Celebrating the Domain Pioneers at the .com Gala |  |
| Celebrating the Domain Pioneers at the .com Gala Posted: 27 May 2010 05:35 AM PDT Last night in San Francisco, California, VeriSign celebrated the .com 25 – the people and companies that, over the past 25 years, helped shape the web as we know it. This was part of the 25YearsOf.com celebration. In addition to the .com 25, Verisign also recognized a select group of Domain Pioneers. We’re proud that Tucows, and Elliot Noss, Tucows President and CEO, were on that select list of those recognized as pioneering people and companies in the domain name space. VeriSign visited our Toronto offices a few weeks back to give Elliot the opportunity to talk about how the Internet has impacted his life, and about where he sees things heading in the future: The Internet is peopleLook back all the way back to 1994, when Tucows.com software library launched in Flint, Michigan, you’ll see that there was a focus within Tucows around the idea that the Internet is made up not of wires and routers, but of people.
These days much is made of Web 2.0 and the social qualities of the Internet. But the truth is that the Internet has always been a synergy of technology and people. Without the physical interconnections, the Internet wouldn’t exist and conversely, without the Internet, many of these social connections wouldn’t be possible. What was originally a way to connect computer networks to computer networks quickly morphed into a way to interconnect the billions of people on planet earth with each other at the speed of light. Mobile, ubiquitous Internet access leads to a more social Internet which empowers people through the Internet. This generation of kids who grew up with the Internet have come to expect to be able to access it on demand, wherever they might be. They forge relationships with each other via the web, they communicate via the web and they seem to be constantly connected to each other via the web. Much thanks goes to VeriSign for putting together the 25YearsOf.com initiative. We’re honoured to be recognized as part of this select group of Pioneers. It’s a testament to vision that both Elliot and Tucows as a whole share–that the Internet is more than a vast physical network but that it is an extension, and an extender of social interactions between people that makes the world wide web so incredible and powerful. How do you .com?Along with the gala in San Francisco, VeriSign also announced a new contest, “How do you .com?,” which invites people to share their personal stories of how a .com website has changed their lives. The contest runs through August 31, 2010, and entrants’ stories will be voted on by the public as well as by a panel of judges notable in the Internet industry. The Grand Prize is $10,000, First Prize is $5,000, and Second Prize is $2,500. In addition, the contest will feature weekly drawings for an Apple iPad between June 21 and August 31. For more information about the contest go to http://www.howdoyou.com. The contest provides a great way for you to extend the 25YearsOf.com celebration to your customers. Do make them aware of the contest and other happenings around 25YearsOf.com and encourage them to think about the impact that the Internet has had, and will have on their lives in the future. |
Tucows.com used a network of thousands and thousands of mirrors – mostly Internet Service Providers – who provided a local copy of the Tucows software library to their customers as an additional feature on top of an Internet connection. In 1999 Tucows extended this network of relationships by adding domain name registrations to the mix through OpenSRS. We leveraged the existing relationships that we had in the Tucows network to build out a global network of domain sellers who used the OpenSRS backend to power sales and management of domain names to their customers.| You are subscribed to email updates from OpenSRS Reseller Blog To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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Several weeks ago, we went out an email asking for our resellers to help us improve our level of service by filling out a short survey. Thanks to everyone who participated – the response rate was great! Although we’re still crunching the numbers a bit, we’re getting some valuable insight from the survey responses, and we’ll be sharing some of that with you soon.
Last week some of the OpenSRS team headed out to San Francisco to attend the 
I've thought about it some more over the next couple of days and I want to take a shot at building some business theory and context around this argument. I warn you, I'm going to throw some freshman macroeconomics at you and probably misremember Freakonomics. I might employ the phrase "irrational exhuberance" and, just for fun, I think I'll lob in a venture capitalist conspiracy theory.
So, lots of good reasons to support free Web services. Here's the problem. These are all way more difficult than they sound and I believe most free Web services today are following a different model entirely – build a huge following now and figure out how to monetize later. Hey, it worked for Facebook. It will probably work for Twitter. But these services have succeeded by getting so many millions of users that they only need to make a few pennies off of each of them to be wildly successful. And maybe one in a thousand companies are going to amass that sort of customer base. It reminds me of the junior drug dealers in Freakonomics who are accepting wages and risks that don't make any sense because they are fixated on the one guy who got to be the kingpin. Or the college basketball players who never go to class because they're all convinced they are going to be NBA players.
These companies are subsidizing their users – offering a service that supply and demand would set at $2.95 a month, for example, for free – with resources they are borrowing from an uncertain future. Remember the impact of a subsidy on supply and demand? It shifts the supply curve to the right, lowering the price and increasing quantity. To continue to meet the demand, the service needs to continue to subsidize it themselves, find buyers for their audience or their data or wrestle the revenue from their users.
e on just one of these, it starts to feel more like a lottery ticket. And the key when you consider a pricing strategy really ends up being time. If you start off with a paid service or advertisers or a buyer for your data, you'll find out a whole lot sooner whether you can satisfy all the parties involved. If you start out offering the subsidy, you could pour years into a service only to find out later that there was never really any way to shove revenue generation into the experience.