Author name: fairwindsp

Josh Bourne ⬥ 28 February The first day of the GAC-ICANN Board meeting was very encouraging. Governments appear to be aware of the difficulties that businesses and consumers would face should the new TLD launch move forward, and are pressing ICANN on these issues. It’s great to see that governments are going to bat for […]

Josh Bourne ⬥ 24 February News about the political unrest in Libya has been flooding the airwaves since protests broke out last week. According to ZDNet, on Friday night, Libya was cut off from the Internet just hours before soldiers began massacring protesters, killing hundreds over the course of the weekend. In Libya, the Internet

Josh Bourne ⬥ 24 February This week, FairWinds’ new Chief Operating Officer Pete Langdon and I have been travelling around Switzerland for meetings with various companies. We’re actually attending 18 meetings over the course of the week. It’s not exactly grueling work – these meetings have given me the chance to catch up with some

Josh Bourne ⬥ 24 February On one of our last day here in Switzerland, Pete and I had lunch with one of our contacts at WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, which is headquartered in Geneva. We discussed ICANN, new gTLDs, the UDRP and other related topics. While here in Geneva, we visited the Jet

Phil Lodico ⬥ 31 January …There’s delicious barbecue and delectable domain names.  Devoted Domain Name Strategy readers will remember my post from a few months back about Dinosaur Bar-B-Que reclaiming the domain name DinoBBQ.com via UDRP arbitration.  I recently spotted another tasty example of a small company using a great domain name, this time a

Josh Bourne ⬥ 28 January A recent post in Advertising Age’s Digital Next blog ponders the question, is Google biased?  Well, not really pondered, per se – the author took Google’s bias as a given fact.  And in the fact that Google uses incredibly complex algorithms to rank its search results and keeps those algorithms

FairWinds Partners ⬥ 26 January The value that a category-defining keyword domain can contribute to an existing business can be huge.  A recent article in Inc. magazinedescribes one case in which investing in a keyword domain paid off big for Action Envelope, a leading envelope retailer. Back in 1997, Seth Newman, president of Action Envelope,

Liz Sweezey ⬥ 21 January While perusing through CNN.com to catch up on some news recently, I came across an interesting post on the Eatocracy blog where the author describes the linguistic double-take she did upon hearing the name of Tyson Foods Inc.’s new product, “Any’tizers ® Quesa Dippers”. Now, I’m not here to offer

Elizabeth Cummings ⬥ 14 January When you climb into a cab, you never really know what to expect in terms of the driver’s personality. Some drivers prefer to remain silent while others strike up a conversation with you. From my years of traveling I have talked to cab drivers about everything from family to American

Samantha Demetriou ⬥ 29 December Earlier this month, we attended a Cybersecurity Forum presented by The Atlantic and Government Executive. The event featured an interview with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA) Deputy Director Kaigham Gabriel; three panels on the future of cybersecurity, cybersecurity in commerce, and cyber threats to the critical infrastructure; as well as

Steve Levy ⬥ 15 December I recently read through an interesting domain name dispute that highlights some important issues concerning appropriate use of the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). The UDRP was adopted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 1999 as a means of addressing and resolving the

Phil Lodico ⬥ 14 December You’ve heard of brands buying their competitors’ brand names as keywords in Google’s AdWords program.  According to a recent TechCrunch article, the practice has spread to Twitter’s Promoted Tweets feature: HP has “bought” Apple’s hash tag.  In other words, HP has paid to have its promoted tweets appear when users