Schilling will lead session at January’s DOMAINfest conference in Hollywood, California.
DOMAINfest announced that legendary domainer Frank Schilling will lead the first ever “Domainer Town Hall Meeting” at the DOMAINfest conference in Hollywood, California January 21-23, 2008. The DOMAINfest conference is presented by domain name parking company DomainSponsor.
The conference will also include an auction in “an innovative new format”, according to conference organizers. Jay Westerdal’s Name Intelligence pushed the envelope with technology at its recent Domain Roundtable conference; it will be interesting to see what innovation DOMAINfest brings to the auction process.
The conference will include a number of sessions to help domainers hone their business skills including negotiation, tax, and finance.
The early bird registration rate for the conference is $595 and ends this Friday. Rates will increase to $795 on September 1. However, DomainSponsor customers who earn $2,500 with the program between December 1, 2007 and March 1, 2008, will receive a rebate for the entire conference fee.
It’s nice to see the conference organizers planning well in advance. It seems like many of these conferences are thrown together at the last minute with agendas not being published until the week before.
More information and registration information is available at www.DOMAINfest.com.
Dan says
Agreed. DomainFest is both the cheaper and the better organized Domain tradeshow I’ve been to.
Stephen Douglas says
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for your coverage on the Domain Roundtable Conference 2007 last month. I was concerned in this article above that you made a blanket statement with your comment “It seems like many of these conferences are thrown together at the last minute with agendas not being published until the week before.”
Which conferences are you referring to, since you say “many”? There aren’t that many well-known domain conferences, maybe totaling four or five, and Domainfest is one of them. It’s obvious that Rick Schwartz’s TRAFFIC events aren’t thown together at the “last minute”, and the Domain Roundtable Conference was announced five months before the event was held. Our topic of events were posted soon after and continually updated online as they evolved. So like DomainFest, TRAFFIC and Domain Roundtable are also well-planned, professionally produced events. That’s three out of the “many”.
My question, respectfully, is which domain conferences are left that fall into your category of being “thrown together at the last minute”? That way you can remove TRAFFIC and Domain Roundtable from readers’ minds as being possible “suspects”. 😉
Keep up the good work, and we’ll see you at the next DRT 2008!
Andrew says
Stephen,
First, I’d like to congratulate you on DRT. I had a great time there and learned a lot too. The networking was good too. You created a good atmosphere and attracted many people who don’t usually come to these conferences.
My comment about conferences being thrown together at the last minute is a comparative statement to other genres of conferences, as described in my suggestions below. I attend a lot of conferences, ranging from health care to law to technology. Most of these are announced at least a year in advance, and agendas are published a good 6-9 months out.
The difficulty with the domain industry is that it’s so dynamic. A topic you put on the agenda 6 months out may be a moot point by the time the conference rolls around.
Here are my recommendations for domain conferences:
-Announce the keynote at least two months in advance. For TRAFFIC NYC, a keynote was announced about a week or two in advance. (Yes, I realize there was a reason for the last minute announcement.) Fortunately, Steve Forbes was announced very early for next month’s show.
-Publish the final agenda at least a month in advance, preferably two. TRAFFIC NYC was published a week or two in advance.
-Finalize the auction at least 3 weeks in advance.
-Create innovative panels. Stephen, you did a good job with many of the panels at DRT. It seems like many of the panels at conferences are the same thing, rehashed each time.
-Limit panels to 4 speakers. I enjoyed my media panel at DRT, which had 4 speakers. The parking company panel, which had around 8 speakers, didn’t give much time for Q&A. Q&A should be the focus of any panel. By the time 8 people advertise their business, there’s not much time left.
There’s also something that I feel plagues domain conferences in general, and I’m curious for your opinion.
Let’s face it, domainers are mostly guys. And guys like women, which are incorporated somehow into all shows. That’s cool if we want to remain ‘us guys’. But is our goal to get more of Corporate America to attend events and learn about domains? Do we want them to buy our generic domains?
Big companies are starting to peak in at these conferences, but at the last TRAFFIC conference one of the dinners had a backdrop of a porn landing page in the background. Not exactly kosher with a Fortune 500 exec whose company has paid to send him or her to the conference.
We can go other way. But if we state that our mission is to make corporations ‘get it’, that’s a problem.