Most phone companies offer this service, which gives you a tracking phone number that you put into .tel.

Here is a description of remote call forwarding as provided by my Canadian phone company, as well as a description of market expansion line from a major American phone company.

When somebody uses that number, the call is forwarded to your actual line, but call duration and the total number of calls is tracked by the phone company. You then get a report with all the data to demonstrate how your .tel phone line is working.

If your phone company does not provide the service you need, you can also set up a tracking line forwarded to a toll-free number. This should provide you with similar data. While most phone companies will charge for the tracking number service, it’s typically a small fee.

We hope that using these tools will provide you a clearer picture of the volume of calls coming from your .TEL name.

Here’s three big developments from the past couple days:

.TEL Search Engine – Jepaa Delivers Contact Information Fast

A .TEL search engine launched this week. It’s called Jepaa and it’s TEL specific, searching only .TEL sites. When somebody searches for contact information on Google they typically have to (A) sort through pages of search results that don’t relate to what they are looking for; or (B) dig through multiple pages to find contact information. Jepaa simplifies things by delivering you contact information in the form of .TEL sites. Jepaa’s other cool features include mobile compatibility, support of multiple languages and the ability to provide results that take both keywords and locations into consideration. Another nice-to-have:  it’s compatible with Adsense.

Read more about Jepaa.  Try Jepaa out for yourself .

.TEL Blackberry App available for Download

Telnic announced yesterday that the final release of its free BlackBerry(TM) plug-in is available for download. The application enables BlackBerry users to do the following things:

• Directly lookup a .TEL domain inside the address book, including private information from friends
• Search for a .TEL domain inside the address book
• Add any .TEL domain as a new contact or associate it with an existing contact
• Send ‘friending’ requests and accept or decline them depending on your TelFriends status
• Quickly change your .TEL profile to make sure your contacts reach you the way you want

Navigating by BlackBerry, the app is available at http://telnic.org/community-applications.html or http://bb.apps.telnic.tel

Read the Telnic press release

My.tel – .TEL  iPhone App Now Available

And to complete the trifecta, just today Telnic announced the availability of My.tel . The free, open source iPhone application allows .TEL owners with iPhones to manage .TEL domains without having to log on to a computer.  The app makes it easy to do the following :

• Publish a location through an embedded map linked with the iPhone’s GPS
• Update their status using profiles depending on how they want to be contacted at that time
• Add new, remove, hide or show items of contact information
• Manage, add or remove folders and profiles which group contact information together
• Manage privacy settings for friends and colleagues
• Add or remove keywords that help people searching for .TEL  owners contact information.

My.tel can be downloaded for free from the App Store or via the iPhone usingthe App Store application.

Read the Telnic press release

Email also launched for .TEL names this week, at least at one registrar. Read our previous post for more information.

And it you’re in the market for a .TEL name, there are still lot’s  of great ones available. Click here to search for yours.

Instead of storing static contact data in your address book, Superbook users only need to store  .TEL names .

The following video shows how Superbook works. What’s especially cool is that everything you see happening in it is dynamic and occurring in in real time. After finding the .TEL you want in Superbook, the call is made in seconds. Nothing in Superbook is cached apart from some maps. The .tel navigation taking place is done entirely through DNS queries.

When will it be available? Superbook is currently being reviewed by the folks at Apple. The review process could take a week, or it could take several weeks. We’ll keep our ears open for word of its release and let you know when it’s available.

Haven’t registered your .TEL name yet? Search to see if it’s available and have it live before Superbook launches to the public.