I needed a way to advertise and discover services over the internet. I found Apple's Wide Area Bonjour (aka. DNS Service Discovery) to be a good fit except that I couldn't find a suitable DNS server to use. So I wrote one and have started work on making it available as a hosted service. If you've got a few OS X machines and you'd like to try it out head over to http://www.globalhostname.com/ and try the free beta.