For the past five weeks Roselyn and I have been traveling all over Europe. It’s been fantastic to experience different cultures, food and a lot of adventures but now I’m focused on ICANN in Abu Dhabi.

I’m writing this from the Rome airport where we’re catching an Emirates flight through to Dubai. Once landed, a car will take us to Abu Dhabi and the conference.....so please bear with the brevity of the article.

For those of you that have never been to an ICANN conference they are something to experience. As well as the normal policy work a huge amount of business is conducted in a very short space of time. You literally have thousands of representatives from registries, registrars, hosting companies and ancillary businesses in the same room….so a lot gets done.

What can be a little intimidating for first time attendees is the fact that everyone seems to know everyone else. This shouldn’t be a surprise as many of the attendees have spent the last twenty plus years charting the course of the Internet together. Despite this, what I’ve found is the great majority are really wonderful people trying to do the best for the businesses and organisations they represent.

I’ve found that each ICANN related conference has been very worthwhile attending as they have given me a much wider appreciation for all the stakeholders in the domain community. Sometimes, as domain investors, we can become quite myopic in our thinking about what is and isn’t important.

Some people complain about ICANN taking a long, long time to make decisions. I personally like this as I know nothing is going to leap out of a dark corner and sideline my business. If ICANN does anything on the policy front that impacts my investments, then I’ll know about it for literally years before it’s finally put into practice.

If you’re attending ICANN then don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’d love to catch-up for a drink or two….in the meantime, I’d better go and catch that flight!

Cheers!

Don't forget to read Part 1 in my Journey into Social Media...

I’d fallen into a marketing trap. I did a market survey of one (ie. me) and decided that everyone must be like me and not be particularly interested in social media.

It’s dangerous to make assumptions that aren’t tested and after I’d detangled myself from my preconceptions I stood back and came to the conclusion I was wrong. It’s like a domain traffic investor believing what they’ve always done is the correct path while they watch their revenues plummet…..they’re just wrong. As Einstein said, if you keep on doing the same thing you’ve always done and expect a different result then you’re crazy.

My conclusion is that Social Media is becoming less and less about plates of food, cats, dogs (I’ve now becoming addicted to these….sigh….) and the like and more about communication and the sharing of emotional experiences. I post articles from my blog because they mean something to me and I want to share them. I also post pictures of Roselyn because I love my wife.

Social Media has always been one of those things that I’ve been both intrigued by and ambivalent towards. I’ve always assumed that social media is a complete time waster and a mind numbing parade of cats, memes and people speaking before they think…..then again I could be wrong…..

Up until recently I’ve had the following attitude about social media. I don’t really care what you had for dinner last night. Yes, I’m sure that it was magnificent but unless I’m with you then you’re just telling me how much fun I’m not having. I’m sure Donald Trump is/is not a complete moron but why tell me that? The cats are cute (sigh…..I miss Pepper) and the dog singing a song was clever but I’d rather watch a movie.

The first two articles in this series discussed the different aspects of the exciting new ParkLogic Next platform. Below is a video that demonstrates a number of the features of Next in the client interface.

Don't forget to catch-up with a ParkLogic representative at the Merge conference in Orlando over the next few days. I'm sure they will be happy to answer any additional questions you may have.

Part 1 in the series on the new ParkLogic Next platform covered a number of the innovations that have been built into the new platform. In this article, I'm highlighting some of the new features in the client interface that greatly assist in managing a domain portfolio.

On top of the revolutionized backend the ParkLogic team have poured a huge amount of effort into providing a client interface that is full of invaluable easily accessible information. The ultimate goal is to make downloading statistics into Excel a thing of the past. Right in the interface, clients can sort, filter and manipulate their domain traffic data…..but of course, CSV files will always be available.

The dashboard provides a slider for expanded viewing of date ranges and you can even drop trend lines right on a chart. At a click of a button, any data in a graph can be instantly displayed in the table below. It’s all about making the data both accessible and actionable.