Remember Realnames – the company that promised to eliminate the need for URLs forever? With their system you needed only to enter a company’s name in the address window of a Web browser instead of a URL and you would be taken to that company’s Web site. Of course, the flaw with this system is that you had to know firsthand which companies had actually registered their names with Realnames — not enough ever did and the company failed.
Apparently a company in Korea, Netpia, has resurrected the Realnames business model with early success. Here’s an article about the company. It will be interesting to see how Netpia does over the long run against the likes of Google, which has a Korean-language search engine.