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.
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.
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.
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_...
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.