I just got back from four days in Ohio spent visiting my mother who will be enjoying her 92nd Thanksgiving Day on Thursday. While focused on spending as much time as possible with her I didn't go online much during the trip. When I did turn on the laptop for a quick email check before heading to the airport for the trip home Monday morning a saddening message was waiting for me. 

My wife sent a note to let me know that our friends Michael and Judi Berkens had lost their beloved 13-year-old Yorkie Bandit who passed away over the weekend. Knowing how Michael and Judi felt about their personable pup I knew their hearts were broken. 

Bandit was their constant companion - just about anywhere you saw Michael and Judi, even if it was thousands of miles from their South Florida home, you almost certainly saw Bandit too. 

At T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conferences, Bandit became as familiar to veteran attendees as anyone on two legs (and a lot more popular than many of them)! That fact is evidenced by the condolence messages (numbering in triple digits) 

Michael and Judi Berkens with their beloved Yorkie 
Bandit who passed away over the weekend

that have been left on Michael's blog post about Bandit's passing and on his Facebook page. 

Everyone stopped to say hi to Bandit and he always responded to the attention with affection. It is appropriate that his loving nature will live on in a new Bandit Berkens Goodwill Ambassador Award that will be presented at future T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conferences. Acting on a suggestion by industry veteran and life long animal lover Donna Mahony, T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Co-Founder Rick Schwartz announced the award on his blog Monday.

Michael and Judi will have a memorial service for Bandit on Wednesday, November 30 at the Broward Pet Cemetery (11455 BW 8th Street in Plantation, Florida) where Bandit will be laid to rest. The service will begin at 12:30pm and will be open to anyone who would like to attend.

It will obviously take Michael and Judi some time to adjust to life without Bandit at their side and unfortunately no words can erase their current grief. The closest I can come is to repeat an observation my wife, Diana, made to me. She recalled that as Bandit got older and suffered more of the illnesses that come with age, Michael and Judi spared no effort or expense to ease his pain. As much as they loved him, Bandit gave that love back and there is no doubt he would not want Michael or Judi to be in pain now. As time begins to heal the wound, nothing would make Bandit happier than to know they are happy and enjoying life again. 

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DomainHoldings.com recently began publishing a free newsletter that has been providing a lot of interesting tips and information for domain investor/developers. Their latest edition that I received today includes an interview with Michael Berkens, author of popular blog TheDomains.com and one of the three partners who just stunned the industry by selling Meet.me for an astounding $450,000. 

Michael Berkens

Berkens, Rick Schwartz and Ammar Kubba paid  less than $6,000 for Meet.me three years ago. In his interview with DomainHoldings Michael talked about why he thought the trio were able to make such a phenomenal return on their investment with that domain.

"Domain names are, at the end of the day, all about branding," Berkens said. " To get high sale prices you have to be patient." Even so, Berkens admitted the Meet.me sale was extraordinary, noting, " You can’t really expect to buy a domain for $5,000 and sell it for 100X more in a short period of time."

Berkens added, "I invest for the long term. I’m not a flipper. Especially with new extensions you have to give the extension time to mature and for end-users to use domain names in the extension to sites. I would say you have to give an extension years to mature."

Berkens said that .ME is starting to mature for that very reason. ".ME has certainly gotten the attention of the venture capital guys who have put millions behind .ME sites, so that extension has seemed to prove its value and demand, especially for verbs that make call-to-action type of domains. Having said that I think the pool of great .ME domains is limited. I’m not big on keyword.me domains like the ones we saw sell recently at Sedo (like RealEstate.me for $8,050)."

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With Amazon's release of their new Kindle Fire model Monday, tablets are again the talk of the town and for the first time, that talk isn't being entirely dominated by Apple's groundbreaking iPad (though early reviewers agree the far less expensive Fire is no iPad killer). While the jockeying for position among hardware makers is always interesting to follow, I find it even more illuminating to learn how people are using their tablets (of any kind) once they get them. As Internet real estate investors and developers, that side of the equation will have the biggest impact on us.

A new article from the Center for Media Research sheds a lot of light on that topic with its breakdown of a detailed study of tablet users conducted by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, in collaboration with The Economist Group. The study found that 11% of U.S. adults now own a tablet computer of some kind and that 77% of those tablet owners use their tablets every day, spending an average of 90 minutes daily on their devices. 

Amazon's Kindle Fire
joined the tablet wars this week

While you hear a lot of talk about apps threatening the future of domain names, one of the most interesting statistics is the study is that the most popular use of tablet computers, cited by 67% of the respondents, is general browsing of the web - not app use. Sending and receiving email (another domain based activity) is second most popular at 54%. The third most popular use for tablets is reading daily news and for that activity browsers crush apps almost 2 to 1 with 40% of respondents saying they use their tablets to browse to their favorite news websites vs. 21% who say they access news via apps.  

Rounding out the favorite uses of tablet computers are Social Networking (39%), Gaming (30%), Reading Books (17%) and watching Movies and Videos (13%). 

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For the third straight year adventurous people with good hearts from the domain industry will take part in a climb of Africa's majestic Mount Kilimanjaro in an effort to raise funds and awareness for The Water School (an organization that has been embraced by many in our 

industry who have been impressed with the non-profit group's clean water solutions that are saving countless lives around the globe).  If you are up for the challenge, you could among those scaling the 19,340-foot mountain next spring. 

Water Climb 2012 will take place March 25 through April 5 but the 

registration deadline is coming up December 1 - less than three weeks from now! Space is limited and is being offered on a first-come, first-served basis. Past climbers have returned with treasured memories, incredible stories and the knowledge that they are part of something that changes lives.

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One of the questions I am most frequently asked is whether or not it is too late to make money in the domain business? Obviously, I thought the answer was "no, it's not too late" when I entered the field in 2002 (a time when a lot of others were getting out).  Over the past decade my answer has always remained the same. Despite the amazing number of twists and turns we've see in this industry over the years there is no business I would rather be in than this one right now.

The opportunities may not be in the same places they were ten years ago but there are still endless ways to make money with domains - in fact I would say there are considerably more ways to do it now than there were when I came in. The latest case in point came today from three well-known industry veterans who branched out from their .com roots to make a killing with the sale of a single .me domain they co-owned.

Three years ago Rick Schwartz, Michael Berkens and Ammar Kubba pooled their resources to invest in a handful of high quality one-word .me domains, including Meet.me - a name they paid $5,890 for. They just sold it for the astounding sum of $450,000. 

Clockwise from top left: Michael Berkens, 
Rick Schwartz and Ammar Kubba. 

Berkens provided the details on his blog today and noted how gratifying it was to prove (once again) that the success he, Schwartz and Kubba have had (and continue to have) is due to far more than being among the "lucky" ones who got into the game early. They continue to make money from the new opportunities that crop up with every turn in the domain road. That's the mark of successful serial entrepreneurs - not people who lucked out by simply being in the right place at the right time on one occasion a long time ago. 

In fact, luck has very little to do with it. It takes a  lot of hard work - often years spent gaining the kind of experience that allows you to recognize opportunities that others miss. But if you are willing to put in the work, do the research and take the calculated risks that all entrepreneurs have to take - you can make it in this field too and I continue to believe your odds are better here than just about anywhere else in today's economy.   

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Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone will deliver the keynote speech at the 2012 DOMAINfest Global conference coming up January 30 - February 2 at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, California. 

Stone became an Internet entrepreneur in 1999 and went on to work for Google. In 2006 he co-founded Twitter, Inc., the real-time, one-to-many network that has changed the way many people communicate.

Stone has been named one of the Most Influential People in The World by TIME Magazine, Entrepreneur of the Decade by Inc Magazine, and one of Vanity Fair’s Top Ten Most Influential People of the Information Age.

Stone will continue DOMAINfest’s tradition of featuring keynote speakers known for their entrepreneurial success, innovative business strategies and inspirational stories. Past keynoters have included Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy, Ben Mezrich, author of Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos and Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer.  

Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone 
will keynote at DOMAINfest Global 2012
(photo courtesy of Joi)

 
DOMAINfest Global, which is produced by DomainSponsor, the domain traffic monetization division of Oversee.net, will feature a world class group of additional speakers and panelists. In a format change for 2012, all speakers and panelists will be asked to present a brief, hard-hitting slideshow. 

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The 5th Annual .Info Awards competition is now underway with more prize money than ever before ready to be distributed to the top three finishers in the contest to determine who has developed the best .info websites. $10,000 will go to the winner, with the runner-up collecting $5,000 and the 3rd place finisher banking $3,000. 

Submissions opened Monday (November 7) and will  remain open through  Thursday, November 24 (the deadline in 11:59pm UTC on that date). To enter, just visit http://www.info-award.info, register for an account and complete the short entry form (detailed contest rules and conditions can be found here).

A panel of website design and media experts will review submitted sites and cut the field to the ten best .info websites based on:

• Presentation of content
• Functionality of the site
• Design
• Usability
• Originality 

Beginning December 5, 2011 and continuing through December 13, the decision on the three cash award winners will be turned over to the the public who will be able to vote for their favorites among the ten finalists. The winners will be announced shortly after the public voting concludes. The 5th annual awards contest coincides with the 10th Anniversary of the .info extension, a TLD that now contains 8 million registered domains. 

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Left of the Dot Media Inc., fresh off a nice geodomain deal with Oahu.com last month, is back in the news  this week with word that they have added two domain industry veterans, Xavier Buck and Slavik Viner to their Board of Directors. 

Buck is the Founder, Executive Director, and CEO of the DCL Group, which is the umbrella organization of EuroDNS, voipGATE and the Datacenter Luxembourg. His current Directorships also include AsiaDNS, DomainTools and eBrandServices. In 2008 Buck co-founded Domain Invest SA, a company which owns over 100,000 premium domains and has the support of several high profile investment firms.
 
Viner has been involved in many areas of the domain industry since the 1990’s and is widely regarded as one of its most successful investor/developers. 

Xavier Buck (left) and Slavik Viner
New board members at Left of the Dot Media Inc. 

Left of the Dot provides an alternative to domain parking by leasing sub-domains of premium domain names like Villa.com, Importers.com and HomeStaging.com. The company said sites built on these highly targeted marketing names substantially increase traffic, search engine relevance  and inherent value to the overall site, resulting in sustainable income for its clients.

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In our latest newsletter that went out to opt-in subscribers Monday, I broke down the 3Q-2011 domain sales data that was reported to us in the most recently concluded quarter. In the newsletter I noted that Sedo (who has been sharing their sales data with us since we 

started doing weekly domain sales reports back in 2003) publishes an excellent quarterly Domain Market Study with a more extensive breakdown of sales made on their popular aftermarket platform. We track only sales of $2,000 and up for .coms and $1,000 or more for other TLDs, while Sedo's publication includes the entire range of sales that go through their service.  

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Winged Media, a rapidly growing domain technology and monetization company with offices in Australia and the U.S., has secured a $3 million investment form the Carnegie Innovation Fund, LP (Carnegie Fund). 

The Carnegie Fund is supported by the Australian Government through the Innovation Investment Fund (IIF) program, an initiative that provides venture capital to innovative companies at seed, start-up or early expansion stage. This is the first investment by the Carnegie Fund in the technology sector.

Winged Media's offerings include a number of internet products and services focused on digital media, online advertising, domain assets and online publishing, but the company has recently become especially well known for the innovative new Protrada platform that I wrote about in July.  

The Winged Media/Protrada team's visibility has increased dramatically over the past year. They had a strong presence at the 2011 T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference that concluded at Fort Lauderdale Beach, Florida two weeks ago with both Rushton and Business Development Manager Louise Munck there to fill fellow attendees in on the company's offerings. 

Winged Media Business Development Manager Louise Munck chatting with Name Media's 
Marketplace General Manager & Senior VP Jason Miner at the 2011 T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference. 

Louise told me that she and her Winged Media/Protrada colleagues will also be at the DOMAINfest Global conference that will kick off the 2012 show season in late January in Santa Monica, California, a city that also happens to be home to Winged Media's U.S. office. 

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Unlike General Availability, Land Rush is not conducted on a first come, first served basis, so anyone applying for an available domain name will have a chance to get it. At the end of the Land Rush period, domain names with only one application will be simply awarded, while those with two or more applications will go to the winner of the auction between the respective applicants.

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