Bob Olea Pilots 747 in United Farewell Tour

Elliot Silver
-
1

For many people active in the domain investment space, domain investing is not a full time job. Bob Olea is a California-based domain investor who recently co-founded a web development business called imPowered. In addition to this, Bob also spends his time piloting commercial aircraft for United Airlines.

Yesterday, United Airlines final Boeing 747 flight took off from San Francisco to Honolulu. For the past several weeks, United was flying its 747 aircraft in something of a farewell tour. On its last flight to Washington DC’s Dulles Airport, Bob Olea was the pilot. The flight made the news in the local NBC news affiliate station, and Bob was also interviewed on WJLA.

It is always fun to learn about the “real jobs” of people who invest in domain names as a profitable side gig or a fun hobby. Bob attends domain investing conferences, and I have had the pleasure of spending time with Bob over the years. It would be fun to fly on an aircraft piloted by Bob someday. Perhaps on my next cross country flight on United!

NYC Encourages Voting with Voting.NYC Domain Name

Elliot Silver
-
4

The City of New York has been using a .NYC domain name to promote the local election which happened today. Domain investor Larry Fischer, a New York City resident who has been in the domain business for many years, shared the photograph of this bus advertisement that is encouraging people to visit Voting.NYC.

When you visit Voting.NYC, you can see a sleek looking website that has information about the current election. It also serves as a resource to send people to other websites for further information about the election and voting. Essentially, it looks like

Read More

More Transparency!

Elliot Silver
-
19

I read Shane Cultra’s article about transparency today and I feel compelled to respond. Transparency is obviously an important topic, especially when there are many conflicts because of business relationships and friendships with industry participants. I agree with Shane that people should be more transparent. In addition to blog writers, this should also be a given for forum participants as well as people who use social media to talk about domain names and the business of domain investing.

I wrote about advertising on DomainInvesting.com in a blog post a long time ago, but I want to make a few things even more clear in case there is any confusion:

Read More

Domain Industry Participants on Earn

Elliot Silver
-
1

Earlier today I wrote about the company that rebranded to Earn.com. Earn is a platform that allows users to contact participants for a small, varying fee. Users are only charged if the participant responds to their message. The concept behind Earn.com is pretty simple and seems like it could be a win/win.

I was curious if anyone from the domain industry (either active or formerly active) is participating, and I found quite a few people I know personally. Here are some of the Earn.com participants with domain industry experience you can email in exchange for a small fee:

Read More

21 Inc Wisely Rebrands as Earn.com

Elliot Silver
-
5

When I think about the branding of 21 Inc. (aka 21.co) without any knowledge of the company, the only thing that really comes to mind is blackjack. 21.co is arguably a nice, short .CO domain name, but 21 doesn’t really say much about its brand. The company appears to have solved this brand issue by rebranding as Earn.com, according to an internal news article on its website.

Not only is Earn.com a short and meaningful domain name, it easily explains what the company does. Here’s how the company explained its rebranding:

“Our product is unchanged: you still earn digital currency for replying to emails and completing tasks, and you can still earn tokens for signing up for our token launch later this year. But we think “Earn.com” gets that concept across more quickly than “21.co”, especially to folks who are new to digital currency.”

I agree with their rationale. Even without much insight into its business model, I think the new branding resonates with what the company’s goal is. People presumably sign up to earn extra money for themselves or for charity, and Earn is the perfect branding for what they do.

From what I can see, it looks like the Earn.com domain name was acquired

Read More

Have an Escrow Backup Plan

Elliot Silver
-
1

We are fortunate because there are a few very good options when it comes to domain name escrow services. Escrow.com and Payonner Escrow are both licensed escrow services that cater to domain investors and others who have domain name transactions.

In the last year or so, I have had several transactions where the counterparty could not use an escrow service for a variety of reasons. On one occasion, I was doing a deal with a financial services institution, and they told me they would be unable to use a third-party company to do escrow. It doesn’t happen often, but domain name investors should have a backup plan to avoid having a deal fall through because of the escrow aspect.

Many attorneys and law firms, even those that do not focus on domain name law, will offer escrow services for domain name deals. In the transaction with the financial institution, we used their outside counsel’s escrow account. It was a bit concerning to use their attorney’s escrow service, but the counterparty to the deal and the law firm were both large enough that I was not concerned about losing out on the funds and/or domain name. In the end, the deal went through without a hitch.

When buying and selling domain names, I prefer to use

Read More
1...697071...154Page 70 of 154