Welcome To 2016 With More Than 800,000 .ME Domains In The World
Happy New Years, dear .MErs! While I’m sure you won’t be reading this post early in the morning because you were either out partying last night, or enjoying the company of your loved one, I can’t wait for you to take a sip of your morning tea or coffee and start reading. Why? It’s the first day of the New Year, 2016, and the perfect time to go through what we all in the .ME community achieved in 2015. As Scottish explorer David Livingstone said, and I’ll paraphrase: We’ll go anywhere, provided it is forward. In this case, we’ll go forward, provided it’s in 2016 based on the lessons and achievements of this year!
January’s TEDxMontenegro
Since we believe that a great web presence is an idea worth sharing, we also try to support other initiatives that support the same premise. Which is why .ME also supported TEDxPodgorica, which took place last January in our own Montenegrin capital with the last speaker being UNICEF’s own Benjamin Perks!
ME Day – A Day For… You!
Fast forward to March, when we decided to start the first ever ‘ME Day’, a day to celebrate and share what makes each and every one of us unique in the world. A day to try to develop and nourish our personal passions and skills. Other days we try to help others but on ‘ME Day’, we try to celebrate ourselves!
The day ended up being a very interesting project that we celebrated on March 16th and launched at the internationally acclaimed SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. Prominent individuals such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and even Edward Snowden (remotely) made the festival a key place where exceptional individuals met, a perfect venue for ‘ME DAY’.
Later in April, our own Natasa Djukanovic got the chance to talk about new domains and how .ME was developing its strategy at the DomainingEurope 2015 conference in Valencia. Instead of rehashing what she said, I suggest reading the detailed post where Natasa herself explains the challenges and opportunities in new domains…
800,000 Domains Strong
Right about that time we were very proud to announce that the .ME domain name passed over 800,000 domain registrations, showing how Montenegro’s country code domain had been marketed as the right choice for personal branding. Our executive director, Predrag Lesic, then noted how we were on track for over a million registrations thanks to a very aggressive marketing strategy from the very beginning!
We celebrated this achievement by holding our very own Spark.Me conference earlier in the summer, with great speakers such as social media visionary Ramon De Leon and even Iron Sky’s director Timo Vuorensola!
Sparks and Surveys in 2015!
Like previous Spark.Me conference editions; we used the opportunity to send one lucky startup to TechCrunch Disrupt in New York. Those who are active in the startup community know how prominent TechCrunch is in the innovative tech industry, as well as how perfect the Disrupt events are as a launching pad for new tech products.
We dedicated the second part of the year to supercharging our projects and getting ready for 2016, which is right in front of us. A great example is our HR survey of how human resource professionals thought that personal websites definitely could give job seekers an advantage in the ever competitive job market. Also, let’s not forget our Googling Yourself survey about the frequency people look us up online and what they usually find.
But that’s why we try to write as much as we can about personal branding and websites at the .ME blog right? We promise to do even more in 2016, so let’s get back to our coffee and tea, rest a bit and rock on in the new year!
