Global Entrepreneurship Week Shifts to .CO

Global Entrepreneurship Week is billed as “the world’s largest celebration of innovation and entrepreneurship.” The worldwide initiative is held annually in November, and this year it is scheduled from November 18-24, 2013. Organizations, businesses, and universities from around the world participate with their own activities, all focused on promoting and encouraging entrepreneurship.

Since the founding of GEW by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the event has used a .org domain name for its website – UnleashingIdeas.org. It also owned the exact match .com domain name, which it forwarded to its main website. This week, GEW announced a major change / rebrand for its website, and the initiative is now using GEW.CO.

In a blog post on the GEW website today, Mark Marich explains why the url change was made:

“We embraced .CO because of their commitment to startups and entrepreneurs around the world. In just over three years since its launch, .CO has become one of the most successful global domain extensions with close to 1.5 million web addresses registered in more than 200 countries–including Twitter (t.co), AngelList (angel.co) 500 Startups (500.co) and others.”

I think it’s interesting that the foundation used a somewhat unrelated (but creative) url for its website for so long. Unless you knew the url off hand, it’s unlikely you’d directly navigate there. GEW.CO makes sense for them to use, and it will offer some very good exposure for the .CO Registry, whose target audience is entreprenurial.