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After receiving a great suggestion from my buddy Adam Strong, I decided to move the Lowell.com Project development discussion to the Lowell.com website. You can find the newly set-up blog at blog.lowell.com. I just posted an introductory post on the Lowell.com blog, and will continue this project discussion over there beginning on Monday.
To avoid adding another blog that you might want to check every day, I will update this blog to let you know when I posted something new on the Lowell.com blog. I hope we all can learn together and gain from this experience. As always, I’d love to hear your feedback – both positive (and negative)!

I found a link to David Airey’s blog on a forum and I think it’s important to read this. Had his registrar enabled a security key fob system, this theft could have been prevented. It’s scary to know that email accounts can be hacked, but its even scarier to know that if it happens, all of your domain names could be vulnerable.

Consumers can purchase insurance policies in the event valuables are stolen, but due to the nature of domain names, I don’t think coverage for theft events exist. Sure, a domain investor can fight to get his names back using the court system, but that is costly and takes a great deal of time. Valuable SEO rankings can be lost in the time a website is down, costing a business thousands of dollars in losses.

I think its about time a registrar makes domain name security impenetrable from outside theft.   As far as I am concerned, the best way to do it is using a security key fob. When will a registrar take action and make domain theft a thing of the past?

By special request, I am posting a poll to see if my readers would be willing to pay a premium to register/maintain their domain names at a registrar that distributes security key fobs to its registrants. Of course, the answer may depend on the actual cost, but I am looking for more of a general consensus. This comes on the heels of this morning’s post about Security Key Fobs.

Due to the poll causing my blog to become distorted to some viewers, I took it down. The numbers were pretty significant, with 78% of those that voted saying they would pay more for the fob.

There are many parallels between real estate and domain names, but I was reading an article in the New York Times last night about home teardowns, and I thought about this in relation to domain names. A fairly recent trend in real estate investing is purchasing a home on a nice lot of land, tearing it down, and building a nicer, more modern, and usually larger home. The investor then sells this piece of real estate for much more than the price he paid and the cost of building the new home.

In terms of domain names, I can see this being a profitable opportunity for an investor who happens to have development skills or a staff of developers on hand. If he is able to purchase a domain name earning PPC for a decent multiple, he could quickly build a custom website, get it indexed by the search engines, and start building traffic and revenue. Assuming that this website generates greater income than the previous PPC page, he could resell it for a higher price. By using the Hybrid Development approach I outlined before, costs would be kept down and this could be done across many domain names.

There are many advantages of domain names over real estate in this instance:

1) A person is not subject to weather that could impede a real estate rebuild.
2) Other than the physical labor involved with developing a domain name, there are not many material costs, other than hosting, with a website.
3) There are no added real estate taxes that will be incurred with a large property.
4) The Internet is worldwide, and geography plays a small role.
5) While searching for a buyer, the website is making money – the real estate property is costing money.

Whereas many domain investors buy and resell domain names based on the same PPC model (which I disagree with – but that’s another story), this could add tremendous value to the domain name. Many people believe they can increase the amount of money a domain name is earning by testing various parking companies and/or keywords, which may yield better results. By developing the name, you would almost certainly increase the value of the name much more than relying on PPC. Of course, development is difficult, so this isn’t for everyone. This is just another opportunity in the domain business.

At TheDomains.com, Mike talks about his experience buying an Ipod from a vending machine. Although the experience wasn’t as good as expected, its neat to see this type of POS buying opportunities.   Some day, Mike won’t even have to swipe his credit card. He will aim his cell phone at the vending machine, push a few buttons, and voila, a new Ipod!

I am here in the Apple store on Fifth Avenue again checking some things out, and they have some awesome point of sale (POS) technology. There are people walking around with handheld credit card scanners to complete the purchase. The only catch is that they don’t print receipts. How do you get your receipt, you ask?

Email!

What a great way to build the customer database for future direct marketing efforts. When they email you the receipt, they can probably send you an offer to make an upsell purchase. They may also re-offer you that extended warranty you passed on before. The sky is the limit with this technology. I am constantly impressed with the way they do business (the rep next to me is speaking in Spanish to a customer, BTW), and I am glad I bought some AAPL stock a couple of weeks ago.

I am curious if buyers are automatically opt-ed in to receiving future solicitations by allowing them to send your receipt via email. I may just have to make a purchase to examine their after sale direct marketing efforts. Regardless, they are certainly building a huge database with a ton of transactional information.