Any questions for Sedo?

[rolf]

Hi,

I'll be attending the below Sedo event. Although it is focussed on the .co.uk market, I may have the opportunity to ask about IDNs. Let me know any questions you have - I'll do my best!

From domain.co.uk

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Speaker Profiles

Matt Bentley, CEO, Sedo LLC



Bentley brought his experience in Silicon Valley startups to Europe (and Sedo) in 2002. As director of English operations for Sedo.com's parent company Sedo GmbH, he was charged with developing Sedo's fledgling English-language presence in the United States, UK and abroad. In spite of an unstable market and competitive pressure from larger, more established players, Bentley was able to transform Sedo’s English division from a small, money-losing operation to the company’s most profitable division in just over six months.

In 2004, Bentley returned to the United States to launch Sedo.com, LLC, a fully-owned subsidiary of Sedo GmbH. Under his leadership, Sedo.com, LLC has been profitable since its first quarter of operations, and Sedo's U.S.-derived revenue has increased five-fold. In addition to leading Sedo.com, Bentley has brokered some of the highest value sales in the domain industry, served as an expert witness in the area of domain valuation, and been quoted on domain topics in the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, CNET and elsewhere.

Bentley holds a BS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University (USA), and a Master’s in International Business from the Euromed-Marseille Graduate School of Business (France).



Tim Schumacher, CEO and founder, Sedo GmbH



After completing his Master’s Degree Thesis at the University of Cologne on “Price Formation in the Trade of Internet Domain Names”, Schumacher teamed up with two fellow students in 2000 to set up Sedo, whose aim was to consolidate the highly fragmented domain aftermarket under one roof. The company’s growth has been phenomenal, and Sedo now has 70 employees based in Cologne and Boston and has established itself as the only truly global domain marketplace and one of the leading domain parking providers.

Schumacher is responsible for marketing, finance and strategic partnerships within Sedo, and regularly travels across the globe meeting domainers and domain related companies, spreading the Sedo word and encouraging Sedo’s growth and development.

Schumacher holds a Master’s degree in Economics from Cologne University, a major in Finance from Stockholm School of Economics and a CEMS Master (Community of European Management Schools). Before the birth of Sedo, Schumacher worked as a consultant on several internet and software projects both in Germany and abroad.



Jeremiah C. Johnston, Esq.- General Counsel



Before joining the Sedo legal department in 2004, Jeremiah spent several years as a business consultant in Boston working with clients to utilize internet technologies to streamline business processes and to reduce communication and marketing costs. A graduate of the University of Utah, Jeremiah founded two internet companies before leaving Salt Lake City to study Law at Suffolk University Law School in Boston where he served as Managing Editor of the Journal of High Technology Law and graduated with a Certificate of Distinction in international Law and intellectual property.



Edward Phillips, Nominet Company Solicitor



Edward Phillips joined Nominet UK, the .uk domain name registry, in 2002 as the Assistant Solicitor. In 2003/2004 he oversaw the public consultation on the updating of Nominet's Dispute Resolution Service (DRS) and its subsequent update in October 2004. He became Company Solicitor at the start of 2005 and with that became the manager of the DRS. The DRS is one of the busiest such systems in the world, handling over 700 cases per year. Nominet provides the DRS for free and almost uniquely offers professional mediation services which settle over half the cases that get referred to it. Elements of the DRS are being copied in Norway, Switzerland, New Zealand and elsewhere. Prior to joining Nominet, Edward worked at a solicitor's firm in London on commercial law.

At the Sedo London Event, Edward will be discussing the nature of the DRS, including the benefits of mediation and some recent relevant and high profile cases; and also some of Nominet's newer but less well known services such as the Domain Availability Checker, Public Register Subscription Service and WHOIS2.



Ashkaan Rahimi, Sedo Director of Brokerage UK/Intl.



Ashkaan joined the Sedo UK/ International Brokerage Department at the beginning of 2005. Currently the Director of UK/International Brokerage, he has been a part of several of the year's biggest domain sales. Ashkaan graduated from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service with a degree in International Law and International Politics, and followed this up with a Masters in European Studies at the Center for European Integration Studies at the University of Bonn. Before joining Sedo, he was a Junior Fellow at the Centre for European Integration Studies, where he published and co-wrote several works in the field of European Integration.



Nora Cotter, Sedo Director of UK/Intl. Operations



Nora comes from Ireland and joined Sedo's German office in 2004. She has worked in several Sedo departments, including brokerage and account management before taking over as the UK / Intl. Director of Operations in August 2005. Nora speaks five languages and holds a Joint Honours BA degree in European Studies and German from University College Cork, Ireland. She has also achieved a Diploma of Association in Speech and Communications and is currently studying for an MBA.

Nora has worked on some of the industry's highest value domain sales and regularly arranges domain brokerage for some of Sedo's corporate clients. She leads one of Sedo's most dynamic teams, operating in the UK and International domain markets. She is responsible for overseeing Sedo's presence in the UK, Ireland, Korea, Japan, China and Scandinavia and her team collectively speaks more than fifteen languages.

[Rubber Duck]

The obvious question is:

How does Sedo intend to better serve the needs of the Japanese Market, as this will have the greatest short-term potential, because Google Adwords is already making serious inroads into this market?

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

[bramiozo]

My question would be:

When will all the latin small characters be accepted by sedo ?

[gammascalper]

When will Sedo correctly parse IDN domain names into titles on parking pages?

When will Sedo start serving ads from foreign partners instead of just google?

Thanks rolf

[rolf]

Sorry guys, something has come up and I won't be able to attend the event :-(

[IDNer]

Originally Posted by rolf

Sorry guys, something has come up and I won't be able to attend the event :-(

If possible, try to forward those "questions" to SEDO will be greatly appreciated.

Also, please suggest to them to accept more formats other than [ Western European IS-8859-1 format ], thanks a whole lot.

[rolf]

I am very stupid. The even is on November 9th, not October as previously thought.

However, again, I cannot make it - I have an invite if anyone is in the London area and interested.

[gammascalper]

Here's a toughie but a goodie for them:

I'm URL forwarding visitors of chinese names to Sedo.

My registrar indicates that many of these names get a couple or few visitors a day. Sedo is not recognizing any of these visitors, so it appears they are indeed blocked from sedoparking.

Baidu seems to be showing paid-ads on the right side of SERPs. It's only a matter of time before we have a viable option for monetization of Chinese traffic.

Does Sedo have current plans to set up an operation on the mainland to monetize this traffic? What's the estimate time for this?

Or do they want us to go elsewhere?

[Olney]

My personal recommendation is if you actually have a lot of sites
& your own server
Make your own custom parking pages.

The Sedo parking pages for Japanese only result in about 2 ads currently

& some of the text on the page looks messed up.
I'm saying this from actually looking at them in Tokyo.

It doesn't really leave a big inspiration for users to click further.
But I belive they don't have a real presence in Japan or China yet to really accomplish things correctly
None do...

[gammascalper]

I hear you Olney, but Google's AdSense TOS prohibits placing ads on pages without content, or more specifically pages made for adsense only.

I would need a premium account, but I don't have the 20,000,000 monthly page views to join the club.

[Olney]

Actually if you have a certain theme you can create a small 4 page site.

That's what I did for some of my IDNs & URLs...

[gammascalper]

Originally Posted by Olney

Actually if you have a certain theme you can create a small 4 page site.

That's what I did for some of my IDNs & URLs...

Gotcha -- for your high OVT japanese IDNs, are you seeing type-in traffic to your mini-sites?