Geir Rasmussen

Geir was a founder and CEO of the Global Name Registry Ltd (GNR), the operator of the .name top-level domain (gTLD). Geir has a background in computer science and has over 18 years of experience in the Internet sector, including 13 years in the domain name industry.

GNR focused on digital identity services, utilizing the .name gTLD as a core part of providing individuals worldwide with personal and memorable digital identities. GNR offered two core products: a personalized email address with forwarding capabilities (e.g. john@smith.name), and a personalized domain name (e.g. www.johnsmith.name).

Geir was the CTO of the company during its initial phase, and was responsible for building its own Registry system, global DNS resolution infrastructure, as well as a 24/7/365 network operations function. He further managed the integration of the Registrar channel and the different phases of the .name launch in 2002. Later, Geir managed the transition from an in-house infrastructure to an outsourced backend provider in order to optimize the cost base of the company. Global Name Registry Ltd was acquired by VeriSign Inc. in late 2008.

Prior to GNR, Geir was a founder of the personal email provider Nameplanet.com. Nameplanet.com provided email accounts using personal domain names to over 1.5 million users. The company had a portfolio of over 100,000 personal domain names on a number of TLDs, providing consumers with a highly personal domain name using their name as an email address. Nameplanet.com was acquired by Netidentity.com in 2002, and is now part of Tucows following an acquisition in 2006.

Prior to Nameplanet.com, Geir was a founding investor in a web-pad company producing the Free Pad, a Linux based touch-screen, wireless Tablet PC. He was a co-founder of one of the first web content management systems (IMAKER CMS) which launched in 1995. Geir managed sales, project management, development and deployment of a large number of internet projects in the early days of the World Wide Web. These projects included developing and launching 52 online newspapers, online travel agencies, financial institutions and a number of other commercial, government and educational web sites. Geir also co-founded Synaps as a vehicle for the research and development of a laser and image recognition based optical weighing system for industrial use.