.tel Story of Oleg Baskakov

Oleg Baskakov is a Java Developer living in Moscow, Russia. He has rich experience in a wide range of software development projects, including development of the mobile client-server platform for social network Gorod Znakomstv ("City of dating") at Nikita, through to an SMS-delivery system in a MFM Solutions start-up, as well as working on the reporting systems for BNP Paribas bank whilst at software consulting company Neoflex.

He is currently working for premier Russian digital agency Actis Wunderman. However, Oleg is also the person behind bigcity.tel, an innovative .tel domain that automatically updates weather and activity information about big cities around the world.

"Many people remember the computer culture of demo-making in the 90s - a peculiar atmosphere of searching for creative solutions and developing impossible things, driving on the maximum of computer resources. Today, assembler code and byte optimization algorithms have lost their relevance, but in their time they opened new horizons for creative technology. Telnic has demonstrated this type of creativity by making an extraordinary present to all progressive people. Yes, I'm talking about .tel - an innovative take on traditional technologies. The .tel creates a multitude of possibilities for cutting-edge software which, in my opinion, have started a portable revolution in the domain industry."

"When I first heard about .tel, I didn't think it was particularly revolutionary, but the spherical image of the .tel logo hypnotized me! I couldn't resist this power and fell into learning about .tel and its technical specifications. I was soon impressed by the domain's capabilities and a fire of new ideas on how to leverage .tel blew up my mind, to the extent that I froze my current project for Google Android and switched on to .tel."

"The main objective as I see it of a .tel domain is as a useful management of contact information, but the potential provided by this platform is much greater. bigcity.tel has been planned to expose some of that potential and show everybody how .tel domain owners might develop these opportunities. Sometimes I need certain information about weather and upcoming concerts, but have no computer access."

"The idea of a universal source of this kind of data sounded good to me and I decided that the .tel domain is an optimal solution for dynamically updated text information. It provides both a Web and WAP presentation layer, mobile device integration and plugins for PIM software. All it needed was quality content in the .tel pages."


"Currently bigcity.tel shows weather conditions for up to 2 days (with information provided from Yahoo! Weather) and upcoming entertainment events information (provided by Eventful.com) in selected major cities. To obtain this info, I used an open API of these services and handy Telnic Client Web services to publish data into .tel pages. A software platform in Java has been created for managing these processes."

"Bigcity.tel is in the testing stage now (so, some errors could appear) and soon local news information and a list of interesting places to spend a weekend will be added.

"The development of this project didn't take much time at all and the main Alpha version was ready in 2 weeks from the start of programming. It's not difficult to develop sites like bigcity.tel; for example, it could be a service for exporting twitter records, linking to new photos or dynamically displaying the current location of the domain owner. With an optimistic vision, I can see a lot of innovative projects providing such services in the future."