I just heard that Go Daddy  Executive Account Manager  Nima Jacob Nojoumi has left the company. He is the second  Executive Account Manager to have recently parted ways with the company, following Tess Diaz, who is now involved in Business Development at Media Options.

Over his 6+ year tenure with the company, Nima serviced over 600 client accounts and consulted with more than 18,000 customers. He also consulted Go Daddy’s executive leadership team on the startup scene and their social marketing strategy.

I know of several people who work with Nima, and his presence will be missed. Although Brad Larson has been my Account Executive for many years, I have always found Nima to be knowledgable and helpful in Brad’s absence.

I spoke with Nima about his leaving the company, and he said he left on good terms. “I want to express my sincere gratitude to Go Daddy, colleagues, domain industry and clients (friends). It was an amazing ride & I’m humbled by it,” he told me.

Although Nima didn’t say what he has planned next, I imagine he’ll be doing something big in the start up scene. Nima’s a class act, and I hope our paths cross in the future.

If you want to stay connected with Nima, you can keep in touch with him via twitter @DomainAdvisor  and on his personal blog, Nima.CO.

Paul Nicks is responsible for Product Development as the Aftermarket Director at Go Daddy. Rich Merdinger is the Vice President of Product Development in the Domain channel at Go Daddy. These gentlemen were willing to share their 2013 predictions for the domain business.

You can read other 2013 predictions here and here.

gTLDs:

• gTLD adoption will move east to west, beginning with IDNs and GEOs; US buyers will be slow to invest, as generic English TLDs are not available until later in the roll-out process
• IDN.IDN domains see strong adoption
• Contention auctions captivate national media attention leading to broader understanding of gTLDs by the general public
• Initial confusion by the general public will dissipate quickly as people become accustomed to identifying web addresses by string[dot]string as opposed to the common string[dot]com
• Business owners will become frustrated with the need to defensively register and trademark-monitor new extensions as they slowly roll-out
• .NINJA sneaks up on everyone

Aftermarket:

• .COM, .NET, .ORG and .INFO see a bump in aftermarket pricing as the original gTLDs are seen as a safe harbor in the impending sea of new gTLD confusion
• PPC makes a comeback, with earnings rising for the first time in years
• Sunrise/Landrush auctions dominate the second half of the year leading to auction overload for TM holders and investors
• Domain conferences set attendance records as traditional investors take notice of the domain space

Go Daddy retains its position as market leader through innovations in domain name presentation systems, providing consumers with the means to find the right online identity amongst the sea of new alternatives in one fell swoop.

I wanted to provide an update to an article I wrote yesterday about Go Daddy’s Website Builder sample website for the fictitious business,  Little Frank’s Pizza.

A reader emailed me at 4:30am to let me know Go Daddy was advertising its Website Builder program on its home page and showed a graphic that included a domain name. When the reader visited that domain name (LittleFranksPizza.com), instead of a seeing a slick website, there was a standard GoDaddy ppc landing page. When I visited that url several hours later, I saw the same thing and wrote an article about it.

Later on in the day, LittleFranksPizza.com was resolving to a fun website instead of the standard Go Daddy landing page. Not only is it a nice looking website, it also contained good information about how the Website Builder program could be used by a SMB to build a functional website.

Nobody asked me to follow up with this article, but I gave them a little bit of a ribbing because the domain name wasn’t operational, and I wanted to follow up on it. Perhaps my article made them realize the site wasn’t working, or perhaps it was a brief glitch that caused the website to not appear. Whatever the case is, put simply, the website was created by Go Daddy exactly how it should have been developed to help promote its Website Builder program.

There’s an interesting article and interview posted on the Inc. Magazine website focusing on Go Daddy and the company’s growth. The article features an interview with Lane Jarvis, the company’s Chief Human Resources Officer.

According to the article, Go Daddy has become “one of the nation’s top job creators” after hiring over 1,400 employees during the last three years. As many people have experienced, Go Daddy is known for its exceptional customer service. Whether I call into the regular call center or business call center, it seems that I am assisted within a very short period of time, and that is likely due to the quality of employees the company hires as well as its training program.

If you want to read a bit more about Go Daddy’s hiring practices and how the company trains its new hires, I recommend checking out the Inc. article. The focus is primarily on the hiring side of the business, but it gives you an idea about how the company operates.

One thing I’d be interested in knowing that wasn’t discussed was how many of the 1,400 new hires were call center positions, and of those, how many were new positions. Call centers tend to have high attrition rates, so it would be neat to know how much job creation is happening at Godaddy vs. filling vacant positions created by employees that have left the company.

Whatever the case, it’s good to see this type of publicity for a domain industry company.