Observations regarding domain names at CES 2017
No .tech and a big difference between startups and established players.
The prior week I attended the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The mammoth event features 3,500 exhibitors and well over 150,000 attendees.
One of the things I paid attention to, naturally, was which domain names firms were using. Here are a few observations I made.
Where’s .Tech? CES switched over to the CES.tech domain for this year’s show, but I can count the total number of times I saw CES.tech at the show on one hand. Actually, no hands. I didn’t see it a single time. Don’t get me wrong, getting hundreds of thousands of people to visit CES.tech is a big win, but I thought it would also get exposure during the show. I did get one business card from a firm that had a .tech domain on it. Interestingly, the firm uses a .com for its website and .tech address for email.
.Com rules for established firms Yeah, so no surprise here. Carnival, the cruise firm, had a huge booth (I ought to call it a building) that prominently displayed its fresh Ocean.com domain name. I don’t know how much Carnival paid to acquire the domain from Richard Lau, but I’m sure it was just a modest percentage of what it is investing in its technology and OCEAN branding.
…But fresh TLDs and ccTLD are big with startups .Com addresses weren’t as visible in the startup section of the event. Firms were opting for short domains on extensions like .io and .co. Although I didn’t see many fresh TLDs, I observed a firm using a .solutions domain. I also came across a firm using a .us domain name.
Domains are more prominent for North American and European firms These firms tended to show domains loud and proud on their booths. Asian firms…not so much. I found this odd, since many of the Asian firms were showing off technology commodities. You’d think domain names and branding would play a big part in trying to differentiate yourself.
