.Me Manages to Impress the Southeastern European Domaining Community in Rijeka
The 15th of June marked the day that the Enterprise Europe Network, represented by the Science and Technology park of the University of Rijeka, organized a brokerage and networking event themed around domaining, web hosting and cloud computing, which took place at the park’s facilities in Rijeka. Your own .Me domain name was, as you might expect present as well with our very own Vuksan Rajkovic speaking to the attendees.
The event was held in two kinds of sessions, joint presentations of trends and news as well as pre-planned or then arranged B2B meeting between the participants. The Croatian Angel Investor’s Network, Microsoft, the domain startup WhoAPI participated alongside the .Me registry.
WhoAPI’s cofounder Goran Duskic was kind enough to share with us the happening of the day. WhoAPI is a startup intent on building a platform for getting extensive domain data using and advanced yet simple to use API – it’s meant for automated and mass “domain details” requests. The product is currently in early beta, but you can check it out on their official website.
.Me success story
Goran notes that the event was a rare oppotunity indeed to hear domain registries as well as hot startups in the region. He fully expects this kind of event to bring in hundreds of people in the future, although the current one was small to begin with – a quality over quantity situation – Goran notes:
The event actually had three themes: domains, cloud hosting and investing. After the .hr registry’s opening lecture, Vuksan Rajkovic presented the .Me registry. It was really interesting to see two completely different approaches, work ethics, problems and success stories. Although .me is smaller (around 650K) compared to .com (over 100M) it’s still much bigger than the Croatian .hr.
After speaking with few guests, all of them said they were impressed with the fact how DoMEn (.ME Registry) pulled it through, capitalized on the worldwide appeal of .ME extension, and put Montenegro on map of the Internet. Niksa Tomulic of Croatian Angel Netowork was curious how such a small team could pull of something like this (compared to team size of some other registries). Although Vuksan raised concerns about the fierce competition at the domain name market due to almost 2000 applications for new gTLD’s, he is still very positive about the future of .me TLD. “It is the only extension that provides personalized internet presence and lets you send catchy marketing message in the URL. Thus, .ME will continue to experience the increase in the number of registrations, perhaps not at the pace after the landrush, but still with a healthy growth.” said Rajkovic.
Goran hopes for more regional events such as this brokerage event, to hear the expeiences of other regional domain name registries. Each one of them has their own way of promoting their ccTLD:
Whatever their strategy may be, the popularity of .me in such a short period can serve at least as a helpful guide to other in the region.
.Me Registry model is known as 4R model. 4R concedes of Registry-Registrant-Reseller and Registrant. Carnet for example implemented this strategy in the mid 2011, with other big changes that resulted in high growth, and than it eased. One of the youngest MBA’s in Europe 21 year old Filip Dragoslavic commented how this is the perfect model for a business like this.
Goran also noted the addition of WhoAPI’s own presentation at the event:
Since the introduction of my WhoAPI presentation highlighted that regional companies at the event (Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Monenegro) should be doing business globaly, I was glad to see .Me registry doing just that.
Please visit WhoAPI’s own blog that Goran writes to learn more about mass domain requests and domaining in general.
Photo credit: STEP.uniri.hr and Wikipedia
