My week at NamesCon: A Recap

A recap of what I did, saw, and heard during NamesCon the prior week.

The prior week was the inaugural NamesCon conference in Las Vegas.

In case you weren’t one of the close to 600 people who experienced it in person, everything you’ve heard is spot on: it was a home run. Richard Lau, Jodi Chamberlain, and Jothan Frakes did a fantastic job pulling this conference together in a short period of time. They saw a hole in the domain conference circuit and filled it with zeal.

I’ve by now written a few posts regarding the conference, and I’ll write more in-depth posts regarding some of my observations the rest of this stretch. This post is a brief walk-through.

Monday

NamesCon attendees strolled in most of the day Monday. The day didn’t officially kick off until 8pm, when .xyz hosted the opening night party. It was packed.

Tuesday

Monday morning started with a keynote by Jennifer Wolfe, a fresh TLD consultant who works primarily with brands. I’ve read Wolfe’s book, which explains how firms can leverage .brand top level domains. Her talk also discussed how firms that didn’t apply for a .brand could leverage other fresh TLDs.

The challenge I have with her book and her talk is that all of her examples are things firms can right now do with .com domains or other extensions. Merely creating a domain.brand instead of domain.brand.com or brand.com/domain isn’t big innovation, and won’t change how people interact with brands online. I have yet to hear how a brand can do something truly fresh or different with a .brand, although I’m all ears.

Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman then came on stage to pitch Las Vegas as a good place to do business. She also mentioned .vegas, but made a faux paus: she accidentally stated Vegas.com one time. We’ll be hearing a lot of these mistakes over the next couple years.

Following Goodman’s talk, the conference split up into three tracks. I stuck around the main conference area to hear five fresh top level domain applicants discuss their plans. There are a wide variety of marketing plans and price ranges for fresh TLDs. On one end of the spectrum was .xyz, which is open to everyone and will cost regarding $10. On the other end is .luxury, which will truly be a luxury item costing hundreds of dollars to register.

Just outside the main conference room was the exhibit hall, which you had to walk through to get to the conference area. The exhibit area was much bigger than any non-ICANN domain conference I’ve been to in a while. It was similar to DomainFest a few years back. One of the big draws was .buzz’s massage booth.

I missed the next couple sessions due to meetings. Had I not been busy, I really wanted to see the “Fresh TLDs + Domainers” panel to hear what Top Level Domain Holdings Chief Strategy Officer Fred Krueger had to say. I wondered if he’d carry the same tone that he did in a comment over at Domain Incite, where he wrote “…Fresh TLD registries are going to have the last laugh as all these fresh TLDs crush (and I mean crush) dot com domainers. Good luck standing up to this tsunami of alternatives to your bad and overpriced domain name portfolios gentlemen.”

Apparently he delivered. Shane Cultra has a great post regarding what Krueger stated, and draws some great analogies.

Around lunchtime I managed to sneak in a trip to .xyz’s fresh office, just a few minutes down Tropicana from the hotel. You can read more regarding .xyz and its Las Vegas office building here.

In the afternoon I attended the legal panel. Despite an all-star cast counting John Berryhill, Bret Fausett, Ari Goldberger, Daliah Saper, and Albert Angel, the session failed to draw a big audience. That’s a shame, since they each gave a great story regarding stupid legal mistakes people have made. I have a separate post (coming soon) with all of their stories.

The programming concluded with Frank Schilling’s keynote, which you can read regarding here.

The day ended with Water Night, a charity event that raised over $100,000 for The Water School.

Wednesday

In the morning, Jodee Rich, who’s backing the bid for .ceo and runs social media analytics firm PeopleBrowsr, discussed his view of the domain market going forward and .ceo. I don’t really understand .ceo, but I went into his talk with an open mind.

He discussed how social networks are not niche enough, and people don’t want to post niche subject matter on Facebook when so many viewers won’t be interested.

The idea of niche social networks isn’t fresh. The joke at startup conferences five years ago was that everyone was starting “a social network for ________”, with the blank filled in by teachers, knitters, athletes, or people who like to be choked by dead cats.

The difference may be that Rich’s firm has the Twitter data to target these niches. Whether there’s demand, I don’t know. He plans to use some of this data and pre-made web pages to target CEOs for .ceo. Although I’m sure there’s a market for a network for CEO’s, I still don’t understand why adding a fresh top level domain name layer to it adds value. I also think that if someone started emailing me from a .ceo address, I’d think they were a poser rather than a leader.

Rich concluded with an encore to his interesting .ceo video played during the ICANN meeting with more of the same, which some people in the crowd labeling it as sexist.

Jeremy Schoemaker, aka ShoeMoney, followed up with a keynote regarding how he’s made money online and the value of creating prospect lists.

Around lunchtime I moderated a panel featuring some of my domain blogging peers. Afterward I stopped in for part of the last-minute visit by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. He had some interesting comments regarding domain names.

The next programming I caught was Bing’s Duane Forrester, who started his talk with a discussion regarding domain names and search. I’ll have a separate post regarding that later.

As things started to wind down, the Ping Pong tournament in the exhibit hall heated up. A lot of familiar faces squared off. Ray King of Top Level Design, a fresh TLD applicant, won the tournament.

Thursday

I headed back to Austin on Thursday morning.

Las Vegas has this cruel idea that it ought to take every nickel you have ahead of you leave town. Its airport is stuffed with slot machines trying to grab your attention ahead of your flight boards.

I actually hadn’t gambled at all while in Vegas. I was too busy. But I stopped at a slot machine at the aiport. When I quickly went up $50, I decided to call it quits.

It was just $50, but for once I could say I left Las Vegas a winner.