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In
addition
to a
new
Cover Story marking DN Journal's
10th Anniversary (an occasion we celebrated
on New Year's Day) that revisits the
history of the publication itself, I have been
featuring
some of the key people and events we have covered
over the past decade in a series of Lowdown
posts over the past two weeks. I touched on 2009
Monday. Today it's on to 2010.
As
the domain business grew like wildfire in the
middle of the last decade, domain conferences
sprouted up like mushrooms after a heavy
rainstorm. As many of you know, I love
conferences as they have played an
indispensable role in providing face to face
networking opportunities that have allowed
attendees to forge invaluable business
relationships. However, like anything else
it is possible to have too much of a good
thing. Such was the case with conference - not
so much for attendees who still gleaned high
value from them - but for the promoters who saw
the pie sliced so many ways it no longer made
economic sense for all of them to continue. That
situation led to our February 2010 Cover Story -
The
Rise (and Fall?) of Domain Conferences - For
Years They Have Thrived But Can They Survive
Oversaturation?
The
January 2010
DOMAINfest Global Conference in Santa
Monica, California was packed
wall to wall but over the next couple of years
many other shows were not as fortunate.
As
markets always do, the conference market corrected
itself. Over the two years since our Cover
Story equilibrium has returned to the
space with only a handful of survivors still
standing tall, led by the original conference - T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
- and DOMAINfest Global (recently renamed Webfest
Global), with the latter
re-positioning itself as a broader Internet
business development and marketing
conference.
As
the interests of domain investor/developers
expanded we decided to touch a lot of different
bases with our 2010 person profile Cover
Stories. One of the best stories about a successful
developer was our March 2010 piece about
Hallpass Media's Bill
Karamouzis and the online gaming
empire that he built and sold for millions.
Bill
Karamouzis (in his Hallpass Media office)
told us the key to development success
is to concentrate on what you are
good at and what you enjoy doing.
In
Monday's post about 2009 I mentioned the boom
in ccTLDs. That theme continued to
play out in 2010 prompting us to profile an uber
developer of Canadian .CA domains - Rick
Silver. Rick's profile was also
raised that year when he served as moderator of
several of the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conferences
that Rick Latona staged under a license
from show founder's Rick Schwartz and Howard
Neu.
Rick
Silver, the owner and developer of one of
the world's best .CA portfolios,
moderating the 2010 T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Vancouver
conference in Canada.
One of
the year's (and decade's) most popular Cover
Stories was our October 2010 profile of
T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Domain Hall of Fame member Chad
Folkening - a piece called Broken
Field Run: How Domain Investor/Developer Chad
Folkening Went from Mowing Lawns to Buying
Mansions. Chad had just taken
another giant step forward by co-founding Domain
Holdings, LLC with web heayweights John
Ferber (the man who built and sold Advertising.com
to America Online for $500
million) and Erik Simons.
Chad
Folkening with the love of his life
Bianka Krausch
in a shot from our 2010 Cover Story profile
of Chad.
Our
last 2010 Cover Story was another fascinating
profile, this one telling the life story of .CO
Registry CEO Juan
Diego Calle who led one of the best
marketing efforts the web has ever seen in
re-launching his native Colombia's .CO
ccTLD as a global domain.
Juan
Diego Calle (right) greets then ICANN Chairman
Peter Dengate Thrush at the
39th International ICANN Meeting in Cartagena,
Colombia in December 2010
Next
time - entering the home stretch - a look
at some photos and highlights from 2011.
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