Rick Schwartz just announced that the keynote speaker for October’s TRAFFIC conference in Ft. Lauderdale will be Bill Karamouzis, CEO of HallPass Media, The topic of the keynote speech will be “the challenge of developing our domains into businesses.”
Bill’s company has been written up in TechCrunch several times in the last couple of years, most notably to domain investors for its purchase of CookingGames.com for $350,000. While some criticized this purchase as being overpriced, the advantage for a development company like HallPass Media is that it knows conversion metrics and can base it’s acquisition price on actual experiential data. HallPass Media operated hundreds of unique games on it’s websites.
Previously, Bill successfully built and sold another gaming business, Addicting Games, to Atom Games, for an undisclosed sales price. At the time of the sale, it was one of the most trafficked websites in existence.
In April of this year, HallPass Media (which had independently raised $2 million) was acquired by MindJolt for an undisclosed price. The acquiring company is led by the founder of MySpace.
I think this is a wise choice for a keynote speaker at TRAFFIC. Bill clearly knows how to develop a business using strong domain names as the foundation, and I believe he’ll be able to give some practical advice to those of us building our own businesses.