DOMAINfest Global 2010 Begins (From My View)

Hello from sunny Southern California!  Hah, I am bending the truth just a bit.  The weather out here is reflective of that in Seattle.  Yes folks, I am hear to give you your local weather.  As some of you know I am native to Los Angeles, California.  I have had the pleasure of living here all of my life.

On top of that I live about 5 minutes from my childhood home in Ladera Heights, an area positioned between Culver City and Westchester.  For those that don’t know the area I live near the LAX airport.  Although the weather is bad out here in Santa Monica, the conference has been great.  Keep in mind I will be as honest as possible in my posts in regards to this conference, because I paid to be here and this is the conference from my view.

I missed the breakfast this morning which took place between 7:30am – 9:00am, because  I arrived to the conference a little late but had the luxury to attend Session 1 – PITCHfest: Vote for the Best Domain Monetization.  This session included the following judges:

Eric Liaw (Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV))
Adam Rioux (OCTANE360)
Frank Schilling (Name Administration, Inc)
Ron Sheridan

During this session entrepreneurs had the chance to pitch ideas for products and services they are currently working on.  The winner of PITCHfest received a DOMAINfest Global 2010 Service Innovator award.  To make the session a bit more interactive, audience attendees had the chance to vote on who they felt had the best pitch.  On a side note it was great to finally see Frank Schilling in person.  I hear a lot of great news about the guy and started to think he might of been a myth. Well he is not a myth and provided great insight as a judge for PITCHfest.

Drum roll please, the winner for PITCHfest was Adam Epstein from AdMarketplace.  His company has developed a new way to monetize domain names.  Instead of the boring text ads we are used to seeing in PPC campaigns, they have developed Ad Tag Cloud 2.0 a new way to display a text based ad.  Think of this as an ad on steroids, one which contains a set of keywords and terms placed within a dynamic field.  Once hovered over, it displays an ad pertaining to the keyterm.

It also spices the standard ppc advertisement up a bit by displaying a graphic based background.  Too put it simply the ads looks better and are more functional then the ones currently being served on the Google Adwords platform.  You can view an example of this here.

I won’t go into this session any further because I arrived late and didn’t get a chance to hear all of the candidates give there pitch.  After lunch, the Oversee CEO gave an inspirational speech about how the domaining market is still alive and ticking.  He compared it to a story which involved his grandfather, who had the opportunity to purchase prime real estate on Wilshire when they first moved to California.  Unfortunately his grandfather did not take advantage of such an opportunity and did not reep from the benefits.  He went further to mention how some people just don’t get domain names or the domaining industry.  Then he want onto say that they have the same mindset of his grandfather.

To simplify this as well, some people won’t take advantage of the investment opportunities that domain names offer.  In the end these individuals will have stories on how they could of purchased a domain name years ago, but they never ended up doing it!  Pretty interesting, the comparison between prime real estate on Wilshire and prime virtual real estate online.  I tend to compare physical real estate and virtual real estate all of the time.  It is the main way I have decided to describe the domaining world.  Glad the CEO broke it down even further and related it to his grandfather’s story.

Session 2 – New gTLDs: Bonanza or Bust? just ended.  I may or may not write about this as I am not really thrilled about new gTLDs being formed.  It is a very controversial topic and in my opinion completely saturates the current market as we know it.