.tel Story of Samu�l Voet

Samuel Voet, internet entrepreneur from Belgium is the creator and owner of cancel.tel, a free but invaluable service for people who have to cancel their credit cards. Extremely accessible from a simple word over mobile devices, cancel.tel enables people to quickly navigate to the right credit card company and click to communicate with them - a fantastically simple solution to an emotionally-charged action no one likes to perform.

"At first when .tel launched I was looking for interesting names and while trying to understand what .tel could be used for and what it was all about I registered a few names. Some are very good and will find their usage in the future. Cancel.tel is something different. I didn't even register that name during the first day of .tel going public, but when I noticed it after a few days for some reason it caught my attention.

"People use their phones to take care of business, so then I tried to find a link between the domain cancel.tel and how this could be used in a good way with the .tel platform. I am convinced that .tel has a lot of power and could mean something important in the age of mobile telephones. Of course, you have the directory-style applications on things like realestate.tel and phonebook.tel, and it allows a great form of branding for companies and celebrities. If .tel becomes more important in the future it will have a significant amount of value for people and companies. Cancel.tel is a bit different from all those things. It doesn't promote anything, but I decided to turn it into a service instead.

"This service can be used by anyone around the globe and will assist people because it uses the strength of what .tel has to offer. It makes use of the simple and easy-to-remember word compared to multiple complex telephone numbers. It is very easy and fast, excellent to navigate on a mobile phone when a person is not at home where they might use a normal phone book, a computer or all kinds of other help devices.

"People don't have to think when they are in a certain mental state (they've just lost personal documents, ID, bank cards) so .tel allows to make use of a simple word to get instantly connected (with one press of a button) with the credit card service of their choice. It's even more simple than calling an emergency number.

"Cancel.tel isn't really a business project. If I can assist hundreds or thousands of people each year, save people tons of hassle and money with a simple domain name that costs under ten dollars then it's better to keep it as a service.

"I know at this stage there will not be many solutions or services on .tel which will have such an "interesting" service. If you take fire.tel, it could be a way to contact a fire department on a global scale, still people will just call the emergency services in case of a fire. So it really isn't that obvious to come up with .tel related services.

"But if a government registered swineflu.tel and then put out a commercial on television where they make use of the .tel name and people could just call if they see something suspicious. If the government used a normal phone number they would need to broadcast many more commercials because they would be forced to put the number out for people to remember, or to make sure people would write it down. With swineflu.tel, just as with cancel.tel, the number is replaced by an extremely easy to remember word.

"Cancel.tel was created in a strange way, almost unintended for what it became, now it's there, people like it, I receive mails from people telling me how much they appreciate the site. It's so simple but it does what it needs to do, almost like a spoon or a cup to drink water. In a way, cancel.tel just demonstrates all the aspects (almost all the aspects) of a .tel domain name and what it can be.