Mike O’Connor

I have a gaggle of premium domain names I got a really long time ago. I keep coming up with ideas for them that are either late/lame or too hard for me to do. I've decided that the time is right to sell one and, being a structured RFP type guy, I decided to build an RFP to select the broker.

Here's a list of the domains -- I only want to sell one of them, but I'm going to let the brokers choose which one they want to sell so they can sell it into their strongest market segment.

bar.com -- social networking, beverage industry, legal services

pub.com -- social networking, beverage industry, publishing

grill.com -- social networking, consumer products, humor

cafes.com -- social networking, food and dining

place.com -- travel industry, entertainment, social networking, Internet-destination

shelter.com -- social services, social networking, consumer products, industrial products

I've prepared a couple of documents. Here's an introductory letter (in Word format) that describes the process and timing in detail. If you're thinking about bidding, you fersure want to read that.

There's also a detailed vendor response document that I will cheerfully email to anybody who's interested. The reason I'm not posting the response document to the web is to keep track of who's inquiring so's to make sure that vendors gets invited to the various events along the way. But if you're just interested in a copy for any reason, feel free to ping me (everybody: put "RFP response" in the subject to get through the spam filter)

Here's a timeline (see? I am into structure);

1/8/2007 Issue and publicize RFP
1/22/2007 Vendor conference call (at noon, CST)
2/12/2007 Deadline for proposal submission
2/19/2007 Interviews with finalists completed
2/26/2007 Negotiations with finalists completed
3/5/2007 Announce selection

Update:

Well dang. Looks like I threw a party and nobody came. Lots to reflect on in that, but the bottom line is that no brokers proposed. This isn't the first time this has happened to one of my goofy ideas. It usually means I'm a little ahead of the market. So I'll go figure out some other approach to this problem... I've got some good friends in a related field who bring a lot of marketing and sales savvy to the table -- maybe it's time to roll my own.

Further Update:

Ah! Frank Michlick wrote a piece about this little RFP over at his great DomainEditorial site. Here's a link to his article about the RFP. Thanks Frank!

Hung out with a few old friends and made some new ones last night. I'm heading out the door -- so not much in the way of captioning or explanation. Maybe I'll get back to this one later at the farm...

I just posted a story over at the St Paul Broadband Committee site about my belief that a lot of the municipal WiFi networks don't seem to be grounded in financial reality.

Here's a link to the article and here's a link to the muni-WiFi financial model I built to go with it.

Here's the deal -- let's get these models out of the hands of the VooDoo consulting expert type people and into the hands of the people. "Open source financial modeling" if you will. Let's beat on this model -- or write a new one if this one is hopeless -- and get to the point where we ALL understand the economics that underpin these projects.

That way, we can either rejoice in bridging the digital divide, solving the problems of the world and putting a chicken in every pot (as advocates claim) or we can avoid the mess that comes with yet another technology project that over-promises and under-delivers.

What say you? Let's have at it.

Sure, they've been around forever. Sure, most of you probably already know about this site. But just in case you don't, here's a pointer to GetHuman.com -- a great site if you're trying to get to a human-being customer-service type person.

Marcie was trying to find the path through Northwest Airline's patented "Voice Prompts From Hell" system to book a seat for me on an existing reservation. She finally gave up. I remembered reading about GetHuman somewhere, Googled it, looked up NWA and tried it out. Tarnation! Worked perfectly.

I'm sold. It's even got the incredibly-secret path to Amazon customer-service reps!

Huh. Full-circle time. I've been working on the St Paul Broadband Advisory Committee for the last few months and put up a web page to help us do our work. Click on that link to check it out.

Better yet, register for the site and help us out!

Ok, that title's a bit harsh but I'm pretty tired after rasslin' with a PHP upgrade all weekend and this is my chance to vent now that the worst of the damage has been repaired. And perhaps wax a little philosophical about the open source world's need to get better at figuring out upgrade management.

It all started with an attempt to install (more...)

Sheesh, this one is a slap yourself in the forehead idea.

If you, like me, have a cable connection to the internet and you, like me, haven't thought about your cable modem since the day you bought it and you, like me, bought the durn thing more than a couple years ago -- go buy a new one that's compliant with DOCSIS 2.0. It'll be way faster.

Ralph pointed this out at lunch on Thursday. By Thursday afternoon I had me a brand new Motorola SurfBoard (which, with all the rebates from CompUSA, turned out to be free).

I'm talking way faster... Ralph's getting over a megaBYTE per second sometimes. I haven't formally tested mine. But it's...

WAY FASTER!

I've been grouchy about Qwest in the past, sometimes even way beyond grouchy into the "troublemaker" category.

But today it was reported that they are the only RBOC holdout in the NSA's program to build a database of every dang call made in the USA.

Kudos to Qwest for holding those call records back. Stick to your guns, folks.

The latest project to keep me away from this blog is bringing up the registry for CORP.COM domain names.

This is a project that Edmon Chung and I started back in 2002 when Edmon was the hotrod young entepreneur in charge of Neteka. He did such a great job that they got acquired by Afilias not long after we started our project.

What with Edmon distracted by the acquisition, and me distracted with a series of really interesting InstantCxO engagements, the Corp.com Registry sorta went on the back burner for a few years. But the time seemed right to both of us last year and the project is galloping toward an April launch.

2nd level domains like CORP.COM have been steadily gaining favor over the last few years, which is another reason why it seems like the time might be right to kick things off. Afilias is game, Edmon is game, I'm game, we have our first registrar in NamesBeyond. So off we go.

Les Suzukamo (a buddy of mine) wrote an article about data center outsourcing in last Sunday's Pioneer Press that you might find interesting.

But he got beat up by a reader for the following sentence -- "Tier 1 is considered the Rolls Royce category of data centers. " The reader pointed out that Tier IV is the best, and that Les had gotten his ranking backwards. When Les asked me this afternoon, I gave him the consultant's answer -- "it depends." In this case it depends on who you talk to. Us network geeks tend to think in terms of Tier 1 carriers -- and thus their data centers are considered Tier 1 data centers (or, telco-class data centers).

But data center infrastructure geeks indeed do have a different hierarchy, and by those lights Les's reader is right -- Tier IV is the best. I pushed this white paper along to Les by way of backup.

Dang, that's confusing...

I'm working with Affilias to roll out a registry for corp.com domain names ("did you miss acme.com? you might be interested in acme.corp.com"). We're shooting for early April to have things up and running.

Along those lines, I'm working on a little gizmo to help people look up name-possibilities for free. There are lots of darn good resources, but they're really hard to find so I thought it would be useful to find as many as I can, and perhaps put some automation in front of them to make the searching easier.

This is a scratchpad for me as I locate the free-lookup sites.

Free trademark searches -- US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) -- (note; follow the "Search trademarks" link in the middle of the page)

Free national business yellow-pages search -- Searchbug

Free state entity name search locations (not complete, I'm still hunting them down on the incredibly variable state pages -- you'd think there'd be some kinda convention they'd follow...)

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia (DC)
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indianna
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
Wisconsin

This is the scratchpad I'm going to use to keep notes to myself as I migrate Sex and Podcasting from Xoops to Word Press on my IIS server (Win2003). This is extreme geekness, not good reading unless you're trying to do the same thing.

Read on for the geek stuff... (more...)

I've been puzzling about the problem that BlogTorrant solves for quite a while.

Namely -- how can I make it easy to put BitTorrant versions of big files (like my Sex and Podcasting podcasts) up on my sites.

These sites of mine are built on Xoops, a very nifty, very flexible open-source content management system that can do all kinda cool stuff. But blogging isn't it's strong suit -- not terrible, but it's a little clunky at things like track-backs, RSS, etc.

I solved the "how do I do enclosures?" problem by using FeedBurner to generate the RSS feeds that you're seeing -- one of the nice things about that system is way it auto-magically does all the enclosure stuff for podcasting.

This BlogTorrant gizmo looks like it might be the add-on that will make it easy to do BitTorrants in the Xoops environment -- I will do some tinkering and update this post with a cookbook if things work out.

Ah. A completely satisfactory geek experience. Now that I've rassled most of the basic podcasting stuff into shape, I wanted to move on to doing interviews and conference calls and recording them -- Ralph pointed out that Skype was the way to go.

Doug Kaye (the maestro of IT Conversations) put together this definitive post on how to record Skype calls. There are other ways, but this is definitely the industrial-strength approach.

I'm going to start doing "conversation" podcasts, but before that I'm going to use this to record an interview for a consulting project I'm working on -- tomorrow. I have a little rant n'record that's going up on Sex and Podcasting about how you could use podcasting as an organizing tool for work (the show will go up in a day or two).

Safe Haven's not getting much attention these days because I'm still getting my sea legs with the podcasting stuff. Sex and Podcasting is gonna be getting a new post a day, at least for the next week.

But I ran into a cool thought while listening to The Gilmore Gang yesterday (what happened to them by the way -- a great series of podcasts that seem to have trickled off to nothing back in February).

Here's the idea -- why not use RSS on a manufacturing shop floor to let machines and work-centers tell each other (and us) what they're up to. Machines could "subscribe" to upstream machines, and "publish" for downstream machines and let each other know what's going on -- feeds could talk about what came into (and left) the machine/work-center.

I spoze this could be expanded to anything that has stuff moving through stages -- paperwork processes, hospitals, etc. All kinds of real-time applications come to mind.

One thing that would be neat is that we'd get away from the huge central database notion and so adding a workcenter, or rearranging them, would be easy. Simply a matter of changing who subscribed to what. Sortof an object-oriented model that us regular people could understand...

It could be really visual too -- lots of cool UI possibilities there. Not to mention fitting in better with the notion of lean manufacturing, and visual management.

Now, back to podcasting.