Alibaba IPO, Historic, Record Breaking, Rise of the Chinese Dot COMs (video)

Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba is reported to have raised $21.8 billion in a U.S. initial public offering. The company and shareholders including Yahoo sold 320.1 million shares for $68 each. Bloomberg’s Julie Hyman reports on “Taking Stock.” (Source: Bloomberg--Sept 18, 2014)

Alibaba and the rise of China's internet giants - Forum:Blog Forum:Blog | The World Economic Forum: "... After the IPO...  Alibaba will probably have a market value of around $200 billion. This will make it the world’s fifth-most-valuable TMT (Technology, Media and Telecom) company behind Apple ($614 billion), Google ($387 billion), Microsoft ($382 billion) and China Mobile ($259 billion).... After the Alibaba IPO, the aggregate value of the world’s largest 50 internet companies will be about $1.7 trillion, of which about $530 billion is accounted for by Chinese companies formed in the past 15 years. Today, 15 of the world’s 50 most valuable – and imposing – internet companies are Chinese which, beyond Alibaba, include Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, VIP Shop, Qihoo and CTrip. Add up the combined value of a handful of companies brewed in the US – eBay, Twitter, Netflix and Priceline – and you would still require about another $20 billion in order to match Alibaba’s market capitalization..."--Michael Moritz, Chairman of Sequoia Capital

Domain Names of Companies referenced above:
alibaba.com
alibabagroup.com
yahoo.com
apple.com
google.com
microsoft.com
www.chinamobileltd.com
tencent.com
baidu.com
jd.com
vip.com
qihoo.com | 360.cn | 360safe.com
ctrip.com
ebay.com
twitter.com
netflix.com
priceline.com
sequoiacap.com

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Rap Genius Changes Name To Genius.com, Raises $40 Milliion

So much for ICANN, its pathetic new gTLDs, and the new gTLD hucksters -- dot Com ain't dead baby! --

TechCrunch has the news, Y Combinator's Hacker News has the insight --

Rap Genius Raises $40M, Changes Name To Genius [genius.com], Launches Embeddable Annotations | TechCrunch: "Rap Genius made three big moves today to further its goal to annotate the world. The founders tell me it’s raised a $40 million Series B led by Dan Gilbert and joined by previous investor Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation under $1 billion. It also changed its name to Genius.com and is launching embeddable annotations so any website can hover over text and see explanations and background info on what that text means. You can see a demo run of the embeds on Business Insider’s deep dive into the company. Genius‘ big new investor Gilbert is the founder and chairman of Rock Ventures and Quicken Loans, plus the majority owner of the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers. He’s know to many as a champion of Detroit’s rebirth. The new funding brings Genius to $56.8 million in total, which it plans to spend hiring engineers, designers, and community leaders. The new Genius name will make it more accessible and intelligible to communities reading and writing annotations outside of rap...." (read more at the link above)

I wonder how much it cost them to get the domain name. | Hacker News: "I wonder how much it cost them to get the domain name... Probably under $100k... Location location location, am I right? Even if it was more, that's your brand. As we've seen that search engines can make or break you, this is one of the few things you can control... I'd be very surprised if 100k did the job. I would bet under $500k though. Still worth it..."

"Still worth it" say the innovators, founders, and venture capitalists -- for a dot Com domain name!

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Frank Schilling says Dot Com Will Become Like AM Radio?

Last time I checked, there were 2 commercial radio bands -- AM and FM. Is Frank saying Dot Coms, 20 years from now, will continue with about 50% of internet traffic (and probably the most LUCRATIVE traffic) and the other 10,000 gTLDs will split the other 50% of internet traffic -- twenty years from now? In any event, who buys a domain name based on a hope and prayer of something having value in twenty years? Particularly when the track record of the other gTLDs--dot mobi et al is so pitiful!

Frank Schilling Live From London: “.Com Will Become Like AM Radio” | TheDomains.com: "The Digital Marketing & gTLS Strategy Congress conference kicked off today with Frank Schilling of Unregistry, laying out how he see the future of the domain name space and its the new gTLD program. Mr. Schilling was being interviewed on stage by Kevin Murphy of Domainincite.com As always Mr. Schilling had some interesting observations and bold predictions: Big brands placed their internet presence on .com as it meant commerce smaller brands and companies followed them into .com . . . ."

Dot Coms will continue to dominate the percentage of internet traffic for the foreseeable future. However, Schilling is right that registrars will make a lot of money selling next to worthless names with the new gTLDs, and of course fortunes will be spent trying to protect trademarks (ICANN's new gTLDS are a lawyer full-employment scheme), and further billions (US dollars) sucked out of the economy to fraudsters and scammers utilizing new gTLDs -- all as ICANN was warned, or maybe this is what they intended?

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Wikipedia explains dot com

.com - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The domain name com is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System of the Internet. Its name is derived from the word commercial, indicating its original intended purpose for domains registered by commercial organizations. However, eventually the distinction was lost when .com, .org and .net were opened for unrestricted registration. The domain was originally administered by the United States Department of Defense, but is today operated by Verisign, and remains under ultimate jurisdiction of US law. Verisign Registrations in com are processed via registrars accredited by ICANN. The registry accepts internationalized domain names. The domain was one of the original top-level domains (TLDs) in the Internet when the Domain Name System was implemented in January 1985, the others being edu, gov, mil, net, org, and arpa. It has grown into the largest top-level domain."

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Dot Com vs Everything Else

Why Branding Commodities Matters to Your Ecommerce Website | Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog: "I asked Brad about his thoughts on Overstock’s domain rebranding, from Overstock.com to O.co – a $350,000 strategy intended to distance the pure-play from just overstocked items but failed to resonate with customers. Brad advises against veering from the very obvious (conventional .com and country-level TLDs) to unconventional extensions like .co, .net and .info (sorry ICANN). Web users simply think in terms of dot-coms, it’s very difficult to establish domain recognition with any other extension."


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A new gTLD? Maybe you should get a dot COM instead

VeriSign warns ICANN (and the rest of us) about new gTLDs--

VeriSign, Inc. - Current Report: "On March 28, 2013, VeriSign, Inc. (“Verisign” or the “Company”) released Verisign Labs Technical Report #1130007 version 2.2: New gTLD Security and Stability Considerations (the “Report”). The Company provided the Report along with a cover letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) (the “Letter”) on March 28, 2013. A copy of the Letter and the Report are attached hereto as Exhibit 99.1 and Exhibit 99.2. . . . Ensuring that Internet software and sites understand all domains - not just the old three-letter domains like .COM and .NET - is called universal acceptance. For example, when is the last time you looked at your company's online contact forms? If you haven't revisited them for a while, you might discover that they are hard coded for certain domains like .NET or .ORG and may reject email addresses that use, say, a four-or- more-character domain like .INFO or .MOBI. (Full disclosure: .INFO and .MOBI are both domains managed by my company, Afilias). Or have you seen some TLDs that don't work in your browser? Some browsers, including mobile ones, screen out addresses as either “right” or “wrong,” and many modern TLDs simply don't resolve because the browser doesn't understand how to handle the TLD. A real-life example: as late as 2007, you could not email an article from the New York Times website to anybody with a .INFO email address, which was actually fun for some of my colleagues because they would try to send me articles and say, ”Oh, you didn't see it? Maybe you should get a .COM address.” . . . From that experience, I developed my three “rules” of TLD acceptance: 1. An old TLD will be accepted more often than a new TLD. 2. An ASCII-only TLD will be accepted more than an IDN TLD. 3. A three-letter gTLD will be accepted more often than a longer string, even if it's a gTLD . . . . "  (read more at link above)


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Dot Com Domain Names To Dominate The Internet For Years Ahead

Dot Com vs new gTLDs--

Is .com the 212 area code of domains? - MarketWatch: "The World Wide Web is getting wider with the addition of new top-level domains this year, but experts say businesses and marketers may find that grabbing new options won’t do much good. The .com ending for Internet addresses still rules.. . the new domains are years from meaning much to consumers. Search-engine algorithms favor whoever has the .com address, says Ed Mayuga, a partner at St. Louis-based marketing firm AMM Communications. Plus, most consumers will try the .com site first, whether it’s the right Web address or not. “We are fixated on .com,” says Larry Chiagouris, professor of marketing at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business in New York. “It’s like how people have become conditioned to go to Google for a Web search. Only then do we try Yahoo or Bing, if Google isn’t getting us what we want.” That could change, he says, but it’ll take five to 10 years and a heavy marketing effort by big brands using the domains. Even then, the .com suffix is likely to still live on, says Jack Vonder Heide, president of consulting firm Technology Briefing Centers. And many domains won’t catch on at all, he says. “I really don’t see a lot of passion about any of these alternate domains, with the exception of .xxx, and that seems to be in their own circle of businesses.” says Vonder Heide. . . ." (read more at link above)


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Dot Com Still King of TLDs

Dot Com Remains the King of TLDs | Siteopia Blog: "the TLD that still reigns supreme is the old favourite, .com. Reports from the third quarter of 2012 have shown that there are around 105 million domains registered in the .com TLD. The runners up are all of the ccTLDs (of which there are 280), which comes in at 104.9 million, followed by the .net extension at 14.9 million. Clearly, .com is the top dog of TLDs but the question remains as to how the new domain names will affect its popularity. As of December 2012, there have been 1917 gTLD applications according to ICANN, so the threat to the .com name has not been significant. However, this might change as popularity grows for the new domain names and businesses look to enhance their digital profile. Nevertheless, it seems that some big-name digital companies (including Facebook, Twitter and eBay) remain wary of the new domain names and have chosen not to apply. It has been predicted that .com will keep its spot at the top but the domain names beneath it will be split in more ways."

Is it illegal to speculate domain names? - News VietNamNet: "Is it illegal to speculate domain names? The story that Nguyen Trong Khoa, known as the domain name baron in Vietnam has offered to sell some domain names relating to Eurowindow company, has become a hot topic on local newspapers. . . . Hanh went on to say that Vietnamese enterprises have not paid appropriate attention to the domain name registration, and that they “lock the stable door after the horse has bolted.” Domain names are not the brands, but domain names play a very important identification role in the global Internet environment. Regarding the principle “first comes first served” which analysts believe is unreasonable, Hanh said that this is the international practice and Vietnam should not refuse to follow the rule. This explains why the domain names aodai.vn (ao dai is the Vietnamese traditional dress) and aodai.com.vn have belonged to a South Korean domain name investor."

No recession in UK domain industry: The top 12 UK domain name sales of 2012 | Latest press releases | PressGo | Journalism.co.uk: ""Savvy UK web address investors have been making some serious money in the last 12 months…" according to Jason Smith, Director of UK domain registration company Siteopia.com. "…The industry has seen a number of very high sales transactions which is very encouraging, despite external economic conditions remaining turbulent." "We took some time at the end of the year to interview domain name investor Frank Paul from 34.co.uk (who sold CheapCruises.co.uk), and it is clear that the market has remained buoyant over the last few years."

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