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Michele Neylon of Blacknight launches WhoOwns.It

Michele Neylon who operates domain registration and hosting company Blacknight has launched a new website named WhoOwns.It, We have completed an Interview with Michele Neylon below to let you know more about the company and its new website WhoOwns.it

Michele Neylon is the founder and managing director of Ireland’s largest registrar and hosting provider Blacknight.

Michele is an active and often outspoken member of the Internet industry. He has presented at numerous internet industry events, covering a range of topics including policy, security, ICANN, Nominet, the Internet Governance Forum and Investment/First Tuesday. Michele focuses primarily on European Internet issues and policy as well as serving on the Eurid registrar advisory board and the ENUM 353 policy advisory board. He is an award winning social media evangelist and blogger as well as a film buff who speaks four languages. Michele is also a passionate philanthropist, sponsoring events such as EarthRace and 24 The Web.

Blacknight are an Irish based, ICANN accredited domain registrar and hosting company. Recipients of several awards for their revolutionary use of social media, Blacknight are one of Europe’s most cutting edge Internet companies. Blacknight constantly seek to lead the way by introducing innovative solutions for its client base and provide dedicated servers and colocation as well as a comprehensive range of Microsoft Windows and Linux based hosting plans and domain name registration services to business globally.

Q1) Why have you launched whoowns.it?

Because we wanted to offer a better domain search facility for both our staff, our clients and the world.

Q2) Why did you go with the hack instead of purchasing the domain whoownsit.com?

The “hack” is more fun!
The other thing is one of practicality. We’d happily invest in a domain for a service, but the site is more of an ever-growing side project than a core service – for now at least.

Q3) What are your long term plans for the site?

We’ll add more domain extensions and features over the next few weeks and months. Expect to see a variety of “domain suggestion” and “searching” options appearing. But ultimately a lot of the development will be driven based on user feedback.
Our developers are playing around with some other features in their development environment, but we have to make sure that the direction they’re going in fits with what our clients want.

Q4) You have selected Afternic.com to help acquire domains for users using whoowns.it – Shall you be adding other brokers?

Afternic’s brokerage service is excellent, so for the moment, no we won’t be adding other brokers.

Q5) Whats next for you and Blacknight?

We’re constantly working on pushing out new products and services. 2013 is going to be a busy year for us. We’ll be attending quite a few events both in Europe, Asia, Africa and the US. We’re also working on a new and vastly improved customer service system and we’ve got a bunch of new and exciting products and services in the pipeline