**FS** On Flowers.mobi Purchase

[thegenius1]

This is the question that was posed to him

"Frank...I'm sure you know Rick Schwartz fairly well, and it's obvious that he's a very smart man in the domain business - what do you think of his purchase of flowers.mobi for $200K? Was this a play to drive up the value of .mobi sales (as you've hinted in previous posts that you've seen this happen with other tld's)? If so, it looked like it worked because we all seen sales of .mobi's on the secondary market shoot up immediately after".

His answer

***FS*** Rick is a smart guy and I've watched him talk about '.com only' for years. Rick and his partner Howard run the Traffic show and its not cheap to sponsor/exhibit at that show. .Mobi was a sponsor of the show so there could have been some legitimate rebate arrangement there. This is purely speculative on my part and I have no visibility into those sales aside from being present when the auction took place and witnessing the staccato of the bidding. Opera's CEO is right. I just don't want naive newbies lauching headlong into the .mobi space and thinking it's an easy path to riches.. I do "not" think that it is and am personally steering clear.

http://frankschilling.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/03/mobi_cashgrab.html#comments

[Rubber Duck]

How can there be some legitimate rebate arrangement there? If others are bidding against Rick, then they will know that part of the sales commissions will be recycled to him and I guess that is fair enough, although in the Stock or Realestate Markets such practices would probably not be permissible.

If the seller has actually pre-arranged to give Rick a discount within the Auction in such a high profile event, it could only be interpretted as Rigging the Market. I know we all do things with the best intentions at times that are misguided, but I would have thought an intelligent person would have backed away from such an arrangement, unless the intention was deliberately fraudulent.

At the end of the day though. whatever the motivations, I guess little damage was done at the Auction because Rick ended up holding the baby. FS's concerns about naive speculators investing, however, are real enough. Whether intentional or not thousands of Wannabee Noobies piled into dot Mobi registering anything with two ends to it. The heat has now gone from the Dot Mobi Bubble, but the warning will have come too late for many.

Similar concerns must, however, pertain to IDN, which is why it is a matter of urgency that a solid aftermarket structure is formed so that people can reasonably benchmark prices and have confidence in the meanings of the name that they would invest in. To this end DNLocal's new auction will require Accredited Translations before sales entries can be accepted into the Realtime Auction.

We already have very credible offers to cover Japanese, Hindi, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech and Greek. We cannot reasonably proceed without Accredited Translations for Chinese and Arabic. We really require native speakers with good English and an established track record. This would appear to be an interesting business proposition to some, as Translations will be charged at upto $20 a name.

If any one has an interest in providing the market with robust translation support in any languages where they have the necessary skills, please do not hesitate to contact me.



This is the question that was posed to him

"Frank...I'm sure you know Rick Schwartz fairly well, and it's obvious that he's a very smart man in the domain business - what do you think of his purchase of flowers.mobi for $200K? Was this a play to drive up the value of .mobi sales (as you've hinted in previous posts that you've seen this happen with other tld's)? If so, it looked like it worked because we all seen sales of .mobi's on the secondary market shoot up immediately after".

His answer

***FS*** Rick is a smart guy and I've watched him talk about '.com only' for years. Rick and his partner Howard run the Traffic show and its not cheap to sponsor/exhibit at that show. .Mobi was a sponsor of the show so there could have been some legitimate rebate arrangement there. This is purely speculative on my part and I have no visibility into those sales aside from being present when the auction took place and witnessing the staccato of the bidding. Opera's CEO is right. I just don't want naive newbies lauching headlong into the .mobi space and thinking it's an easy path to riches.. I do "not" think that it is and am personally steering clear.

http://frankschilling.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/03/mobi_cashgrab.html#comments