[Sydney, AUSTRALIA] Melbourne IT will offer domain names written in Chinese characters, following an agreement with i-DNS International. The company's subsidiary, Internet Names WorldWide (INWW), will be the first ICANN-accredited domain name registrar to offer the Chinese names, and plans to extend the licence to cover other character-based languages, including Japanese, Arabic, Thai and Tamil.

The domain names are supported by technology developed by i-DNS' Singapore branch, which extends domain naming beyond the use of ASCII Roman characters.

According to Clive Flory, general manager of INWW, the technology will help drive Internet adoption amongst the non-English speaking population and open up new e-commerce opportunites in countries where English is not "comfortably used... From a business perspective, it makes the marketing of Web addresses easier and more effective. Language-specific sites can market the address of their site in the relevant native written language... Its an intuitive process," he said.

The licensing agreement will expand the business opportunities of Melbourne IT too, Flory added. "INWW has a unique opportunity to be involved at the early stages of what promises to be a rapid expansion of Internet adoption by the non-English speaking world. The I-DNS licence helps us further our expansion into new markets."

INWW also offers mult-year (up to ten years) and multi-character (up to 63 characters) domain name registrations.