Today at noon, the Tokyo-based independent ISP Interlink[J] started the world's first contest inviting new generic top level domains (gTLDs) of your own.

We used to have a limitation in choosing an option of gTLDs, but it was fully liberalized by the resolution that was made at ICANN's board meeting in 2008.

.car(dot car), .web(dot web), .blog(dot blog) and whatever - your application entry is acceptable from Jun 24th until Sep 30th, then 20 domains will be chosen as the final candidates. Public votes to pick the grand prix from the 20 candidates will be open from Oct 15th until Nov 11th. The grand prix winner will be announced on Nov 30th. (all dates are in this year)

The winner can get the prize of USD10,000 in cash, furthermore, for a decade from Nov 30th, he/she has the right to receive USD1 for every sale of domains ending with the gTLD applied. If your gTLD were adopted for 80 million domains such as those of .com, you could earn annually as much as USD80 million as the reward. Any charge to apply it to ICANN is definitely paid by the ISP company.

If the grand prix is won by two applicants or more, the prize and the reward money are to be distributed equally to each of them.

Tags: Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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Currently, there's a boom that many geeks install wireless-enabled video cameras on their cars, and that they publish captured on-board video movies on video sharing sites such as Nico Nico Douga[J] (link to videos tagged with on-board camera view, requiring username and password) and Ustream. The videos can make you feel as though you were driving on Japanese expressways.

The geeks are called "Shasai Cluster" meaning the group of driving video shooting hobbyists, form networking communities and have offline parties here and there. Some of them contributed to launch a website[J] which shows you real-time locations of the members of the "Cluster" who have GPS-enabled devices and Internet-enabled wireless video cameras online. By clicking each of red arrow signs seen on Google Maps mash-up on the website, any viewers are allowed to watch live streaming videos as though you were sitting on a driver's seat.

The geeks are competing in shooting many chokepoints and in improving video quality for viewers as to watch with comfortability and not as to get carsick that may be caused by gazing at wobbling video images.

Via: IT Media News[J]

Tags: Cellular Phone, Community, Japan, Trend, Video by Masaru IKEDA
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