US$ 15500 as cash prize in 2010 .INFO awards

Afilias, the registry operator for the .INFO domain, had lanched .INFO Awards 2007 . For initial two years (2007 and 2008) awards were conducted in Germany only. However, increasing popularity and success made Afilias expand the program internationally in 2009. Now in 2010, .Info awards program is open to all .INFO site owners, anywhere around the world.

2010 .INFO Awards

The call for entry ends on September 10, 2010. A panel of experts in the fields of website design and media will review submitted sites and determine a shortlist of the ten best .INFO websites. Submissions will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

• Presentation of content
• Functionality of the site
• Design
• Usability
• Originality

The short list will be published on October 5, 2010. The public may vote on their favorte .INFO site on the short list from October 5, 2010 until November 2, 2010. Winners will be announced shortly thereafter. A number of cash prizes are on for the winners.

Entry Requirements

1. Entrants for the .INFO Awards must be the valid Registrant of the .INFO Domain Name submitted.
2. The contact information of the Entrant must match one of the Registrant contacts in the .INFO Whois.
3. The submitted website can represent institutions, associations, corporations, blogs, or individuals. The site may not violate the .INFO Domain Name Abuse Policy. Websites containing content that is pornographic, illegal, or otherwise deemed by the panel in its sole discretion to be offensive will not be considered.
4. Staff members of Afilias, its holding companies, and ELEMENT C are excluded from participation. Previous winners of the .INFO Awards are not eligible.
5. All address data will be stored with Afilias database. Multiple entries and automatically generated data will be excluded from participation.
6. Winners will be announced on or before November 8, 2010.
7. Winners must possess a valid physical address and phone number.
8. This program is governed by the laws of the Republic of Ireland. Participation in this program is void where prohibited by law.

Prizes
The winners of the 2010 .INFO Awards will be awarded the following cash prizes:

1. 1st Prize: US$7500
2. 2nd Prize: US$5000
3. 3rd Prize: US$3000

To participate in the .INFO awards, visit http://www.info-award.info/

About .INFO

Registrations in .INFO first became available in 2001. INFO Domains are currently available in ten Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) scripts. For more information on .INFO please visit www.info.info.

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Internet testing regional flavour with Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)

An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains a language-specific script or alphabet, such as Hindi, Chinese, Russian or the Latin-based languages with diacritics, such as French. These writing systems are encoded by computers in multi-byte Unicode. Few domain registrar companies worldwide have started offering IDN registration. Recently I purchased (read Registered) my own IDN अजय.com from one such registrar.  Now, the question comes is that how IDNs can be hosted or accessed? How do one type the internationalized domain name in browser window if (s)he doesn’t has the tools to type in that particular language. Enters Punycode.

Punycode is intended for the encoding of language specific component of the Internationalized Domain Names, such that these domain names may be represented in the ASCII character set allowed in the Domain Name System of the Internet (The encoding syntax is defined in IETF document RFC 3492). This procedure is known as ToASCII and ToUnicode. For example अजय.com in punycode becomes xn--l1b0cxc.com. To host an IDN (domain name containing international (non-English) characters), you need to convert the domain name into “punycode” before entering it into the DNS server. The domain registrar with which you will register the IDN shall provide you punycode equivalent of that IDN. However, you can find one such tool at network tools website.

In my opinion IDNs will take some time to pickup the pace. Moreover, it will add more confusion to already confused common user of internet.