From Lesley Cowley, Chief Executive of Nominet

Welcome to our third edition of Nominet News for 2007.

The months since our previous edition have been extremely busy, exciting and challenging in equal measure.

At the beginning of June we released our Online Services for registrars and registrants. This major project enables customers to manage their accounts online and lays the foundations for significant developments in the future such as the launch of EPP. In this issue we hear from Jay Daley, Director of IT and Eleanor Bradley, Director of Operations about the challenges and successes associated with the data restructure and project implementation. More ›

On 10 June 2007 we made a fundamental change to the way we store our data. This change was essential to allow us to move forward and develop robust online services, implement new services such as EPP and prepare for new products. This restructuring of our database systems was the largest single technical development that we have undertaken.

We spoke to Jay Daley, our Director of IT and Eleanor Bradley, our Director of Operations to find out more about this project… More ›

The latest ICANN meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico was varied and interesting and the key discussions included the following:

Country Code Names Supporting Organisation (ccNSO)

Lesley Cowley, our CEO, is a member of this organisation that is responsible for developing and recommending global policies relating to country-code top-level domains to ICANN’s Board. Lesley led a session on participation: only 60 of the 240 ccTLDs are members of the ccNSO, so they are looking for ways to engage the others and to make the community more representative of the global community. Following the debate, Lesley was appointed to chair a working group looking at participation. More ›

We conducted our third registrar satisfaction survey in the Spring and we now have the results. As with previous surveys, our aim was to give all our members and registrars the opportunity to tell us how satisfied they are with our customer facing support teams. 307 customers completed the web-based questionnaire and we would like to thank them for their participation. More ›

On 5 June 2007 Margaret Hodge MBE MP, Minister for Industry and the Regions unveiled the Nominet Best Practice Challenge 2007, as part of an initiative by Nominet, DTI and key parliamentarians to create a UK Internet Governance Forum. The Best Practice Challenge will recognise organisations, groups or individuals that have worked to deliver a safer, more accessible, diverse Internet experience. More ›

We are very pleased to announce that Lesley Cowley, our CEO, has been awarded the First Woman of Technology in the 2007 First Women Awards. The awards, organised by the CBI and Real Business magazine in association with Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets, celebrate women who are trailblazers and pioneers in business - genuine “glass ceiling breakers”.
More ›

We have entered into a partnership with Oxford Brookes University to develop anti-abuse technology that will help protect more than 6 million UK domain names, registrant data and the UK Internet as a whole. The partnership is being supported by the Department of Trade and Industry through a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) award. As a result, we will be creating two new anti-abuse posts for postgraduates who will spend two years working on the problem. They will receive management training so that they can run the project themselves, including budgeting. More ›

Nominet Chief talks domains (video interview)
ZDNet.co.uk - 1 August 2007

Six million .uk domains sold
ZDNet.co.uk - 6 July 2007

Domain name scammers target uk.biz
The Register - 17 July 2007

Red tape “holding back” next-generation Internet
Silicon.com - 8 June 2007

Nominet and Oxford Brookes team up to fight domain name fraud
ITPro.co.uk - 25 April 2007

A death penalty for spammers? No, the solution is social change
The Guardian - 16 August 2007

Top 10 e-commerce developments of the decade
The Register - 16 July 2007

One laptop per child eyes September launch, bigger price tag
ITPro.co.uk - 27 April 2007

Most workers to favour IM as comms tool by 2013
ITPro.co.uk - 26 June 2007

Web retailers still not customer service savvy
ITPro.co.uk - 26 June 2007