Marketers: Wake Up!

I'm deeply amazed at this late date that so many big corporate marketing departments still don't fundamentally understand the power of internet marketing.

I'll use a few of my own domains as examples. All are generic words & .com domains:

鼻塞

= nasal congestion, stuffy nose (Chinese)
1350 million Chinese people live in dusty, dirty, crowded conditions where colds & sinus problems are continuing difficulties. How many million suffer from 鼻塞 at any one time? Perhaps 50 million people? Maybe 100 million? Maybe more!  Many companies sell congestion treatments such as Vicks®, Contac®, Otrivin®, Clarinase®, Nazal®, Afrin®, Bisaitong®, Mentholatum®, Pabron®, etc. Each of these firms should strongly want 鼻塞.com bringing sufferers to them. Basically, each wants  鼻塞 most associated with their product and not linked to one of their competitors. Great key word!  (also for sale: 鼻炎薬.com)

眠る

= sleep (Japanese)

Each company selling futon, beds or sleeping pills wants this word linked to them. Nishikawa, Sakuramichi, Maruhachi and other futon sellers are now fiercely competing for market share amongst themselves (西川布団, 櫻道, 丸八, など), but also with Francebed (フランスベッド), Tempur, IKEA, Simmons, dreambed, Hästens, etc. Additionally, companies selling insomnia medication (睡眠薬 such as Nytol®, マイスリー®, etc.) want their name linked to sleep. The hotel industry is also concerned with sleep. Many different industries, many more individual companies. Who'll be the successful one...? This is a powerful word at a cheap price (imagine the cost over ten years). Or imagine when a competitor gets 眠る.com before you buy it - what's the cost then per year? They get an image boost and continually many customers will flow to them instead of going to you.

在线娱乐场

= online casino (Chinese)
These people earn lots of money. When people imagine an online casino, why not make sure they come to you, at 在线娱乐场.com  Better than investing in TV commercials, the website keeps working around the clock, every day, year after year.


 >> more to come...
 
 
 

Squat Between the Ears

A recent article in The Local (Sweden) explained about a woman who's owned the website Amazon.se since 1997. Now the mega-retailer wants her site, but she's not yet sold out.

[ First report (here) in Swedish by Daniel Goldberg, IDG / internetworld ]

Swedish readers react in part to the fact the Stockholm-based company is in the ultra-posh district of Östermalm. Thus she gets minimal sympathy.

Responses to the English-language article labeled this woman "a squatter" and "greedy" and also "a gigantic pain in the ass" -- but what's the truth?

The woman, a graphic designer, founded her company named Amazon in 1988, long before Jeff Bezos started his firm. Amazon AB was registered as a graphic design company in Sweden on 1988-Sept-19 and got their web domain amazon.se on 1997-July-03. 

The mega-retailer amazon.com was founded in Washington State, USA in 1994 and registered their domain 1994-Nov-01. First, clearly the founder of Amazon AB did not choose her company name based on the book giant, as she was in business six years earlier.

Of course, both firms are riding a preexisting well-known term (the Amazon women warriors of Greek myth, and the South American river). Taking advantage of popular generic words is not wholly positive commercially, as common usage continues (we needn't have an apple® a day).

Applying for trademark protection is an administrative process within national jurisdictions. There is no automatic worldwide comprehensive protection. Multiple firms can register trademarks and legally operate in parallel when operations are in different classes of goods or services.

It's very unlikely this woman registered her company name as a website with bad faith intent, or tried to infringe on what's now a monster juggernaut. There's no cybersquatting here. If Bezos & Amazon.com want this woman's site, they can pay. Maybe she'd accept two million euro today -- tomorrow may be different.

Colombo Discovers the World

International Domain Names are similar to Christopher Colombus 'discovering' the New World - welcome to narrow anthropocentric vision. IDN are not 'international' any more than English or Romanization - they are words, characters and languages regularly used by billions of people.

Some may say the characters / letters of IDN are coded, and can also be displayed as xn--(etc.). But all internet and computer characters are codes - every domain also has a numeric IP address, and behind that is always a binary string of ones and zeros.

The IDN punycode is rather a workaround aid to people without quick access to direct character input methods. People in the relevant nation simply input native text from their keyboard.

Recognize now that IDN are simply domains. And as using the web gets easier & more vital each day for people worldwide, the Smart investors are buying key domain names today. 

子.com  =  xn--i8s.com  =  http://www.%E5%AD%90.com  =  198.235.133.226