Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

My highlights from .nxt

Kevin Murphy, February 16, 2011, 13:50:28 (UTC), Gossip

The jetlag has finally worn off, and I’ve had a few days to cogitate, so I thought I’d share some of my personal highlights of the .nxt conference last week.
In no particular order, these are the things that put a smile on my face:
Kieren McCarthy’s opening speech. The analogy he drew between the introduction of new top-level domains and the building of San Francisco’s bridges was either divinely inspired or Satanically tortured. Either way, it worked. Nice bit of writing.
Meeting a genuine outsider. It’s rare I get to meet anybody at this type of meeting who’s not already familiar with ICANN and the domain market, but I did at .nxt. Dude gave me a fake name and said he’d showed up primarily to see if his competitors were there, ahead of a possible TLD bid. When I asked him what information would make his life easier, he said “help with the acronyms”. Figures.
The “Reality Check” session. I took six pages of notes, so I must have found it informative.
Juan Diego Calle’s keynote. He may not be the world’s greatest public speaker, but Calle’s speech, which talked the crowd through .co’s pretty smart marketing strategy, was good content.
John Berryhill’s panels. Everybody bangs on about how funny this guy is, but the .nxt panels he moderated really gave him a platform to exercise his wit. He’s good value, but I feel certain that if I ever let him represent me in court we’d both find ourselves banged up on contempt charges.
San Francisco. I lived there for eight years, and last week was my first time back there since 2007. Great to visit the old haunts. Beautiful weather, too, for this time of year.
Free candy. Great big bowls of the stuff were laid out after the closing session. Nice touch.
Me. Virtually everybody I met for the first time was already a DI reader, which was hugely gratifying. The notable exception was a certain ICANN staffer, who’d never heard of the site. That’s fair enough, I suppose – it’s not like I cover ICANN much.
Overall, I had a great few days at .nxt, and I look forward to the next one.

Tagged: , ,

Comments (5)

  1. Kevin, maybe I’d like to come to the newdomains.org conference in September in Munich, too.
    – Florian

  2. Kate Hutchinson says:

    Kevin, it really was great to meet you after reading your blog for so long. And I will remember the candy bit for our next booth appearance… 🙂

  3. Juan says:

    Oh Kevin! I was hoping for a better review than that! I promise to do a better job next time. 🙂

  4. […] We have Kieren McCarthy’s .nxt coming up next week in San Francisco. I attended the first one in February and thought they did a great job. I wrote about it here. […]

Add Your Comment