25 Years of .Com Gala Celebrates Web Innovators
Thursday, May 27th, 2010
Gala celebrates big companies and players in the dot.com revolution.
Last night I had the honor of attending VeriSign’s “25 Years of .Com” gala at city hall in San Francisco. It was a fantastic event with a lot of the companies and people that made the internet what it is today in attendance.
After cocktails, comedian Dana Carvey took to the stage to warm up the crowd.
“Welcome. How many people have a net worth over $10 million? Don’t think, just raise your hand,” joked Carvey. He then pointed to another audience member. “Are you worth a billion dollars? You look like you’re thirteen.”
Carvey then introduced Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who provided a list of 10 reasons we shouldn’t be celebrating 25 years of .com. One of his reasons: “I’m still waiting on my new Nigerian friend to send me that twenty-five thousand dollars.” (Note to self: never follow an emmy-award winning comedian on the stage and try to be funny.)
The gala included a video celebrating the “.com 25″, including eBay, eTrade, and Craigslist (the latter of which is actually on a .org domain). VeriSign also welcomed the “Domain Pioneers” consisting of some of the biggest domain name registrars. Among those accepting the honor on behalf of their companies were Warren Adelman of Go Daddy, Elliot Noss of Tucows, Bhavin Turakhia of Directi, and Jeff Kupietzky of Oversee.net
But the most entertaining moment of the evening was Carvey’s improvised introduction of ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush. I know the video below is of low quality (hey, I had a Flip in the back of the room), but you’ll get a kick out of it.
Further Reading:
Who else was there that we would know?
Were there any domainers there?
Other ppc guys?
Did Verisign announce a price reduction for 2011?
I forgot to mention that Aron Meystedt, who bought Symbolics.com, was there and was recognized.
The crowd was mostly: registrars, companies in the .com 25, VeriSign, policy people.
What’s with the smiley on the bottom left corner of this page?
At first I could not figure out what you were talking about.
Son of gun, you are right.
Did someone hack the site and just want to leave a small notice to show his buddies?
The smiley is just a wordpress stats thing. are you using internet explorer I take it?
The smiley gif appears to be from stats.wordpress.com, presumably a typical web analytics bug, but instead of the usual 1×1 0-byte jpeg, it’s a smiley.
@ Jeremy – yeah, that’s something WordPress does.
I see the smilie on FireFox.
Smileeee…….. I love smile…
Was good to see you there!
It was a great event.
Aron
I like this video.
We also heard that .com prices is going to increase next month immediately after this event.