This past weekend I’ve had a real opportunity to play around with Virtual Reality (VR) and my Oculus Rift. If you’ve never experienced VR then I would highly recommend you take the first opportunity possible…..it’s simply incredible.

Earlier in the week I downloaded the social app V-time for the Oculus. This app allows you to meet with other people and then “teleport” to a wide variety of destinations. So you could be chatting with friends in Paris (including hearing the traffic in the distance and someone playing La Vie En Rose) or look down on the Earth from the International Space station.

There are other aspects of the app that allow you to share photos in a boardroom at the top of a skyscraper. I think it’s only a matter of time before you can share a power point presentation and have a white board materialise for anyone to interact with.

I downloaded Chronos the other night which is a VR game where you are wielding a sword to fight off bad guys. All really cool but the best application by far would have to be the star fighter combat game, Eve Valkyrie. When you hit your thrusters and whip around the far side of an asteroid to escape a locked-on missile it’s nothing short of spectacular. The sense of actually being in a cockpit and launched out the side of a space-carrier is amazing.

When you really think about it, VR is in its infancy and everything will just get better and better. I hate to think what it will be like in a couple of years time…..and hence my decision to dive into the programming side of the Oculus.

Games and apps from other people’s imagination are great but building a world yourself is nothing short of mind blowing. So far I only have really simple objects built out of spheres and cubes but not long from now I plan on building far more complex buildings that people can explore. Why am I doing this? Because it’s the future and any online business depends on entrepreneurs being able to quickly grasp the changing opportunities that VR like technologies will provide.

If any of you have an Oculus Rift or another VR headset then let me know.....maybe we can meet online. Anyway…..I’d better get going as I have a bogey on my tail!

When we reflect on the last hundred years of history innovation has been rampant as one breakthrough after another has succumbed to the creative talents of people who think differently.

Think about it, just over a hundred years ago the Wright brothers flew for the first time at Kittyhawk and now humanity has been to the outer reaches of the solar system. The rate of change an innovation is simply staggering.

I found myself reflecting a lot about innovation this week because on Monday I took delivery of an Oculus Rift Virtual Reality head set. I’ve been waiting for over five months for the Oculus and it’s been twenty-two years since I first experienced VR at the Walt Disney Imagineering labs in Florida. You could say that my expectations were pretty high!

It only took a couple of minutes to setup and then I put on the head-mounted display unit for the first time. To say the experience was staggering is an understatement. The sense of being in a virtual world was completely engrossing, including feeling vertigo in a demonstration which involved standing on the edge of a skyscraper.

I fired up a futuristic star fighter flight simulator that involved being launched out of a space-carrier and into the middle of a space battle. I can look behind me, above me and forward as enemies’ wheel around my ship and try and get a missile lock. Flying behind asteroids and other structures for cover is entirely real as they swoosh past my left and right. I was really there!

An interesting thing happened to me when I left VR. I began to think about the computer generated world as being all around me. Staring at a flat monitor as I write this blog just seems so old hat now. There is one thing for sure we are on the brink of a VR revolution that will change the way we interact with computers forever.

So after my bit of playing around I downloaded Unity 3D to start to learn how to program the Oculus myself. With a bit of help from an Amazon book it wasn’t long before I donned the headset to explore a world that I had created. This was a lot more fun than flying spaceships!

I’m a firm believer that if you want to really be innovative then you need to be learning about technological advances when they are in their infancy. When the Internet was first commercialised in the early 90s I founded an ISP because I wanted to learn all there was about the Net. Likewise, I did the same thing with a broadcast technology that I developed back in early 2000.

Before founding ParkLogic I learnt a lot about domain names by being a domain investor myself. This innovative philosophy is at the heart of why ParkLogic is so successful with domain investors all across the world. We are constantly looking for new innovative ways to extract greater value from domain traffic. The reason why we never stop is we have a mantra of “Innovate or Die”.

I had a discussion with one of our team this week and he was asking why we were testing out a new monetisation opportunity. I replied by saying, “We are charged by our clients to constantly find better ways of monetising their traffic. We can’t just rely on a single source of revenue; we need to innovate for our customer’s sake or we should stop right now.”

Every day I read a synopsis of the latest innovations in technology and science from around the world. For example, quantum entanglement will not impact the domain industry in the short-term but in the long-term it’s going to change everything. Behind the scenes Artificial intelligence is now changing the way we interact with the web. How it will change the domain industry is anyone’s guess.

So the question I have for you is what have you done in your business that was different today compared to a few years ago? If you’ve been doing the same thing with your domain traffic as you’ve always done, then don’t be disappointed with poor results. Give me a call, do something different and be amazed at the outcomes at little innovation can generate.

Have a great weekend…..I know that I will because I’ve got a world to build!