In the rush into the new gTLDs many domain investors have almost forgotten about the ccTLDs. The country codes are full of incredible domains that are in many cases still available at registration fee. The question we need to ask is why?

There is one thing for certain, most ccTLDs have neglected marketing to the domainer community. When you consider that around 30% of registered domains are owned by investors the lack of focus on this market by the registries is at their loss. In addition, domain owners that aren’t keeping an eye on the ccTLD market segment are missing out on a fantastic opportunity.

I remember attending one of the very first TRAFFIC conferences and one of the things that struck me about it was that it was incredibly .COM centric. No one was talking about any of the other extensions….in fact, they were often regarded as being irrelevant.

I love lakes. They are beautifully calming as you gaze across their sparkling surface in the glow of a setting sun. It just so happens I don’t enjoy one particular lake……this one spontaneously formed in our bedroom early Tuesday morning.

I was working late (as I often do), headed to bed and as I stepped into the bedroom, rather than the comforting soft new plush carpet beneath my feet I heard a splash. You guessed it, we had a cracked pipe that was letting out water that should normally be trapped inside of it into our bedroom.

Being the good husband that I am, I waded across the bedroom and woke up my wife to inform her we were about to drown in the half inch of water making its way towards our bed. Being the joy of my life, she replied, “What do you want me to do about it?” and promptly went back to sleep. It was with fear and trepidation that I too managed a few winks to dreams of be engulfed in a deluge.

The next day I mastered my anxiety and called the insurance company. I was no longer anxious about the water (I’d got over that) but more apprehensive about what the heck did our policy actually cover in these circumstances.

I remember when I was about 13 years-old, my friend and I used to ride our bikes a few miles to a local Tandy Electronics store. Tucked in the back was a thing with a keyword and black and white screen that just captivated our attention....it was spellbinding.

For some reason, the store manager didn’t mind a couple of kids spending hours each Saturday morning tinkering away on his demonstration machine. Maybe he thought it was a good sales tool, “Even these kids can do stuff with a computer!”

I’ll never forget filling the screen with white blocks with some simple Basic programming code. It was an amazing event that sparked the imagination and caused us to believe we could do anything with this thing.

10 FOR X=0 TO 128: FOR Y=0 TO 47: SET (X,Y): NEXT Y,X

Type that line into a TRS-80 (affectionately called a Trash 80) and you’ll get the same rush as we did 38 years ago. BTW, the same two kids that road their bikes to the store each Saturday are now working together in ParkLogic.

So why have I just completed a 38-year project? It just so happens that around this time my father met a guy that gave him a copy of a game. This game wasn’t the traditional Star Trek, kill all the Klingons but more of a strategy game that could have you engrossed for literally hours……and it did.

It just so happened that I made a photocopy (remember that wet photocopy paper?) of the code and have kept it in a safe spot waiting for its day to shine once again. Over the years, I’ve made numerous failed attempts to recode the game on different platforms. I even tried doing it in javascript over my recent summer vacation…..yes, for me, the game was that much fun.

Last night, my lifelong friend and I decided to focus and get the job done. We worked until about 2am and this involved some debugging and reading about 10 pages of old code. Laboriously we checked each line that was entered into an old TRS-80 emulator and finally we were in a position to run the game. Guess what, it worked!

The game is called Saratoga (no idea why) and it’s awesome. By today’s standards of fancy graphics and sound it is pathetic (there is no sound but the sound of space) but for two 50+ year-olds we were in raptures as we “geeked” out and became 13-year-olds once again.

What readers should understand is this game ran in 16K of RAM. This is less space than the banner graphic on my blog.....but boy was it fun to play!

The impact this simple game had on my life is not be underestimated. For instance, the starship that I would always captain was called Yorktown……the server that you are reading this blog on is called Yorktown. It also taught me programming, inspired me to get into IT and reminded me to be ever curious.

Have a great weekend….I know that I am!

Ping me if you would like a copy of the game…..like I said, it’s awesome!

BTW - don't forget to have your say in the Leaders survey!

I was crunching some numbers today on the domain sales market and a number of things just didn’t add up for me. It would appear that as an industry we are going backwards….which should be a little bit of a concern.

The first thing I wanted to do was try and dimension the size of the domain sales market. I decided to start with the estimated size of the Sedo marketplace as they quite regularly published their numbers. I was more interested in the number of domains sold and also proportions of the size of each sale.

After some mathematical magic, I came to an estimated sales volume of just shy of $37m for 2016…..I think this is a little low as some of the larger outliers will push the number up to around $50m. If there’s anyone from Sedo that can confirm or deny this number that would be awesome!

The next question I asked was what proportion of the total market does Sedo have? Sedo actually sold around 99 of the top 304 domain sales for 2016….which suggests about 32% of the domain market. This seems a little on the high side to me.

I’m a firm believer that everyone is born with a spark of creativity inside of them. It’s the energy that spins the dynamo and as children causes them to dream big wonderful dreams. As we age we often start getting “sensible”, stop dreaming and life backs us into a corner of mediocrity when we were meant to soar like eagles!

How many times have you shared an idea with a work colleague to find you’ve become the butt of everyone’s jokes? Or maybe it’s been your parents that tell you to just knuckle down and get a job as that’s going to be your future…..when deep down inside you want to do something else. I’ve met so many people that have had their dreams smashed before their eyes and they end up crawling back to the weekly grind they despise.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a job, especially if the other option is to not have one at all. The question each of us needs to ask is whether we have a secret desire to do something else? Yes, it may be a business but like Richard Gere’s character in the movie “Shall We Dance” it could be to dance. It could also be to do something quite different.