Personally I think the idea seems a bit outdated. It basically provides a direct method to connect to a single business. This sounds alright in function, but when you think about the overall landscape of user interactivity, it becomes far less attractive.
It may have some appeal as far as registering generic keywords and setting up a pay-per-call contract with an advertiser. The drawback here is that I cant see how the advertiser would be able to track where the calls originated from. They would just get random calls and have to go on the word of the domain owner that they were sent X amount of calls through their domain. Without tracking functionality I don't see the opportunity.
Theres also the possibility of owning a domain like pizza.tel and establishing annual priced contracts with local pizza shops throughout the country to be the exclusive contact for domain traffic originating in the pizza shop's area. (or any type of business, hotels, car rentals, real estate, etc...). The problem here is that there will need to be some way to create a dynamic way to route the calls based on the callers location to put them in contact with the local source. From what I've read, it seems that the contact details will be held in the DNS and these details alone will be what the domain will resolve to. Not sure if it would be possible to implement the dynamic system that would be required to allow for possibly thousands of varying contacts based on GPS. Which would again make this opportunity unfeasible.
I guess the only real option would be to own a generic keyword and have an annual contract with a major corporation that has chains all over the country. You would then direct the calls to an 800#, where the company would have to redirect the calls using the callers ANI or just giving them the option to enter their zipcode etc... This method seems feasible.
As far as user interactivity... Most of us want options... We want to be able to search a topic, find various options, and get extended information. This is the information age after all. If we are in need of a hotel, type-in hotel.tel and are instantly connected to some random hotel we know nothing about, what are the chances that this will convert? Or we're looking for a restaurant and get connected to some random Italian restaurant when we were in the mood for Indian? Even if we were in the mood for Italian, how do we know its a decent place? We have no options to read reviews, get directions to the place, or see the menu.
It all just seems like a hi-tech way of doing something outdated...
