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Rob Monster exits DigitalTown, George Nagy takes over CEO role

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Rob Monster has left DigitalTown.

Monster pares CEO roles down to one.

Rob Monster has resigned as CEO of DigitalTown, a company that provides community building platforms. The company owns a large portfolio of domain names, including 11,000 .city domain names.

Monster told Domain name Wire that the move has been planned for a while. In an email, he said that new CEO George Nagy, who was the COO, “brings significant experience with running and selling public companies and with working with institutional investors, both which will be highly relevant for the next phase.”

He was CEO of both DigitalTown and domain name company Epik. He will now have more time to focus on Epik and other endeavors.

He noted:

As a general statement, my competency leans more toward vision, strategy and corporate development. Over the last 2.5 years, we completed 7 acquisitions with which we assembled the technology and team that has allowed us to start rollout of DigitalTown around the world as well as secure deals with both private developers and government clients.

Blockchain, Crypto and Decentralized Apps are a logical response to the pattern of winner-take-all and the policies that allow it. Timing-wise, I believe the world is on the cusp of a major catalyzing event that will make DigitalTown a lot more relevant. The economic situations that are unfolding in Puerto Rico, Turkey, Venezuela and Argentina are not isolated events.

Looking ahead, I continue to be a significant DigitalTown shareholder with 18 million shares and to be an informal advisor. I have high hopes for George and the team we built. Epik continues to manage DigitalTown’s domain portfolio and will help accelerate progress on selling domains into the hands of end-users, an area that was lower priority while I was running both companies.

On the personal side, after 3 years of working 100 hour weeks while running 2 companies, I am looking forward to devoting more time to equipping Epik for the next phase. I also plan to devote more time to Christian ministry and philanthropy. My family doubts that I will slow down. Regardless I am taking a measured and Spirit-led approach to what comes next.

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New: “Like” comments on Domain Name Wire

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Now you can Like comments you read on Domain Name Wire.

Ever read a comment on Domain Name Wire that you agree with or find interesting? Now, in addition to adding your own reply or comment, you can Like the person’s comment.

Just look for the Like link underneath the comment:

In the future, I might feature comments that get more likes.

The Like feature is an experiment. Let me know if you think it’s useful or not.

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August’s top domain name stories

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Here’s a look back at August on Domain Name Wire. These were the top stories ranked by number of page views:

1. Betsy Riot trolls NRA Lobbyist’s wife with domain name – Anti-NRA gun control advocates successfully defended a domain name in a UDRP that they used to troll an NRA lobbyist’s wife.

2. Living as a Digital Nomad for a month – Many domain investors can live and work from anywhere. Here was my experience setting up camp in Seattle for a month.

3. California.com sells as part of big domain name transaction – The seven-figure transaction included 10 domain names.

4. Allstate is no longer in .GoodHands – Allstate is giving up its .goodhands new top level domain name.

5. Former NFL player Shawne Merriman wanted LightsOut.com, but panelist disagreed – His clothing company tried to get a domain name through UDRP.

And here are links to the three DNW Podcasts published during the month:

#199 – Crowdsourcing (domain) name selection – listen
#198 – New TLD Economics with Colin Campbell – listen
#197 – Top Domain Sales of the Year – listen

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Putting the Google Chrome URL news into perspective

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What impact could changes to Chrome have on domain names?

Yesterday I wrote about a WIRED story discussing the Google Chrome team’s efforts to change how it displays a site’s identity.

The reaction was pretty strong. Any threat to URLs seems like a threat to domain names.

But let’s take a step back and think more about this.

The idea is to make sure people visiting a website understand the identity of the website. Who runs it? Is it the site I intended to visit? Is it legit?

We can all agree that knowing these answers is a good thing. The question is how to convey this information, and how much of it can be conveyed in the “address bar” of a browser. Click here to continue reading…

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Google Chrome team says URLs “kind of suck”, figuring out how to replace them

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The people behind the Chrome browser are investigating ways to replace the URL for site identity.

Are URLs a good way to understand site identity? Google’s Chrome browser team doesn’t think so, according to an article published today by WIRED.

Adrienne Porter Felt, Chrome’s engineering Manager, told the publication:

People have a really hard time understanding URLs. They’re hard to read, it’s hard to know which part of them is supposed to be trusted, and in general I don’t think URLs are working as a good way to convey site identity. So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone—they know who they’re talking to when they’re using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs. We want to challenge how URLs should be displayed and question it as we’re figuring out the right way to convey identity.

At the same time, Parisa Tabriz, director of engineering at Chrome, said they don’t know what this will look like. But Tabriz said that whatever is proposed will be controversial. “But it’s important we do something, because everyone is unsatisfied by URLs. They kind of suck.”

Some browsers have tried to replace the URL in the past, and those efforts have been unsatisfying. The key thing is to be able to trust the site and content you are viewing. Seeing the URL helps. That’s not to say the site identity in the browser can’t be different than a URL, but you can learn a lot by viewing the full URL of a page. Some previous efforts are akin to just showing a site name, which can be spoofed or copied.

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