At long last I’ve finally returned from attending ICANN Los Angeles. So was the jetlag, long hours and sitting in a flying tin can for a day and half worth it?
I found that the main attraction for me was that there were a lot of domain owners at ICANN that were looking for a solution that ParkLogic provides. This was great news and we ended up doing a lot of business.
I spent the majority of my time either in meetings or hanging out in the lobby waiting for my next meeting. I think that we had about 30 scheduled meetings and many more that were impromptu while passing someone.
As always, I enjoyed catching up with the many, many friends that I’ve made over the years as well as making a bunch of new ones. Both Joe (from ParkLogic) and I have been working with many of the people that we met for years and putting a face to a skype voice was fantastic!
A real highlight for me was when a group of us hung around a fire pit at the Intercontinental hotel until about 2:30am. It was a chance to really get to know the .green team and hear about their passion for the extension. Dirk from .club was also there and it was great to hear his story and journey over the last few years. We sometimes forget that with all of these new gTLDs that there are real people with real lives behind them that have often put everything on the line to see the extension come alive.
One thing that did surprise me was that attendees could pick up a plastic strip that would tell them their temperature. I thought that this was in really bad taste and a complete over reaction to the Ebola crisis happening in Africa. I had no idea what I should do with it. Maybe, before I shook someone’s hand I should ask them to prove if they had a fever or not….how ridiculous!
It was wonderful catching up with Matt Bentley at one of the evening events. About 5 years ago he resigned as the CEO of Sedo and is now running a startup doing work in SEO.
I had a chance to spend some time with Nat Cohen and Phil Corwin from the ICA. It was great discussing some of the ideas that I shared in my series of articles on a domain association with them. I hope that they both found the discussion as worthwhile as I did.
Since I only attended one ICANN session for about 20 minutes I’m not really sure if they were worth going to. My impression was that it was a bunch of people being overly nice to one another as they explained what a great job their region was doing. To be quite honest with you…..I really get confused with all of the acronyms that ICANN uses…..they just make my head spin.
So was ICANN worth it? From a business perspective the best thing about ICANN was the fact that it was a meeting place for people and organisations that are hooked into the domain industry. Everyone from registries through to end users were represented. If you’re prepared to introduce yourself to people that you haven’t met before then ICANN was a great experience and I look forward to attending more in the future.