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NamesCon picks The Capital Factory for 2020 show in Austin

by — Services 0 Comments

Event chooses startup accelerator for its 2020 U.S. event.

Picture of an event at The Capital Factory in downtown Austin, Texas

The Capital Factory in Austin, Texas.

[Update: NamesCon has changed dates and location for this event.]

NamesCon has finalized the date and location details for its 2020 conference.

The event will take place January 26-29 in Austin, TX. Much of the action will take place at The Capital Factory, a business accelerator.

The Capital Factory is in a unique building that is half business offices and half hotel — The Omni. I suspect that The Omni will be the key hotel for guests.

It’s not a big space for a conference, so keynotes, partner workshops and the live domain auction will take place outside Capital Factory, perhaps in the Omni. It could also take place at the office of some of the companies that are just a few blocks away, such as GoDaddy and WPEngine.

Hosting the exhibit hall and various workshops in the incubator presents an interesting opportunity. Exhibitors and the domain industry want to reach end users, and Capital Factory is full of startups. That means exhibitors and speakers can reach a new audience in addition to domain investors.

NamesCon is calling the event “The Domain Economic Forum,” a nod to trying to pull in sponsors and guests that do more than service domain names. It wants companies that are tangentially related, too.

Early bird tickets are available for $349.

NamesCon picks Austin for 2020 show

by — Uncategorized 6 Comments

Pull out your cowboy boots and get ready for lots of BBQ.

Picture of Austin

Austin, Texas will be home to NamesCon in 2020.

NamesCon is heading to the Lone Star State for its 2020 show.

Soeren von Varchmin, CEO of NamesCon/CloudFest, announced the news in the opening session at NamesCon in Las Vegas today.

The dates haven’t been selected and NamesCon is seeking input on the time of year. It is considering either January or early September. Having lived in Austin for over 20 years, I can say that January is hit or miss for weather and early September is still very hot.

NamesCon is considering having multiple walkable venues as part of the event. With companies like GoDaddy, WPEngine and Google downtown, it would be interesting to have some events at satellite corporate venues. (There also might be a Uniregistry office in Austin by that time.)

I find it a bit ironic that NamesCon is coming to Austin right after I move from the city, but I look forward to coming back to visit.

University of Texas Loses Domain Name Dispute

by — Policy & Law 8 Comments

University loses fight for TexasSports.org.

I have to admit I’m a bit ashamed of my alma mater today. The University of Texas lost a UDRP case against Kevin Ham’s Vertical Axis for the domain name TexasSports.org.

The University’s official athletics site is TexasSports.com, and it was concerned that some people might type in .org instead of .com. This is plausible given that it’s a non-profit. TexasSports.com gets over 300,000 visits per month.

Still, the University made quite a stretch claiming trademark rights to the generic term “Texas Sports”. It based this claim on the University’s trademark to “Texas”. But, as Vertical Axis pointed out through attorney Ari Goldberger, this doesn’t give UT exclusive rights to anything attached to “Texas”, especially something generic.

I think a better strategy for UT’s attorney, William G. Barber, would have been to argue for some sort of common law rights in “Texas Sports”. That would still be a long shot, though.

While finding that the domain name wasn’t confusingly similar to UT’s mark, the panelist declined to find reverse domain name hijacking.

Barber has successfully brought many other UDRP claims on behalf of UT and Baylor University in Waco, Texas.