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.
Free Unique Content: Themed Restaurants
This is a pretty small niche, but interesting nonetheless. Web Urbanist has posted 15 of the strangest themed restaurants. And when I say themed restaurants, I’m not talking Hard Rock Cafe or Rainforest Cafe. I’m talking cosplay and vampires.
This is an international list. In fact none are in the U.S.; most are in Asia. However each one of them would be a small but unique addition to a travel or geo site.
If you’re going to Tokyo, you simply must check out Cannibalistic Sushi, Maid Cafes and the Vampire Cafe. You won’t find these things on any other site. Ok, you will on Web Urbanist. But my point is that content like this can help set you apart from the other guy that doesn’t go out of his way to provide interesting content.
Simply grab some pictures, write something up and publish it on your:
- Geo site of the cities or the countries they’re in
- Travel site geared towards tourists who would want a story to tell, such as visiting the Hobbit House in the Philippines.
At first glance this list from Web Urbanist looks nothing more than something you would find on Digg, take two minutes to read, chuckle and then move on. That’s because that is where I found it. But a domainer needs to look at these things from a different angle. Ask yourself: Do I have any sites that could benefit from this info?
Even if the article did not provide you with any useful into for your sites- say you don’t have any international geo or travel sites- you can still apply it to a site you may have. For instance: there simply must be tons of themed restaurants in every country, right? Taking five minutes to do a Google and Digg search yielded these:
- 13 Creatively Themed Bars and Restaurants
- 10 Ridiculously Unique Dining Experiences You Should Try Before You Die
- 7 Strange And Different Restaurants
- Weird Canadian Restaurants
- The Worlds Most Unusual Restaurants
Of course, this wouldn’t be complete without the movie themed restaurants.
Do Technology Trends Have Their Own Hype Cycle?
Found a neat chart over at TechCrunch on technology hype cycles, pulled from the Gartner Consulting website. For those of you who do not know about Gartner, they are an IT consulting group that are also known for trend research. This stuff is not free, however TechCrunch got permission to post one of their hype cycle charts.
The picture shown at the top is the July 2008 tech hype cycle.
Gartner explains hype cycles here, but long story short there are five phases of a technology cycle:
- Technology Trigger
- Peak of Inflated Expectations
- Trough of Disillusionment
- Slope of Enlightenment
- Plateau of Productivity
I’ll just go over the emerging trends, as they are probably the most interesting and also the most likely of places to find available domain names.
Context Delivery Architecture is a fancy name for WYNIWYG: What you need is what you get. It’s the idea of focusing on an individuals needs and delivering the goods. Though it is quite low on the chart, it’s obviously been around a long time. Perhaps they are saying that we now have the technology to take this to the next level.
Mobile Robots, something I claimed to possibly be the biggest trend of 2008, and perhaps future. (Yea, I know… it’s hard to argue against the green machine).
Augmented Reality, as defined by Wikipedia, is the combination of the real world and the digital world. For instance, one could wear translucent glasses and through them see the real world, as well as computer generated images that project onto the real world. TranslucentGlasses.com and TranslucentGoggles.com were available, I picked them up.
Surface Computers started hitting the news last year where Microsoft announced a division dedicated to bringing these to the masses. Surface computers can recognize things you set on top of them, such as paint brushes, your finger, plates, whatever. They are aiming at hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues.
Cloud Computing is one of the more popular tech trends at the moment. “Cloud” confuses people; just think of it as “Internet Computing” or “Online Computing.” It’s a combination of many internet technologies, but mostly software as a service and web 2.0. Your G-mail, a place where you store your emails online, is a perfect example of cloud computing.
3D Printing has actually been around a long time, but recently has been picking up steam. Personally, I find it boring and almost totally useless. At least so far…
Microblogging is a huge trend right now, thanks largely to Twitter and partly to Pownce. Some businesses are catching on and using microblogging and instant messaging to communicate in the workplace. Large social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn, have incorporated microblogging into their platforms.
Green IT is the practice of using computer resources efficiently.
Of course, this is just one company’s point of view. But I still find it quite interesting and full of material that I can research and find domain names.
Are there any technologies that you think they left out? If so, where would you put them on the hype cycle?
Social Trendcasting Site Is Great Tool For Domainers
Ran across a nifty site today; I have no idea how it slipped by me. It’s called Edopter.com and they brand it as social trendcasting. You are able to browse and follow trends, even submitting some yourself (requires free registration). As a member, you can comment on submitted trends and even help hype them. You are given credit for discovering trends and can give credit to others.
The popularity of a trend can rise and fall, and it will show you the difference from the previous weeks popularity.
The site does use information that you enter to help define trends. For instance, you enter your date of birth, zip code and gender upon registering. The site will keep track of the trends you submit and support. So if a certain trend is wildly popular among 20-24 year old men, the site will say that.
I spent a good deal browsing the site and found some interesting trends and clever start-ups. A few examples:
- Spikeball - Like volleyball, only different… just $50 and enjoyed by males ages 25 to 30 from Chicago. Being the curious fella that I am, I checked in with Google Trends. The trend report for “Spike Ball” supports this claim. Check out the cities: LA is first, with Chicago second. Pretty neat. (ChicagoSpikeball.com is available Spikeball is the name of a product, not a sport. So it’s trademarked)
- OLED’s - Organic LED’s are more efficient and powerful.
- Coworking - The idea of work-at-home employees getting together in a community area such as a cafe or a shared office.
I even found one related to domaining: Backwards-spelled domain names. Sorry, not sold.
Taking a look at the most popular trends and you will see a watered down list of obvious things like the iPhone, Obama, Apple, Firefox, etc. The real treasure is found from browsing the trends.
Plenty of stuff here for domainers to sniff out. Some of these trends are quite early, which is a great time to get in on it. Let’s go back to the Coworking trend: If people are searching out comfortable places to work, a directory could be worth building. How much competition will you have? LocalCoworking.com is available.
Check the site out, spot anything that has potential?