Voting opens for the best .INFO website of 2011

Afilias, a global provider of registry operations services and the registry operator for the .INFO top-level domain (TLD), announced that the 2011 .INFO Awards – celebrating the tenth anniversary of the .INFO domain -- are now open for public voting. Anyone can now vote for his or her favorite of the top 10 .INFO nominees, selected by a panel of distinguished judges. Each voter will also automatically be entered to win one of five new Amazon Kindle Fire tablets.

"Today, with more than eight million domain names and millions of live sites, .INFO is synonymous with quality information on the Internet," said Roland LaPlante, Senior Vice President and CMO, Afilias. "The .INFO Awards let you show your support for this year's nominees as well as giving you the opportunity to win this year’s hot ‘toy’: the Kindle Fire from Amazon."

The 2011 panel of judges included seven distinguished individuals from the online, media and technology industries: Dominik Grollmann, editor in chief, Internet World Business (Germany); Peter Prestipino, editor in chief, Website Magazine (US); Liam Eagle, editor in chief, The Web Host Industry Review (Canada); Anand Parthasarathy, editor, IndiaTechOnline.com (India); Katy Tafoya, creator and editor, ConstantChatter.com (US); Daljit Bhurji, Managing Director, Diffusion PR (UK) and Philipp Grabensee, chairman of the board, Afilias (Germany).

The panel selected the following sites as the top 10 nominees for the best .INFO website of 2011:

• www.docma.info
• www.frauenundhiv.info (“Women and HIV”)
• www.hotel.info
• www.mailworx.info
• www.opentype.info
• www.solicitor.info
• www.trafalgarsquare.info
• www.typografie.info
• www.visitwhitemountains.info
• www.wien.info (“Vienna)

Dozens of sites were submitted from 17 countries for this year's awards. Entry categories covered include personal websites (28 percent), business websites (27 percent), non-profit websites (15 percent) and blogs (10 percent). Awards judge Anand Parthasarathy said, “Some of the best sites this year come from non-profit organizations who have created compelling resources, sharply focused on the needs of a specific community of users.”

Public votes will be combined with the judges' scores to select the top three winners, with first place being named the "Best .INFO website of 2011." Award prizes are US$10,000 for the winner, US$5,000 for second place, and US$3,000 for third place. In conjunction with the announcement of the award winners, five voters will be chosen at random to receive an Amazon Kindle Fire tablet.

Members of the public can vote for their favorite site at www.info-award.info now. Public voting will remain open until 11:59 p.m. UTC, Tuesday, December 13, 2011.

About .INFO

.INFO was the first generic, unrestricted TLD to be launched since .com and is the most successful new TLD launched in more than 25 years. Registrations in .INFO first became available in 2001. Since then, .INFO has grown to become the fourth largest gTLD in the world with more than eight million domain names registered. .INFO domains are currently available in ten Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) scripts. For more information on .INFO, visit www.info.info.

About Afilias

Afilias is a global provider of Internet infrastructure services that connect people to their data. Afilias’ reliable, secure, scalable, and globally available technology supports a wide range of applications, including Internet domain registry services and Managed DNS. For more information on Afilias, visit http://www.afilias.info.

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