Guy is, well, he is a smart guy. Guy Kawasaki has been Apple Macintosh evangelist for years before he founded the venture capital firm Garage Technology Ventures which makes direct investments in technology companies and Internet start-ups. I’ve learned a great deal on Guy’s blog, where, as he says, he wants to empower entrepreneurs. In fact, many of his blog posts teach you more than you could ever learn in school. For example, take his August 2006 blog post “Ten Things to Learn This School Year“:
It seems to me that schools often teach the opposite of what’s necessary for the real world. Perhaps in school people have plenty of time and no money, so long papers, emails, and presentations are not a problem. However, people in the real world have plenty of money (or at least more money) and no time. This is a list of what I wished I learned in school before I graduated.
What follows is a list of ten great advices like “How to explain something in thirty seconds” or “How to write a five-sentence email”. In school they teach you how to write ten-page essays, but what they don’t teach you is how to get all your important arguments into one page or less. It’s always been my opinion that what you learn in school is much more theoretical than it is practical (read: useful).
Therefore, take ten minutes of your time and read Guy’s blog post mentioned above, because it will be ten minutes well-spent.
Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld interviewed Rick Schwartz about domain parking, live domain auctions, the .cm ccTLD, web traffic and other domain-related subjects.
There is a nice piece on Fabulous.com’s Dan Warner in the Sydney Morning Herald today. Another domain-related article that has been published in the mainstream press in the recent weeks.
Dan Warner, chief strategy officer at Brisbane-based Dark Blue Sea Limited, is used to watching multimillion-dollar sales of domains such as Diamond.com and Vodka.com take the headlines. His story of a slow and steady accumulation of domains, bought for less than $7 and sold for thousands, day in and day out for several years, lacks get-rich-quick appeal. Yet this measured approach to domain accumulation has grown a $5 million initial investment into a company with a market cap of $68 million.
His company holds the world’s second-largest portfolio of domain names, with more than 550,000. NameMedia Inc., of Waltham, Massachusetts, has about 725,000. Together, these two companies hold more than 1 per cent of the world’s domains.
I finally got the chance to see the actual clip on CNBC’s On The Money and I’m disappointed to say the least. The clip has been titled “He makes millions on typos” and it talks about nothing but typosquatting. After all, the clip is pretty bad press for the domain industry, because people from outside the industry might have been confirmed in their views of domainers as tricksters and cybersquatters. Having also re-read the Business 2.0 article several times, I must say it contains many negative points too and only adds to the bad image of domainers as people making money from the trademarks of other companies.
This is so untrue! There are only very few black sheep in the industry and it’s them who feed the bad image domainers are having in the public. Don’t get me wrong. Paul Sloan’s article is well-written, but it certainly leaves a bad aftertaste. Kevin Ham owns a very nice generic domain portfolio and he is not cybersquatting with his .cm scheme, because he’s only monetizing domains that are not registered. Though, the article is the cover story of Business 2.0’s June edition and most people who will read it are not into domain investing. Therefore, many of these people do not see the difference between monetizing generic domains and earning money from typos and I believe many of the readers will think Kevin is running some kind of shady business, which he is not. He’s only having a wild-card refresh the URL of unregistered .cm domains to point to a specific page. This is legal and both Microsoft and Google have been doing this for a long time with unregistered domains, domain extension typos (e.g. .xom, .cpm) and domains that cannot be reached by having their browser (Microsoft: Internet Explorer; Google: FireFox) forward the typo traffic to a parking page. In fact, the Microsoft/Google scheme goes a step further than Kevin Ham, because Microsoft and Google make money from TLDs that do not even exist. On the other hand, .cm belongs to Cameroon and it has been the country’s decision to monetize the typo traffic arriving at their domain extension.
Paul Sloan’s new article, which I wrote about in an earlier blog post, has now been made available online at Business2.com. It’s about Kevin Ham of Reinvent Technology and the title is “The Man Who Owns The Internet”.
I’ve done business with Kevin Ham myself and I can say it’s been a pleasure dealing with him. He’s a very active buyer of generic .com domains. His latest coup is that he partnered with Cameroon to monetize the tons of daily typo traffic of the country’s unregistered .cm domain names.
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