.tel Story of Bernard Giraudeau

Scott Smith is president of TelCartel, a .tel reseller, and established domain investor. Based in Canada, Scott has recently helped organize the first TelCamp to be held in Toronto and, along with Mark Kolb and Freaky Steve, created the concept and realization of telcamp.tel, the management tool for TelCamp organization, registration and feedback.

"I first learned about .tel in October or November of 2008 and got quite excited about it. I didn't understand it a whole lot but was interested enough to do a little bit of further digging. I've been in the domain business for around eight or nine years, and had experienced the landrush for .us and other landrush periods. So I sort of got this euphoric feeling about this new domain extension being delivered and how I might be able to capitalize on it."

"What I didn't really understand was how it worked, how I could use it and how I could make money with it. We did quite a bit of research and were intrigued by the potential for .tel on mobile. The fact that, most people will only ever see the internet over mobile devices, held a lot of intrigue for me. If .tel could enhance that experience, I was quite game to give it a go."

"So based on that, we put together a little investment group and targeted generic keywords, and decided to invest in .tel. " As we learnt more about the use and utility of .tel, we came to see it as a game changer. Being a hardcore domainer for a lot of years and now publicly stating that I was backing .tel for my own reasons, I certainly got a lot of flak from people in the domain community – but that's OK!" "We currently own in the region of 350 domains – mainly generic, primarily geo's (geographic), common first names and some different language domains, with the purpose of building them out individually or for future resale."

One of our primary ones is condos.tel which we think has world-wide appeal. We're looking to develop some unique tools that go with the .tel that will help our customers – those being realtors – to see the value of advertising on condos.tel. One of the features that we want to build into it is a dynamic pricing model, whereby the real estate agents can set the price that they want to pay to be listed in our directory. This gives us the ability to not set a price so high that we price ourselves out of the market, but also not set a price too low where we're leaving money on the table. We think this dynamic pricing model has the ability to help us manage that."

We've recently just completed our first TelCamp – TelCamp Toronto 1. It was a collaborative effort between a number of ‘Telsters' – including the owner of Telsters.com, the .tel community forum that is popular globally – and we thought there was an opportunity here to take our skills and our abilities and our passion for .tel, and share it with people, not only locally, but also around the world."

We held the TelCamp at the Royal Ontario Museum and had a very good turn out, with representatives from the legal community, insurance brokers and other .tel domain owners with significant portfolios that were looking to build directories, so it was a very good forum for us to be able to discuss and create a groundswell of enthusiasm for .tel."

As we were developing the curriculum we were faced with several ‘process' issues. We were spending too much time – time that we didn't really have, managing administrative processes. Knowing that future TelCamp organizers might be facing the same challenges, we took the time to create telcamp.tel. This was really set up so that we could take everything that we'd done from our registration system to the list of our attendees, photos, news and updates, and packaged it so that future TelCamp organizers could utilize and build on the foundation of that information that we created for the broader .tel community. Hopefully this will allow them to spend more time finding sponsors and putting "butts in the seats" to make their TelCamps as successful as possible."

So we will now pass on those credentials to wherever in the world the next TelCamp will be, whether it's Prague or Montreal or Paris, so they can benefit from our experience, and hopefully build more tools and applications that will improve TelCamp.tel for the future."