Eric Lyon is one of the moderators at domain industry forum NamePros. In this video he shares some advice for old time domain investors as well as newbies to the industry. He also talks about Scorpion agency, his design and brand management company that works with clients all over the world.

I hope you enjoy hearing from one of the very special people in our industry as he shares from the heart his thoughts on domaining.

It’s not often that I experience the level of incompetence that I have from Optus, my Internet Service provider. For those of you that don’t know, Optus is the second biggest ISP in Australia…so there one of the big boys on the block. My experience has sparked me to write this article and circulate it to as many people as possible as an example of bad customer service and hopefully warn other away. So what’s the story?

I’ve been a good loyal Optus customer for about 15 years and I pay for the highest level of Internet possible. About five weeks ago I noticed that the speeds were getting slower and slower…..which is never good as I regularly do video conference calls etc.

After checking the speed with both the external and Optus Internet speed checks I found that I was getting about 20% of the rate that I expected. This clearly explained why many of my skype calls end up in either me or the other party speaking like a robot!

I can’t stand the term “networking”. It really iterates me when I hear people talk about “great network opportunities” when they refer to a conference. The reason I don’t like the term is that it’s completely self-centered. It’s all about what you can get out of something or someone.

How many times have you been in a conversation with someone where the only reason they want to get to know you is because of who you work for or the position you hold? You’re merely the stepping stone for them to sell some product or service. They actually don’t care about you and developing a friendship is the furthest thing from their thinking.

Yes, in business we all do transactions with one another but there is a right way and a wrong way to treat people along the journey. Networking is all about getting something…..I think we should flip the model on its head and work out what we can give.

I’ve just spent the last couple of hours reading reports and listening to updates on publicly listed company, Rightside, post their sale of Enom. Trawling through all the data has been confusing to say the least with numbers from different sources not seeming to correlate with each other. After all of this what are my conclusions?

With the sale of Enom, Rightside is putting more of its eggs in the new gTLD basket. Is this a brilliant move or more of a train wreck in slow motion? Obviously, a lot will depend upon the growth in the ngTLD market.

nTLDstats.com is suggesting Rightside grew their number of registered ngTLDs by 29,537 last quarter which means they are growing at about 13%. From a revenue perspective, they managed to increase by 23% in Q1 2017 compared to Q1 2016. All these are good healthy numbers.

I’ve just arrived home after traveling for 38 hours in multiple flying tin cans. An Air Berlin plane delay combined with their baggage handlers walking off the job played havoc with the itinerary and caused us to miss our connecting flights in both Dusseldorf and Dubai. Got to love air travel.

I pointed out to the Air Berlin ticketing agent that the measly 10 euros of compensation could not even buy us a sandwich and a bottle of water at the airport. At which point the person next to me in another line completely agreed. As you can imagine, Air Berlin is now at the top of my list of “never fly again” airlines. Enough of the complaining.....!

My first stop on this European business trip was Madrid. It’s a fascinating city with a great old quarter and some of the most modern artistic architecture I’ve ever witnessed. It was also the host of the ICANN GDD summit. Unlike many ICANN policy centered, sleep inducing, events the GDD was a hive of activity.