Hyperlocal Dating Gone Guerilla
I’m not one to give you a link, say two sentences and move on. But this evening a domaining article made the front page of Digg, which doesn’t happen very often. And the only reason I’m posting about it is because it involves one of the geodomain ideas I had written about.
The full article can be read here.
The author basically uncovers a massive advertising campaign for online dating using lawn signs littered about towns with their respective geo+dating.com printed on it.
I unwittingly wrote about it back in August, here.
A real fascinating, and well-written article.
It’s A Brave New World (And Other Biotrends)
I’ve got three words for you:
- Personalization
- Individualization
- Uniqueness
These have been at the forefront of trends for 2008; many of the trends this year tie directly into one of these. Now, perhaps more than ever, people want to express themselves in their own way. Well, I’ve got a trend for you that utilizes these three words to the absolute extreme: Biotrends.
It really wasn’t all that long ago when DNA wasn’t in our everyday vocabulary. It somewhat hit the news in the 1980’s with the discovery that it can be used for identification purposes. But it wasn’t until the early to mid 90’s that it went mainstream with FlavrSavr, OJ Simpson and Dolly. FavrSavr wasn’t a big hit, but the news that we can successfully genetically engineer food was enormous. I don’t really have to say much about OJ. And Dolly made headlines all around the world.
I remember when all three of these news stories hit. That was 12 to 14 years ago.
In the grand scheme of things, that simply wasn’t long ago. Hell, we’ve been on DNA’s tail since the 1800’s. And now? well, it’s so common that you can order home DNA paternity kits. It has spawned numerous companies looking to take things to the next level with DNA Personalization in a wide range of fields.
To start, let’s look how this meshes with another popular trend: dating sites. I sometimes like to combine trends to come up with new ideas, such as hyperlocal dating. If you take the growing ease and popularity of DNA testing and combine it with dating sites, it was only a matter of time that someone began using DNA to match people romantically. Make sure you send off your DNA to My DNA Fragrance and pick up some perfume before you go on that date!
Another emerging trend is DNA art, such as:
- Genome Quilts takes your DNA and replaces the four bases with patterns. This produces a large quilt that you can truly say is yours.
- The DNA Glowframe maps out your DNA on a backlit display for $900. DNA Art UK offers something similar. There are many companies that do something this, just search for “DNA art.”
Now THAT’s unique.
Bio technology is advancing at a rapid pace, uncovering new and amazing opportunities. With these opportunities comes great interest from Joe Consumer. By being ahead of the game, you can have the domains that will be needed by future end users as his field grows.
For instance, a family in Spain has a son with Beta Thalassaemia major, a rare hereditary disease. He is now 6, but isn’t expected to live past 10 years old. When discussing having a second child, they came to realize the new baby can provide a rare opportunity for their son in the form of bone marrow. However, because the disease ran in the family’s DNA, it was possible that the new baby would have it too and thus would not be able to help. So they had the embryo prescreened to make sure it would be immune to the disease, and it worked; the baby was born immune to this rare disease. So they took the blood from the umbilical cord and are now storing it for the older child for when they do the marrow transplant.
The part in the article that claims this is genetic engineering is inaccurate. The embryos were prescreened, not genetically engineered. The procedure is not even a huge accomplishment, medically speaking, and is becoming more and more commonplace.
It’s no longer sci-fi.
In fact, we are inching closer to Gattaca (actual genetic engineering), or, perhaps much further down the line, and more frighteningly, Brave New World.
It’s scary when you think about it.
So with our better understanding of DNA and the human genome, what else can we expect to come from this?
Well, the medical field is always a fantastic place to look so lets keep looking there:
- Kid DNA kits in case they get abducted or injured.
- Diets created specifically to alter your DNA.
- DNA supplements.
How about smart drugs? No, I don’t mean drugs that make you smart, although those may not be far behind. I mean drugs that are designed based on our understanding of how genes and proteins work. I found this fascinating article written in 2005 by Danila Medvedev, a self proclaimed transhumanist, futurologist and cryonicist, which speculates on the role that genetic engineering will have in the next 20 years of human existence. It gets a bit far fetched, but who knows? Most things today were far fetched at one point.
This overall biotrend is not limited to all things DNA. There are other ways to express yourself in an extreme, and 100% unique way.
There is a company that will take your bone cells and grow them on what is called bioglass, a sort of scaffold for the bone to grow upon. They will then shape the bone into a ring and put an inscription on it. You now have a ring made out of 100% your bone; the ultimate gift of something personally yours.
Or, on a much simpler, and far less painful, note: fingerprint art.
Biotrends, and more specifically genetics, are bursting with keywords. I’ll list some here, but these don’t even scratch the surface:
- genealogy
- anthrogenealogy
- transhuman
- bioengineering
- biotech/biotechnology
- bio product(s)
- biometry
- bioinformatics
- bioremediation
- remedial ecology
- biogeographical ancestry (BGA)
- cloning (and it’s other obvious forms that are already mainstream)
- nanotech/nanotechnology
- nanorobot(s)/nanobot(s)
- microbiology
- nucleotide(s)
- immunogenetics
- genome/genomic(s)
- genome analysis/gene analysis
- gene therapy/genetic therapy
- gene silencing
- genetic mapping
- genetic programming
- genetic modification
- genetic profiling
- viral genetics
- endocytobiology
- cytogenetics
- proteomics
- symbiosis/symbiotic(s)/symbiote
- haplotype(s)
- haplogroup(s)
- polymerase chain reaction (PCR) devices (cheap personal DNA kit)
- smart drug(s)
- augmented reality
- extended identity
- human enhancement
- artificial general intelligence (AGI)
Finally, lets combine this with yet another trend: robotics. This is where the transhuman and nanotechnology keywords come in. Will humans and robots merge in the future? Some think so. And they say it may be closer than you think.
A Domainers Long Hard Look At Bail Outs Part 1: The Auto Industry
The auto industry is hurting: it’s down 20% from this time last year. In case you don’t know how auto dealerships work, here it is: dealerships don’t own the new cars on their lot. Who can afford having 100, 200 or 300 new cars at ~$25k a pop? In order to get around this problem, they simply take out a loan for every new car they get shipped to them. They then pay one or two payments before selling the car outright. They pay off the loan and the difference is their profit (plus accessories and anything else they upsold you, otherwise known as gravy; their real money maker).
This is a common business model for companies that have high priced inventories, such as industrial/commercial copy machines.
So if no one is lending, then who will the auto dealerships get money from to put cars on their lot? When you combine an already slow economy; inventories that are truck/SUV heavy; and the lack of lenders, auto dealerships are getting hit hard.
In the past year alone, over 500 GM, Ford and Chrysler dealers have closed shop in the U.S. They are dropping like flies and it’s not just the small dealers: giants like Bill Heard are waving the white flag.
This leads up to a secret: the auto industry got their own bail out. It was rarely in the news until Congress passed it and Bush signed it into law. Even then, it was a footnote in a period where a $700 billion bail out was being ironed out, a presidential debate was happening, huge companies were being bought, a stock market crash and constant hype for the VP debate. It was genius of them to ask for it, really, as $25 billion is chump change when compared to $700 billion. Not to mention our top three auto states, Michigan, Ohio and Missouri, have struggling economies and are battleground states this fall. They were all but guaranteed on getting this loan.
In 1979, Congress bailed out Chrysler to the tune of $1.2b. This bill is $25b (the most allowed under law), and the auto industry will be pressing for $25b more. Each of the big three will receive about $5b, with the rest going to suppliers. This is different than the $700b bail out in that this is a straight up loan at a cheap 4% or 5% (they are paying 10% to 15% now) rate that they have to begin paying off in 2013.
One of the problems is that the “strings” attached are not really strings at all. This money must go to retooling and updating plants and assembly lines and develop advanced fuel efficient technology. The loophole is that the auto makers already spend billions on this. They can now apply the bail out money to these departments and simply shift the existing money elsewhere. That makes this “string” completely pointless.
Another “string” is that there is language in the bill that says the money can only be used on factories that have been in operation for more than 20 years, leaving out foreign manufacturers that only started building in the past ten. That makes this a Big 3 Bailout.
Whether you agree with this bail out or not is moot. It happened, and only time will tell whether it worked or not. The point is that $25 billion has just been inserted into the Michigan economy and auto industry.
What kind of trends can you expect from the Auto Bail Out?
Dealerships will surely keep dropping due to the struggling economy while failing to get out of the truck/SUV markets in a timely fashion. This will reinforce an existing trend of buying your car on the internet with sites like AutoBuyTel and CarsDirect. I bought my first new car with AutoByTel in 1998 and I can personally say that buying your car on the internet is a breeze. If these online companies keep getting bigger, they may begin to offer kickbacks for referrals. That would be a welcomed addition to a niche considered to be one of the three biggest investments you will make in your life (education, and home are the others).
This will speed up their research and production of fuel efficient vehicles, reinforcing that huge trend.
Another trend the $25 billion auto bail out will start is the actual act of asking for a bail out. The airline industry must be raising an eyebrow to this bill and I’m sure they are piecing together their request as I write this. Who else? Brick and mortar retailers? The rail industry? Manufacturing? Shipping? Construction? Health care? Social Security?
How about actual states in our union? If your state is having a hard time paying its law enforcement, hospitals or teachers, why not ask for a bail out? They will ask. And if they ask, they will receive. Why? How can you say no to paying a teacher, or an officer, or nurse? You can’t. They will guilt trip everyone into saying yes.
The new hot keyword, Bail Out, could be here to stay for a good while.
How To Research A Keyword Geodomain Before You Buy It
To start, this post isn’t about pure geo domains. Those are no-brainers. This post is intended to help you decide if a geo+keyword.com is worth picking up.
Since I found the new Name.com tools I have been doing a lot of mining for geodomains using my trusty Domain Research Tool. There are so many geo+keyword.coms deleting every day, with countless more waiting to be registered. They are littered all over every single site out there.
So how do you tell if you are looking at a winner?
I’m going to leave out things you check for in every domain, such as pagerank, backlinks, indexes, history, etc. That said, there are four main things I look for, other than price, when deciding whether or not to pick up a geo+keyword.com:
- The size of the city/state/whatever. Not just population, but quantity of businesses. City-Data.com can help you here. This is the most obvious and doesn’t really need any further explanation.
- The relation of the keyword to the geo location. Does it fit? Do you want FloridaSnowblowers.com?
- Has it been registered in the other extensions?
- The number of other similar geos that use that same keyword. This is perhaps the most important and the reason why I’m writing this post.
For example: I have a handful of cities and states in the Name.com notification list of deleted names, including “Texas.” If a domain drops with the word “Texas” in it then an email will be sent to me. Yesterday I received a notification that FuelTexas.com deleted and was available to register. I thought it was a pretty good name. But before I pulled the trigger, I wanted to look a little deeper into it.
- Big state, both in size and population. Win.
- Fuel and Texas are almost synonymous. Win.
- It was registered in .TV but the other extensions were available. Lose.
- And finally I ran all 50 states in the DRT with the keyword “Fuel” in front of them. This was going to be the deciding factor in whether I purchased the domain name or not. Unfortunately I found that just 7 Fuel+State.coms were registered. Ouch.
Finding just 7 registered was quite disappointing. I was fully expecting 40+ to be registered. So few means that this simply can’t be much in demand. Still, these two words fit quite well together and since it’s reg fee, it’s worth picking up in my opinion.
Let’s move on to another example. I received an email notification saying that FlightsMichigan.com had deleted and was waiting to be registered. I thought it was a pretty good keyword, so I put it to the test.
- Again, big state both in size and population.
- Not really touristy like Florida or Nevada, but still a great keyword that can be good in any state.
- Again, the .TV was taken but the rest are available.
- Yet another shock: just 12 state.coms have this prefix!
I really thought such a popular keyword would be taken by now. Personally, I prefer geo+keyword.com over keyword+geo.com. It sounds better to me and feels brandable. MichiganFlights.com. Yea, it sounds better. And I’m not the only one that feels this way: running state+flights.com through the DRT… 100% gone. Not a single one is available.
So I decided to look even further into FlightsMichigan.com using one of my favorites: the Google Keyword Tool. “Flights Michigan” has a search volume of 40,500 with some decent advertiser competition. Even further, “Flights Colorado” has 135,000 searches a month and FlightsColorado.com is available! The list of available names are at the bottom of this post.
This is something you should always do before you pickup a geodomain. It’s helped me make purchases many times. There have been a couple instances where I took a keyword and found just 1 or 2 states, or a couple of the top 50 cities that didn’t have the geo+keyword.com registered. Even though there was a time or two where I wasn’t absolutely thrilled with the domains, there is an obvious demand for them.
And remember, none of these are set in stone. This is a guide to help you make a more informed decision. If your gut feeling says to ignore the rules and go for the domain, then by all means do so. I’ve done it myself.
Have fun with these:
flightsalabama.com
flightsarizona.com
flightsarkansas.com
flightscarolina.com
flightsnorthcarolina.com
flightssouthcarolina.com
flightscolorado.com
flightsconnecticut.com
flightsdakota.com
flightsnorthdakota.com
flightssouthdakota.com
flightsdelaware.com
flightsgeorgia.com
flightsidaho.com
flightsillinois.com
flightsindiana.com
flightsiowa.com
flightskentucky.com
flightslouisiana.com
flightsmaine.com
flightsmaryland.com
flightsmassachusetts.com
flightsmichigan.com
flightsminnesota.com
flightsmississippi.com
flightsmissouri.com
flightsmontana.com
flightsnebraska.com
flightsnewhampshire.com
flightsnewjersey.com
flightsnewmexico.com
flightsohio.com
flightsoklahoma.com
flightsoregon.com
flightsrhodeisland.com
flightstexas.com
flightsutah.com
flightsvermont.com
flightsvirginia.com
flightswestvirginia.com
flightswisconsin.com
flightswyoming.com
Oh, and I left FuelTexas.com for someone to reg.
(Something tells me I’ll regret not registering all of these)
I’m Back! And I Have A Couple Great New Tools
I have electricity once again after Ike took it from us for 11 days. The site was also down today. Apparently the Google positioner plugin I use stopped working and made the entire site go poof. It’s gone and the site is back.
I’m a bit out of touch at the moment; haven’t been able to keep up on news and trends very easily. What I do have, however, are a couple great tools recently released by Name.com.
To start, they now have Domain Suggestions, Expiring Names and a Recently Deleted section.
The Domain Suggestion feature isn’t terribly special; it seems like any other suggestion engine. Though, I was able to find a couple decent names using it.
The Expiring section lets you buy names for $19.99 before they get deleted. Again, not terribly special but I did find a decent name or two.
Now the Recently Deleted section is a different story. I was able to find plenty of decent names here for the bargain price of reg fee. Eliminating hyphens, numbers, .nets and dropping the length below 20 yields some nice domain names for the keywords you enter. I love how you can search back X amount of days as well, but beware: the searches can take a long time (and I hate the location of the checkout button; my mousehand loves to click on it).
Let’s take some recent trends reported here on TrendDomaining.com and search the Recently Deleted feature on Name.com
- BambooTips.com
- TattooFinder.com
- RobotMachinery.com
- KyotoCarbonCredit.com
- CheckCarbon.com
- CarbonNeutralising.com (Yes, I know this is British)
- CarbonActivist.com
- ReduceOurFootprint.com (Call-to-action is the in-thing)
- CharlotteDayTrips.com
- SolarHerald.com (what a great name for a solar news site)
- OntarioSolarPower.com
- HomeEnergySolutions.com
Enter broken record: Yes, these aren’t CarbonCredit.com, SolarPower.com and Robotics.com, but these are worth reg fee and would do an end user well.
There is one last tool Name.com has given us: e-mail alerts for deleted names that contain your hand picked keywords. You can reach there through a not so subtle link on the Recently Deleted section called Get email notification of newly deleted names.
You can enter as many keywords as you like, such as Houston, Chicago, NewYork, Bamboo, etc. Then choose a max length, hyphens, numbers and e-mail frequency and Name.com will send you a notice as soon as the domain gets deleted.
Like Google Alerts though, this thing can spam ya. Do not leave the max length at 63 unless you really are interested in xomphoenixnightlifewhiteoutparty.com. Yes, I did receive an e-mail alert for that.
I really like how it will bundle your alerts into one e-mail instead of one for each name or even each keyword. Excellent idea.
These are a couple nice tools to add to your ever-growing arsenal. They need some polishing, but it’s a good start for Name.com in bringing in new features.