.tel Story of Nathaly Vermette

My name is Nathaly Vermette, I’m from Montreal in Canada, and I’m an attorney practicing in intellectual property law. Being discoverable on the internet, or contactable by my clients, is excessively important. Doing intellectual property technology-based work, clients usually prefer to use the web, to contact each other, and their help. Therefore for me it is essential that I be contactable.

I enable my clients to reach me in a number of ways; obviously, the telephone, my website, Twitter, but now we have the .tel, which makes it easy to accumulate all of these sources in one place.

I heard about .tel domain names interestingly through one of my clients, who was a .tel developer for certain services, and I instantly saw the usefulness for my business and registered quite a few .tel domain names. I saw the instant usability of .tel because I could reach most of my clients in a quick and efficient way as well as I could gather all of the sources of communication in one spot. For example, I could put all of my telephone numbers, my fax numbers, my Twitter name, my web page, all in one place. And when I travel abroad, I can update my contact details and people can reach me without difficulty.

.tel’s are different from other domain names. ‘Revolutionary’ is perhaps a strong word, but I find that they will be very, very useful in the sense that it’s easy for anybody to use; you don’t need a web developer to put up the information, you can do it yourself in seconds. So in that sense, yes, I do agree it is revolutionary.

I think that everybody can pretty much benefit from a .tel. You have your plumbers, who do not necessarily require a full-blown web page that would need to be reachable at any level. They can update their information very quickly. You have professionals like myself, that when they travel on business, can update their information and be reachable. Then you have the large corporations also that can have their branch information on also in one site and which can be updated for their employees within seconds and it’s not a whole production process to update.

It can be personal also, where you have your family information only accessible to your family because because you can limit also who sees what information which is another feature that is highly important in this day and age.

My experience in having used the .tel service is very good. I find it very easy to use, very accessible, so much so that even my Mother has been able to update her own information on the .tel’s that she has purchased. I explained the .tel to my Mother as the place where she could put all of her contact information in one place, that she could update it herself in seconds and no matter where she is, people could reach it. She was immediately intrigued and went to the .tel website and looked it up and realized how easy it was to use and, before I knew it, she had the whole family signed up, and had all of our information on the different file folders! She had a different file folder for each child with all of our information on it, and I was amazed!

I think the future of .tel will be perhaps to replace what we know today as the telephone book, the yellow pages or any directories, because it is a ‘living directory’ that is published by individuals or enterprises themselves. The enterprise has control over the information that is being put in and are not limited by a box in a book. So I find that is key for answering any contact information.”