I’ve been building online businesses for my employers, clients and myself for over 12 years so I was excited to get to my first DomainFest to meet people, talk to vendors and learn about the industry. Below is a random list of thoughts from the first day:

• It’s still a young industry. Comparing DomainFest to SES, AdTech and other on-going internet conferences highlights how early the domain industry is in their development. Fewer speakers, fewer tracks and fewer attendees point towards this.
• But, it’s growing rapidly. The attendance is growing, from ~400 last year to ~650 this year!.
• There is money here. The event is put on by Oversee.net in a very nice facility (The Renaissance in Hollywood), with a mid-tier cost ($795 pre-register, $995 at the door), good food and parties.
• People are eager to network. I met a lot of people on my first day and everyone was very nice, eager to chat about opportunities and interested in learning how to progress their business whether is it monetizing a portfolio, building a site or buying domains at auction.
• A large gap in sizes of businesses. There are a few very large companies (relative to this industry) like Oversee.net, SEDO, etc. and a LOT of smaller, individual owned businesses (primarily domainers). I don’t see a lot of in-between support businesses like we see in the Search, Ad Network, Analytics or Web Tools businesses.
• Not a lot of differentiation across the exhibitors. I spoke to just about every exhibitor yesterday and the main thing that I came away with was that there are more similarities than differences. The parking companies and registration companies looked and sounded very similar. This might be due to my newness to the domain industry and I don’t quite get the nuances of the differences so I’ll keep asking questions.

Thanks for reading, post some comments if you have some and now it’s time to head back to the event.

Vint Cerf is known primarily as one of the founders of the internet in the late 60’s and early 70’s. As a graduate student at UCLA, he tested the first internet hook-ups in 1969. Then as a professor at Stanford in the 70’s, he led a team that developed the underlying communication protocol for the internet - TCP/IP. For the last seven years, he has led ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) through a tumultuous childhood into early adulthood.

ICANN is the organization responsible for the global coordination of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers. Think of ICANN as the world wide governing body for keeping the domain name system (DNS) of .com, .co, .uk, .chn, etc. consistent and usable across nations, languages and networks. Without a strong and clear framework for allowing computers to find and talk to each other via the internet - inefficiency would reign.

Cerf has used his deep knowledge of the internet, warm sense of humor and business insight to work with high level personnel across the world to expand and organize the foundational elements of the internet. He is respected and his leadership will be missed.

The big question now is who will replace him and what effect will this have on the thousands of registrars, domain managers and internet systems that are influenced by ICANN. The short list of potential successors includes telecommunications expert Roberto Gaetano and lawyer Peter Dengate Thrush. Both have been active with ICANN, but neither has Cerf’s name recognition or long-standing ties to the Internet.