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Have a peek at the Next Internet from the coming gTLDs

by on June 23, 2012 in Entrepreneur

A big change on our Internet

Top-level domains like .COM, .NET and .ORG are about to become part of a much larger, more diverse family. Today their number stands at 22. Soon, there will be over thousand to join this bandwagon. Those root domain names are not cheap. The fee to apply was $185,000 and there’s an annual fee of $25,000, both of which go to ICANN. Not to mention, there are extensive legal and administrative costs tied to running a domain. However, there are still over thousands applicants.

In order for your root domain name being the first 500 released, companies have launched an intensive war to win the game called “Digital Archery“.  Here I am not planning to talk about the detail of this game. I may provide more detail of it if I win this game later. Today, my plan is to give you a taste of our future Internet via looking at some root domain names the big guys like Amazon and Google are going after.

List of gtlds that Google are applying

Because I see Google is the one has the greatest potential to shape the Internet, I would like to peek at what root domain names they are applying. Using the applicant name ’Charleston Road Registry Inc.’, I can fish out 101 root domain names google bought. Some of them are obvious but some of them may give us insight of what Google is heading to. Lets categorize them as following:

  1. Existing products: ADS, AND (short form of Android), ANDROID, APP, BLOG, CHROME, CHANNEL, CLOUD, DOCS, DRIVE, EARTH, DCLK (doubleclick), MAP, GMAIL, MAIL, GOO, GOOG, GOOGLE, SEARCH, WEB, PLUS, TALK, PAGE, NEW, SITE, GUGE (chinese name of google), SPOT
  2. Education, Degree and License: MBA, PHD, PROF, MED, CPA, DDS, ESQ
  3. Ecommerce: BOOKS, BUY, CAR, SHOP, PET, STORE, DOG, PET, FREE, EAT, FOO, CAL
  4. Entertainment: GAME, FILM, FUN, MOV, MOVIE, MUSIC, PLAY, YOU, YOUTUBE, TUBE, SHOW, LIVE, FLY, TOUR,
  5. Social: LOVE, LOL, WOW, MEME, HANGOUT, RSVP, MOTO
  6. Family: BABY, BOO, DAD, MOM, FAMILY, HOME, KID
  7. Business: CORP, LLC, GBIZ, INC, LLP, SRL (private limited), GMBH(Germany),
  8. Development: DEV, PROD, TEAM, TECH, ZIP
  9. Others: DAY, DIY, FYI, VIP, EST (eastern standard time), DOT, HERE, HOME, HOW
  10. Unknown: GLE, ARE, ING, NEXUS, SOY

According to the list above, isn’t that clear that Google is trying to take personal marketing to the next level? As the root level domains starting to flood the market, each person may soon be able to get their own domain name without adding too many weird characters to make it unique. In other words, we can start locating a person using URL instead of a company or organization. How is it going to change the world? I am not sure yet. It is a million dollar question. May be the way we perceive the Internet also need to be evolved.

Interesting Statistical Data

Geographical distribution

  • Applicants are distributed across 60 countries.
  • There are 884 applicants in US fighting for 714 root domain names.
  • Surprisingly, Cayman Islands (KY) is 2nd and Luxembourg (LU) is the 3rd. They have 91 and 85 applicants respectively.

Below is the top list:

Popular root domains

  • APP is the most competitive root domain whereas HOME, INC and ART are the one closely followed.

Below is the list of root domains with at least 5 competitors

Big Buyers

  • Google and Amazon are the obvious winners. Google has applied up to 101 domains while Amazon goes after 76.
  • Google and Amazon are fighting against 21 domains.
  • The richest company Apple only applies for their own name “APPLE”.

Below is the top 10 list

List of root domains that Google and Amazon compete against

What is Next?

Purely based on the root domain name purchase, you can tell Google and Amazon are the ones betting the most to reshape the domain space. It is going to be fun. However, on the other hand, has anyone ever thought of it is quite a burden for users to remember the extensions when they type the url? A browser plugin to help you to scan all extensions and redirect you to the one you want to go the most may be needed. Stay tuned!

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Protected: Social Stuff

by on February 4, 2012 in Entrepreneur

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Create a Virtual Company

by on July 13, 2009 in Entrepreneur, Team

Nowadays there are many tools available on the Net ranging from IM to cloud computing that certainly lowers the barrier for entrepreneurs like us. Today, I am going to list out the tools that helps me to run my company:

Set up virtual office

  1. Skype – Save you from long distance bill
    • FREE. If you pay a rate, it will let you connect to phone line.
    • When I am tired of typing, it will switch to this.
    • If you like face to face conversion, I would use iChat on Mac. All you need is an AOL account.
  2. Yugma – Web conferencing
    • FREE up to 20 attendees.
    • It has Skype integration.
  3. Free conferencing
    • FREE
    • In case you don’t have internet access or your laptop is not next to you. This is a good tool because it gives you a dedicated line to dail in. However, the number is not TOLL-FREE.
    • Why 712 area code? Check this out
  4. Google tools – all FREE
    • Google doc (shareable)
    • Google calendar (it can sync with my iCal on Mac now. If you use Outlook, you need to install a plugin to do the calendar sync). Follow this guide to set it up.
    • Google email (have gmail to host your mail server – yourname@yourcompany.com)
  5. MediaWiki – good wiki tool for information sharing
  6. Posterous – create your company blog via email :)
  7. iPhone
    • Not FREE
    • I use it for sync email, calendar and access Web.
  8. VNC – Remote desktop tool
    • FREE
    • For Mac, download OSXVine Server from here.
    • If you are using DSL that assigns you IP address dynamically, it is quite a headache to keep track of it. You can obtain a domain name from DynDNS to abstract you from the IP address.
    • By default, VNC server will be listened on port 5900. If you want to do remote desktop outside your subnet, make sure your DSL router open a port for that and forward the request to your machine.
    • Here is a web-based VNC viewer. With that, you can do remote desktop anywhere. Just key in your dynDNS domain and you are done.
    • If you want to make this access security, you can password protected your box via configure the VNS Server.
    • Here is a great article for that.
    • There are people who uses LogMeIn service that provides more remote secure featuers. However, it is NOT FREE. To me, VNC Server is good enough solution.

Build your virtual dev team

  1. Tracs – combine wiki, ticket system, project planning in one
    • FREE
    • A bit complicated to set it up in web hosting company
    • It integrates with Subversion as well
    • Bugzilla is pretty good for issue tracking as well
  2. Dreamhost for web hosting
    • Below $10 per month
    • I currently use it for hosting my own blog and subversion repository.
    • No java support yet.
    • For VPS solution, this one is cheap and my buddy said it is great.
  3. VirtualBox – have several operating system runs on your laptop. Very appealing!
    • FREE
    • I set up Ubundu on my Mac. Full screen, share folders, share mouse. I love it.
    • With this, I can ensure all developers are working on the same environment. Furthermore, I can have dev, qa and production using the same environment.
  4. Omnigraffle – design graphical tool on Mac
    • NOT FREE but cheap
    • Free stencils available on here.
  5.  Amazon AWS
    • Way low cost comparing to hire your own team to make sure your system 24×7
    • Cloud computing allows you scale on demand.
    • Processing power via EC2
    • Storage via S3
    • CDN via CloudFront
    • Messaging via Amazon SQS

 

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Plenty of Fish – Cash cow!

by on October 15, 2008 in Backend, Design, Entrepreneur, Scale and Optimize, System

A site called “PlentyOfFish.com” is currently getting 30 million hits a day. The number doesn’t blow me off. However, what surprise me is that this site is basically operated by single man “Markus Frind”. How does he achieved that? If you want to hear how he does that, you can go to his interview from this link. Otherwise, you can read the summary I got from his interview.

The stuff I learnt from Markus

You may think that Markus must spend a lot of $$ to maintain his site. A picture of server farm may be popped up in your head. Hahaha… all he needs is just 1 web server and 3 database servers. This is the cost that you and me can afford. No bother to write your business plan and wait for VC $$ nowadays. :grin:

Here are some quick tips for Markus

  1. You need a lot of RAM. RAM is cheap, go ahead to power up your box with tons of RAMs please!
  2. Markus uses Akamai CDN to offload the bandwidth of fetching images across different locales.
  3. Separate R/W database operation.
  4. Markus uses one database as master for write and 2 databases as slave to handle the searches (read). According to him, radius-based searches demand lots of resources. “If you have one system to do just one thing, it will do it much efficiently.”
  5. Markus put RAM to both web and db servers. “If you can load your whole db in the RAM, do it!”
  6. Optimize the db access is the key to handle lots of requests.
  7. Denormalization is necessary if you want to reduce the number of joins that can potentially slow down your queries.
  8. PlentyOfFish.com is purely based on “Word of Mouth” marketing. Do things right, your users will spread it out for you. Cheapest marketing strategy ever!
  9. PlentyOfFish.com is FREE site. Because it is free, it doesn’t have high requirements like uptime. It can be down without much issues.
  10. PlentyOfFish.com solely monetized from advertisement like Google Ads. Just this, Markus is making around 10 million annually. Amazing!
  11. PlentyOfFish.com is purely using Microsoft solution like IIS, ASP.NET and SQL Server. In fact, you can build it using other solution like Apache, Spring, MySQL

I love to see how people like Markus beat down the giant like Match.com. One man beats hundreds of people with simple system settings. Incredible! Folks, there is no excuse whining no $$ to start your business!:lol:

Although it sounds easy for Markus during the interview, there are areas the interviewer didn’t cover:

  1. PlentyOfFish.com webfront is not looking good. How could it attract the first set of users in the first place? FREE
  2. If you go to a FREE site without data, you may leave it right away. How PlentyOfFish.com attracts the first real user? Did PlentyOfFish.com crawl competitors’ data to power his site as bootstrap?
  3. PlentyOfFish.com purely makes $$ from Google AdSense. However, according to John Chow, Adsense is not a good place to make $$. Why is that?

What possibly may go wrong for his approach:

His database architecture is traditional master-slave approach. It can offload the read but not write operations. Obviously the master becomes the write bottleneck and a single point of failure. And as load increases the cost of replication increases as well. Replication costs in CPU, network bandwidth, and disk IO. The slaves fall behind and have stale data. The folks at YouTube had a big problem with replication overhead as they scaled. This problem can be tackled by shard/ federation. I will discuss this topic later.

 

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Planning a Behavioral Marketing Campaign

by on January 17, 2008 in Entrepreneur

To have an effective marketing strategy, you should follow the steps below:

  1. Audience segmentation
  2. Targeting
  3. Positioning

Audience Segmentation

We normally segment our audience based on the following characteristics:

  1. Geographical - location like country, dma, city, zip
  2. Demograhical - gender, age, income, education, culture and job.
  3. Behavioral - online/offline shopping behavior, web usage, website loyalty, prior purchases.
  4. Psychographical - social class, lifestyle, personality, type

For a market segment to be useful to marketers, it should meet some certain criteria:

  1. Measurable and obtainable
  2. Accessible with minimum of cost and effort
  3. Large enough to be profitable

Targeting

How to target the segment you chose? There are many ways that you can do it: email, banner advertising or viral marketing. Here I will not go through each of them. I will focus on banner ad with behavioral targeting. The idea of advertisement is to drive more sell and profit to the company. To do that, you need to be targeted in order to make the advertiseing dollars you spent more effective. Segmentation is a good start. After that, you need to understand that the buying cycle of your product. It normally drives from customers’ needs. If there is a need, users normally start to do the information gathering and the buying window is open at that time. If you successfully push your relevant ads with the right message to them at that time, there is good chance they will react on your ad. The idea is simple but in practice it involves a lots of work. First, we need to gather enough information to segment our users. Normally, online traffic stream doesn’t contain demographic and psychographic info. That is why big giants like Google pay top dollars to buy the social networking site. They are not buying their tech but the huge user-based and site-stickiness.

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Startups – It is full of ups and downs

by on June 28, 2007 in Entrepreneur

My buddy Steve sent me an article today that contained some important data shared by 4 startups companies. I like this article a lot as it reflects what I have experienced since I started my online wedding company – JustProposed.com. Being an entrepreneur, I found out it was way more difficult than I thought. You need to believe your idea a lot and be persistent to push it out. I have spent so many sleepless nights and face quite a bit of discouraging facts… However, when I found out people actually using it with good comments and feedback, my energy came back. :)

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