, whereas Chart exports can
pull historical data from charts. The Screener
lets you also pull Excel-compatible
information from our fundamentals database.
Streaming live prices to Excel is perhaps the
most involved process but this is also an
opportunity, in that clients can have their
spreadsheets set up by our best-in-class service
team, or we can even come round to take you
through this.
Meet and greet
Hagen Geissler, Analyst Developer
Hagen, 24, has a varied
technical background.
He has worked at Pixel
Park, one of Germany’s
leading
software
houses. He also did
contract
work
in
Germany developing a
hospital patient tracking system, a
communication system for Infortex, and a
courier service management system for
Bamboo Software. On coming to London
Hagen developed a webtracking system for
Fyicreative, which is how he eventually
found himself at KTS in the City.
Knowledge Technology Solutions PLC, 8th Floor, Finsbury Tower, 103-105 Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8LZ
tel +44 (0)20 7256 2300
support +44 (0)845 226 0060
[email protected]
www.ktsplc.com