Chicago Geodomain Conference a Great Success

By Conor | July 14, 2008

I am in a daze having just returned from Chicago for the 2008 Geodomain Expo. Mainly because my 9am flight back turned into a 7am flight back this morning when I realized that I booked my morning return for the wrong day (Saturday) on Saturday afternoon. I have not slept so little in a weekend since college. But most importantly, I am in a daze because of the quality of the conference this weekend.

It is quite impressive to see a room full of Internet entrepreneurs speaking to each other so openly. There is no concern of losing trade secrets to a competitor. In Chicago, it was just the opposite. There is a desire of everyone to teach others in hopes of building a stronger community and reaping the rewards of this informal partnership in the future.

Geodomains are truly a strange beast. There are no plurals or synonyms to compete with on the domain side. The biggest risk is .com versus .net/.org/.tv, which in most people believe to be a moot point. If you own a .com you have the best property. But if you are able to succeed building out a .net, it can actually benefit both parties involved.

Geodomain owners have long moved beyond domaining and are now developers. While there are many opinions out there as to the performance of the Geodomain auction, I think that fact is the real reason why the interest and inventory is so low. Geodomainers are not trying to flip to the next guy any more, so there is far less supply. Nor do they care as much about buying, because they are focused on putting their money towards development. One could almost question whether an auction is needed at this Expo.

The leaders of this industry are top notch, but the tail is long here as well. Meeting the veterans in person is exciting, but there are times when they are almost too far along the curve for me. The technology that Richmond.com or Boulevards has in place is years beyond us. However, it is the beginner help from the others about where to market (Airports? Try kiosks at the rental car booths), where to find Video producers (my question yielded 4 different answers - Thank you!), and what rates to charge for ads at the start (the Costello’s say it doesn’t matter, just sign them) that truly make this a conference and not just a series of lectures or seminars.

We brought a lot of information home from this domain and we are very excited to put it to use with Lahaina.com over the next few months. Having these new contacts to bounce ideas and questions off of will be very beneficial. I will thank each of them personally in time, but I would like to publicly thank the people who put the event together, such as Associated Cities, the Kelsey Group, Patrick Carlton, and Jessica Bookstaff.

Lastly, I will be posting more about Geodomains and even re-branding a bit towards this space going forward. I plan on talking about international geodomaining a lot more and driving interest toward taking this truly worldwide. And, most importantly, I will be back in 2009 for wherever the conference takes me!