The news as of the first coffee this morning, catching up on some news of a more general nature, and the music is country-Caribbean-rock maven Jerry Jeff Walker's "Hill Country Rain," his 1991 comeback record. A good album, it's not his best - that would be 1975's "Ridin' High":

 

Service provider Iron Mountain Digital, the technology arm of Iron Mountain Incorporated, is now offering the new .tel domain name.

 

The .tel domain "is similar to an interactive business card on the Web, and has been called 'the Google of online address books,'" according to company officials.

 

The .tel domain allows businesses and individuals to store and manage all of their contact information and keywords directly in the Domain Name System, or DNS, thereby displaying the contact information more quickly. "For large businesses with established domain name portfolios, .tel is a way to consolidate contact information and make their company or brand easier to contact," according to the Iron Mountain men.

 

The domain is being pitched to individuals and small businesses as a way to enable an online contact directory "without the need to build, host, or manage a Web site. The domain name's extension began on December 3, the first day of the domain's sunrise period.

 

The sunrise period is reserved for trademark owners and extends from December 3, 2008 through February 2, 2009. During this time, owners of existing trademarks can obtain a .tel domain for their brands, the selection method is first-come, first-served. This is followed by the land rush phase of the launch, from February 2 to March 23, 2009, in which .tel registrations are open to all.

 

Lower priced, general availability registrations open on March 24, 2009 for .tel domain names that remain. Iron Mountain's guidance is that "companies with established brand trademarks should take advantage of the sunrise period if they want to strengthen and protect their brand with a .tel domain for their brand."

 

If companies do not register a .tel domain for their establish brand trademarks during the sunrise period, that brand will no longer be protected, and will be available to anyone during the land rush period.

 

Telnic Limited is the Registry Operator and Sponsoring Organization for .tel. Telnic's CEO, Khashayar Mahdavi, said from any Internet device, "you can enter a .tel domain, and the DNS immediately returns the appropriate contact information allowing you to immediately initiate contact."

 

A .tel domain provides a named listing with unlimited contact information in a global directory, accessible from any device connected to the Internet. This integrates all communication products, such as e-mail, phone, fax, premium numbers, call centers, IVR systems, vanity numbers and VoIP products under a single product.

 

Founded in 1951, Iron Mountain has over 120,000 corporate clients throughout North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific.

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Tel Aviv-based Traffix Systems has announced that it will offer a pre-validated, integrated NGN Control Plane product based on Traffix OpenBloX, and Intel SOA Expressway, a service router designed to address the high speed service mediation, transformation, validation, and virtualization requirements of federated SOA deployments.

To simplify NGN deployment, Traffix officials say they will integrate the Intel SOA Expressway with the Rosetta Gateway product line. The combined product expedites NGN deployment by "addressing common bottlenecks - it accelerates, secures, integrates and routes services and legacy signaling in a single form."

Using Intel SOA Expressway, "we are able to accelerate and secure the NGN Control Plane," said Lenny Ridel, Traffix CTO.

 

Girish Juneja, managing director for Intel SOA Products, Intel Software and Services Group, said the combination of Traffix's approach in the Telco Authentication, Authorization and Accounting market segment and Intel's high performance service router architecture for SOA backbone processing "sets a new standard for cross network NGN service and Control Plane connectivity."

This new announcement places Traffix's Rosetta Gateway as an SOA-based Control Plane product for the NGN networks. The Rosetta Diameter Gateway is now available from Traffix Systems.

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Commtouch has announced that it is ranked Number 32 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA 2008, a rating of the 500 fastest growing technology companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

 

Rankings are based on percentage revenue growth over five years (2002-2007), Commtouch officials report that the company grew 3,319 percent during this period. Overall, companies that ranked on the Technology Fast 500 EMEA 2008 program had an average growth rate of 1,297 percent.

 

To qualify for the Fast 500, entrants must have had 2003 operating revenues of at least €50,000 and 2006 operating revenues of at least €800,000.

 

Commtouch CEO Gideon Mantel attributes the company's revenue growth to its "expanding OEM partner base," together with its advanced security technologies: "We have anticipated the market demands for security services and introduced technology to meet the threats."

 

"Achieving sustained revenue growth of 3,319 percent over five years is a tremendous achievement," said Karel Bakkes, partner in charge of Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 EMEA program.

 

Commtouch has also placed seventh on the Israel Technology Fast 50, a ranking of the 50 fastest growing technology firms in Israel. The firm sells messaging and Web security technology for security companies and service providers, founded on what company officials describe as "a datacenter-based approach."

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Amazon Web Services has launched "Public Data Sets on AWS," providing access to a centralized repository of public data sets that can be integrated into AWS cloud-based applications.

 

AWS hosts the public data sets at no charge for the community, and users pay only for the compute and storage they consume with their own applications. Data sets already available include various U.S. Census databases from the U.S. Census Bureau, 3-D chemical structures provided by Indiana University, and an annotated form of the Human Genome from Ensembl.

 

More data sets will be available soon, including a wide range of economic statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and additional scientific data sets.

 

Previously, according to the Amazonians, large data sets such as the Human Genome and U.S. Census data "required many hours to locate, download and customize." Now, company officials say, "anyone can access these large data sets from their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances and start computing on the data within minutes."

 

AWS officials say they hope to "fuel innovation and further accelerate the pace of new discoveries." Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services, says "we can't wait to see the discoveries and innovations that could stem from this ecosystem."

 

Select public data sets are hosted on Amazon EC2 for free as Amazon Elastic Block Store snapshots. Amazon EC2 customers can access this data by creating their own personal Amazon EBS volumes, using the public data set snapshots as a starting point. They can then access, modify and perform computation on these volumes directly using their Amazon EC2 instances and just pay for the compute and storage resources that they use.

 

If available, researchers can also use pre-configured Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with tools like Inquiry by BioTeam to perform their analysis.

 

"Bioinformatics is a hugely exciting area which is providing much insight into our understanding of biology and, particularly, the genetic basis of many human diseases like cancer and diabetes," said Dr. Glenn Proctor, Ensembl Software Coordinator at the EBI. "Ensembl's approach has always been to try and lower the barriers to entry so that a researcher using a desktop PC in a lab or a laptop in an airport departure lounge has access to high-quality, up to the minute genetic information."