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Above:
Epik.com CEO Rob Monster (at far right)
conducts Swapfest on the closing day
of the 2010 T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Miami conference Wednesday
(Oct. 20).
Below:
Part of the crowd on hand for Epik's Swapfest
event.
Several
things make Swapfest a unique sale. For
one, all domains include a website developed
on the Epik platform and for another, you can pay
for winning bids with either cash of Epik
bucks, a new form of currency invented
by the company to bring added liquidity to
the market. We had to begin the trek back home
before the sale ended and the results have not yet
been posted but I would expect to see a recap soon
on the Epik
blog.
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This
was one of the best T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
conferences ever (and many of those
who attended have let show co-founder Rick
Schwartz know that in comments on his blog).
Schwartz and fellow Co-Founder Howard
Neu, backed by a tremendous family
support team in Barbara Neu, Ray
Neu and Alina Schwartz, hit
this one out of the park. The
venue, the number and quality of people on
hand, food service and programming all
served to burnish T.R.A.F.F.I.C.'s luxury
brand.
With
so many new competitors cutting the
conference pie into dozens of pieces,
T.R.A.F.F.I.C., over the past couple of
years, has experimented with different
approaches (including lowering prices and
trimming expenses) in search of the
best combination to continue standing out
in an industry category that this |
Rick
Schwartz and Howard Neu
T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Co-Founders |
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conference
originated in 2004. Ironically, the
formula that wound up working best, as
clearly demonstrated in Miami, was the one
they began with - do everything
first class or don't do it at all.
I posted from
Miami daily during the show but with while
the conference was underway there wasn't
time to go into a lot of detail about
individual events or to edit and share
more of the many photos we shot during the
conference. We will be doing that in a
comprehensive review article that we will
publish around this time next week. |
In this
last of the daily reports from the show, I wanted
to leave you with a personal note about what to me
has been by far the biggest dividend I've
received from attending so many T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
conferences over the years. The show has a slogan
- T.R.A.F.F.I.C Means Business - and it
does - a remarkable number of major deals are cut
at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. shows - but the bigger reward
has been meeting a very special group of people
and forming many personal friendships that I think
will last a lifetime. I've done no business at
all with many of these people, but they have
enriched my life immeasurably. After a few
days, the lights at the latest show go off, but the
friendships go on.
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I'll give you
one example from the trip to T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
Miami. Rob Grant (who I got to know
well when writing a profile about him for
an April
2000 Cover Story) lives in Lake
Placid, New York, but also has a
vacation condo on Anna Maria Island
(a relatively unknown jewel on Florida's
West Coast, about an hour south of our
home in Tampa).
On the final
night of the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference,
Rob, who had not had a chance to stay at
his condo for over a year, decided
at the last moment that he wanted to stay
over in Florida for a few days and go
there. Knowing we would pass near Anna
Maria on our way back home, he asked my
wife, Diana, and I if we had room
for him to hitch a ride to our side of
the |
Rob
Grant and Ron Jackson on Anna
Maria
Island (Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2010) |
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state. I was
happy to have the opportunity to take him all the way to his
front door because when I first moved to
Florida from Ohio at the age of 22, I
lived minutes away from his
vacation getaway and for two years spent
part of almost every day on the island's
beautiful Coquina Beach. I was
curious to see how much things had changed
there over the past three decades.
Fortunately, not much - it is still a
little piece of heaven on earth. |
Above:
the historic Anna Maria City Pier we
visited with Rob Grant (Wed. Oct. 20, 2010)
Below:
The Old Florida style restaurant at the end of the
pier where Rob took Diana
and I to dinner (the fresh seafood was some
of the best we have ever had).
Below:
After dinner Rob showed us around the island and
he snapped the
picture of Diana and I below that was taken
at a second pier, a short distance
up the coast from the first one (a record-breaking
17-foot shark that people still
talk about was caught off this pier several
decades ago).
It was a
very special day with Rob. Talking domains with
him along the way made the four-hour
drive from Miami feel like it went by in four
minutes. The evening with him on the island
was even better - a reminder that it is not the
business, it is the people who make this
field the best on earth to be a part of.
T.R.A.F.F.I.C. brought us, and many other special
people like Rob, together and, at least as far as
I'm concerned, that is the greatest conference
value of all.
Above:
After leaving Rob, on the way home we stopped at Coquina
Beach to watch the
sun go down. The perfect end to a perfect day and
our latest T.R.A.F.F.I.C. adventure.
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