Showing posts with label stock symbol. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stock symbol. Show all posts

2016-12-11

News Review: ICANN's IANA Transition Costs Now Exceed $31 Million

News Review | ©2016 DomainMondo.com
Domain Mondo's weekly review of internet domain news:

 Feature •  ICANN has spent over $31 million in IANA transition costs from inception (July 2014) to October, 2016:


Included as "costs" are the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) work, the Cross Community Working Group on Naming Related Stewardship Functions (CWG-Stewardship), the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability) Work Stream 1 (WS1) and Work Stream 2 (WS2) still underway, and related implementation work.

Cost categories include cost of staff support, travel and meetings costs, professional services (legal advice), and administrative costs. According to ICANN, costs disclosed are exclusively direct costs and do not include any overhead allocation.

IANA Transition Cost Summary Reports – Inception to October 16, 2016:
Legal Advice Costs below are also included in the Costs Summary above, but deal solely with the three legal firms employed: Jones Day; Sidley & Austin; Adler & Colvin. According to ICANN, when monthly invoices have not yet been received, estimates are requested from the legal firms. If no estimates are received from the legal firms, ICANN Finance produces an estimated monthly total cost, mainly based on historical trend.

Other Internet Domain News:

•  ICYMI: IGF 2016, Internet Governance Forum, concluded its meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico, this past week. For more: News Review: IGF 2016, Internet Governance Forum, Guadalajara, Dec. 5-9 and IGF 2016 Video: ICANN New gTLDs Program, Impact & Future Direction.

 •  GDD (ICANN Global Domains Division) Industry Summit Sponsorship Opportunities, Madrid, Spain, May 8-11, 2017 (ICANN.org pdf). Review GDD Industry Summit 2016 here.

•  New gTLDs .XYZ, .CLUB and .VIP have obtained official licenses from the Chinese government, joining legacy gTLDs .COM and .NET, in obtaining approval from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology ("MIIT"), the domain name regulator in China. More at Overseas TLD Registries Licensed by Chinese Government | CircleID.com.

•  Wonder about that recent explosion in new gTLD .KIWI domain name registrations? Read Using digital fear to get more domain name registrations! | OnlineDomain.com and KIWI managing director Angus Richardson replies to fear tactics and inflated numbers accusations | OnlineDomain.com. One commenter wrote:
"After 2 years nobody wants them, provide them free, and hope for a renewal. The demand is not there, the domains are not needed."
•  So what's that domain name really worth? Investor portfolios of .COM domain names, sold in bulk wholesale? Maybe $500 per domain name, read: GoDaddy Likely Buys Traffic Names LTD Domain Portfolio | dotweekly.com.

•  Stock Ticker Symbols Matter: ‘When you pick out the name of your stock, you need to be really careful.’--Xuejing Xing, co-author of the study--"Stocks benefit from the “likability” and even the pronounceability of a ticker symbol ... A study published in the Journal of Financial Markets finds that the “likability” and even the pronounceability of a ticker symbol are positively related to a stock’s value. In other words, if your stock can’t have the symbol IBM or AAPL, at least pick a clever one ... the study says, is that a likable symbol is associated with greater liquidity, since investors also tend to trade stocks with more-likable symbols at a higher rate. Alternatively, the study suggests, a higher value could be the result of mispricing; investors might unconsciously assign a higher value to a symbol that is easier to pronounce .... Other studies have agreed that companies with easy-to-pronounce names have higher value and liquidity ... Mr. Xing says he is at work on a related paper looking at corporate names and their effect on profitability."--WSJ.com. See also Company Domain Names, IPOs, Simple Rules, Stupid Mistakes | DomainMondo.com (7 Oct 2014).

•   Language: China’s tyranny of characters | Economist.com: "... Like Latin, classical written Chinese was a dead language, spoken by no one. A century ago, when language reformers began to introduce a common nationwide spoken tongue of Mandarin, they also abandoned the classical written language and replaced it with one that mirrored the spoken form, thus trying to synchronise their speech and their script. Some revolutionaries, including Mao Zedong, initially wanted to scrap Chinese characters altogether and replace them with an alphabet. They settled instead for a simplification of the characters and a standardisation of how they are pronounced and written in Roman letters, known as pinyin. Yet despite major success in literacy programmes, there are still 400m people in China who do not speak Mandarin, and some 100m who the government says cannot read at all. The actual number is undoubtedly higher ..."

•  How to break the internet: "DNS servers are today’s biggest targets ... when the DNS server is unavailable nothing can work – without the DNS there is no connection, therefore no business – so hackers achieve their ultimate goal of causing downtime for a company.“--TechRadar.com

•  AWS Protection from DDoS attacks: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is trying to help protect its customers with a new service named Shield aimed at mitigating DDoS impacts, and the free entry-level tier is enabled by default for all web applications running on AWS--PCWorld.com.

•   How DNS Works In Six Steps | Verisign.com:
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2014-10-07

Company Domain Names, IPOs, Simple Rules, Stupid Mistakes

Stock Charts screenshot: Rocket Internet on left; Rightside on right
Stock Charts screenshots: Rocket Internet on left; Rightside on right (source: marketwatch.com)













I don't mean to be harsh, but look at the domain names and stock symbols of two companies that started trading publicly recently, one just last week, and the stock performance of both has been, shall we say, "sub par"--(see above):

    Corporate Name                      Stock Symbol              Domain Name

1. Rightside Group, Ltd.                    NAME                     rightside.co

2. Rocket Internet AG                        RKET                   rocket-internet.com

See any problems here? And to add insult to injury, the first company above is in the domain name industry! No wonder they are "having problems" -- see here and here. The second company, Rocket Internet, is a German tech company (see video link below).

OK, for you start-ups and entrepreneurs out there, let me make this short and simple. If you want to be taken seriously by investors, venture capitalists, and/or intend to go public on a major stock exchange at some point in time, and you want to maximize your chances for success, it helps to follow a few simple rules:

1. Use consistent branding between your corporate name, stock symbol, and main domain name.
2. Never use a hyphenated domain name.
3. Always get and use the .COM domain name that matches your company name for your main website. I know Google owns (and uses for certain purposes) g.co--but they are known to the world as Google Inc. -- GOOG and GOOGL (stock symbols) -- google.com (website). That's your template--got it? For the slow learners out there, here are four more examples:

Facebook, Inc. -- FB -- facebook.com
Apple Inc. -- AAPL -- apple.com
Twitter Inc. -- TWTR -- twitter.com
Alibaba Group -- BABA -- alibaba.com and alibabagroup.com

Applying the rules to our two subject companies above, I can go to rightside.com and rocketinternet.com but I don't find either of the two companies we are talking about. In the case of Rocket Internet, if they couldn't get* the matching .COM--then they should have changed the name of the company--really! In the case of Rightside, everything is messed up--wrong domain extension, wrong symbol--it looks like they are either suffering from some kind of split personality disorder or trying really hard to fail. 

Entrepreneurs, don't make it any harder on yourselves than need be, follow the simple rules! (And note that I am not addressing in this post the basics of avoiding trademark conflicts [here's a tool for that] or other aspects of branding and nomenclature.)

*If your domain name registrar tells you the .COM name you need is "taken" or "not available" and you do not know how to use the WHOIS in order to contact the domain name owner and make an offer to purchase the .COM domain name you want or need, contact a good domain name broker to do that for you (it's well worth the fee to get a professional to handle it for you and get the right .COM domain name for your company). How much should you spend? Depends on your resources. Rough rule of thumb: up to 10% of your cash--if you have $10,000,0000 in cash (angel funding, etc.), then spend up to $1,000,000 to get that "right" .COM domain name.

Video link: Why You Should Be Wary of Rocket Internet IPO: Kedrosky - Bloomberg.com September 26, 2014.

 Rocket Falls on Debut After Biggest German IPO Since 2007 - Bloomberg: "Rocket Internet AG fell 13 percent on its first day of trading in Frankfurt, failing to replicate investor enthusiasm for e-commerce stocks sparked by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd." Oct 2, 2014 

*update Dec. 30, 2016 corrected video link.



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