TRAFFIC DOMAIN CONFERENCE 2006

DAY 1 - Today is Day 1 of the 2006 TRAFFIC Domain Conference & Expo being held at the Westin Diplomat Hotel in Hallandale Florida. For those of you unaware of South Florida geography, Hallandale is the first city north of the Miami Dade County line and its just south of Hollywood Florida. The new Diplomat Hotel is amazing and I was just told today that it is the most expensive hotel built (I believe) in the U.S. Whatever the case, it's beautiful!
I attended several of the scheduled panel discussions which consisted mostly of Domain Industry related content.
I am excited about the upcoming Domain Name Auction being held at the event. They anticipate generating big dollars at the auction and I mean millions. I did hear an interesting tidbit about a name that might be put up for auction. As most of you know, the company YouTube.com was recently sold to Google for $1.68 billion dollars. Well it turns out that that there is a company that has been in existence since the 1990s called Utube.com which specializes in buying and selling used metal tubing and such. As a result of YouTube.com's explosive success, the other company, Utube.com has seen its daily traffic increase several thousand-fold resulting in their hosting company shutting down because they could not accommodate the surge of hits! So now it seems that Utube is exploring suing YouTube and Google for domain name infringement which obviously has tremendous implications. And...on top of all of this, Monte Cann of TRAFFIC 2006 was negotiating today to put Utube.com up for auction at the event.
I'll keep you posted of this.
The only other thing I have to say about the event is the quality of "goodies" provided by the companies sponsoring the event. I am referring to T-shirts, pens, notebooks, knickknacks and other somewhat useless paraphernalia. Well I loaded up a couple of goodie bags so I satisfied my lower self...for now.
I'll keep you posted on the event as it unfolds this week. I do hope the sessions pick up in terns of energy and content.
Until then, Mike
http://www.targetedtraffic.com/