Global Entrepreneurship Week Shifts to .CO

GEW_LogoGlobal 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.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

4 COMMENTS

  1. Why is everyone so afraid of rebranding? Every week a new form of competition is born and parallel rebranding usually happens when the numbers start to slip.

    t.co is simply keeping up with the kardashians because the joneses aren’t that really that hip anymore.

Leave a Reply

Recent Posts

Spaceship Doubles its DUM

1
At the end of July, I wrote about Spaceship surpassing 100,000 domain names under management (DUM). The registrar continues to grow, and its Founder...

You Can Now Hide Estimated Value at Dan

1
Last week, Dan.com announced and deployed a feature I did not like. On the user control panel, Dan showed GoDaddy's Estimated Value for each...

Media.com Buyer Comments on Acquisition

1
This afternoon, Axios reported the sale of the Media.com domain name. Kismet Group, an Australian private equity company, acquired the domain name to launch...

“We love to share success!”

1
If I see two friends or colleagues that could benefit from meeting over a shared interest or converging path, I am always on the...

It Pays to Know Random Phrases

3
My eyes bulge out of my head sometimes when I see a somewhat obscure term in a domain name coming up for auction. Oftentimes,...