There have been some financially rewarding successes for speculators on certain domain names. For example, the original registering group that sold ‘ecommerce.com’ supposedly received a seven figure price for the domain name alone. We believe the days of that kind of domain name speculation are over. Almost all three-letter and four-letter ‘natural’ names like ‘car.com’ have been registered and owned for a decade or more. There is also a dark side to domain name speculation. One cannot ‘cyber-squat’ on a domain name like ‘coca-cola.com’ where the intellectual property already exists and is a registered trade name or copyrighted material in other media. Extortion and piracy exist in cyber-space just like modern day Somalia based sea pirates raid the nearby coastal waters.

Effective use of ‘natural’ domain names involves monetizing them through the use of advertising. Advertising is the primary method for generating revenues on websites that do not directly sell a product or service through the website. Advertising pays for the content and is exactly the same revenue model employed by the ‘commercial’ broadcast TV industry. Effective use of ‘natural’ domain names goes beyond just providing a long list of paid advertisers. Once visitors to the website find what they are searching for, or worse, don’t find what they want, they may never return to that domain name. We maintain that some unique content, in addition to the paid advertisements, will guarantee some continued traffic to the domain name and keep the ad revenues flowing. Employing web-based publishing to develop unique content will make sure you have at least something to offer besides just a pure advertising medium.

Until recently, the movement of workers between the developed and developing world has been characterized as a ‘brain drain’ of the most skilled to the rich economies of America and Western Europe. But now that jobs tied to computer technology, with rare exceptions, can reasonably be done from any terminal connected to the Internet, work has been completed divorced from a
physical location, and the worker, similarly, can be located wherever is convenient. Virtual telephone service allows tech workers to choose from any number of area and country codes, and an email address is accessible from anywhere.

The main barrier to large numbers of American workers moving abroad is not technical, as those issues have been solved, but the perceived social difficulty in being located far from familiar sights and sounds. Perhaps the more likely scenario will be a slackening of job-related immigration to the States, as Internet-based opportunity opens in the developing world.

We maintain that there will be immense cost savings in both physical operations and employee overhead by deploying telepresence as an employee work paradigm. When all employees are always available during scheduled work hours from everywhere, the physical organization of work takes on a new dimension, especially in the services economic sector.

Our nephew, and his immediate famliy members, used to own and operate a fairly large wholesale distribution company (i.e. warehouses, trucks, wholesale outlet locations - lots of real world bricks and mortar). That business was sold a few years back, and now the family is primarily involved in utilizing the proceeds from their business sale in investment banking and venture capital endeavors. The current activities of the immediate family lend themselves quite well to ‘virtualization’.

Our Nephew’s first major step in becoming a virtual employee was extensive use of a cell phone. In particular, a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) style of cell phone is required. First, PDA type cell phones usually allow a plethora of business oriented activities like calendars, extensive categorized contact databases, memo and note databases, email, text messaging, and the list keeps growing in functionality as more and more small efficient software applications become available for PDA cell phones. Second, choose a cell phone network provider that has a large footprint. Personally, as a Managing Partner of a regional Internet Service Provider, and while on vacation at the top of Machu Picchu in Peru, I actually took a cell phone support call internationally routed through the park headquarters cell tower. The point is that you can have most of your basic office functions with a PDA type cell phone, and with the right provider, literally be almost anywhere on the planet (ok, I admit there aren’t a lot of cell phone towers in Antarctica…. yet).

If your company or organization spends $50,000 or more per month on telephone or telecom services, you are probably overpaying by 10-30% and maybe more. Invoice Insight has developed a proprietary online system that utilizes the electronic record-keeping and automated payments systems of the major phone carriers nationwide to more effectively analyze usage, correctness of billed services, and employ their electronic payments systems efficiently. Some may say it isn’t sexy, but when we took a look at the typical monthy savings versus the cost of the service, we decided that you should take Invoice Insight to breakfast, lunch and dinner when you go to the telephone and telecom services cafeteria.

If you follow our analogy, Invoice Insight makes sure you don’t end up with a total ‘a la carte’ approach to telecom services, which undoubtedly is always the most expensive way to proceed. And, they also make sure you get the right ‘blue plate special’ for your organizations’ tastes and appetite. Each and every State in the USA has a PUC (Public Utilites Commission) and while there are guidelines, standard policies and practices, and Federal laws to govern their actions, one could easily conclude that tariff’s for telecom services is an arcane magical pursuit at best. Too many competing ideologies and business strategies by the telecom providers are embedded in the tariff’s and don’t forget that PUC’s are political creatures, so it may be impossible to untangle what agenda’s lie hidden there.

The good news is that, once all these underlaying considerations are applied, a telecom customer gets a final monthly statement of the outcome of all this stewing by competing telecom chefs. Most people review their ‘check’ at the restaurant for correctness, and more importantly, as a guide for a possible future visit to the same establishment. If the price/value ratio meets your expectations for service, quality, and budget, then a particular restaurant will probably stay on your list for a return engagement. We think you should let Invoice Insight be your partner the next time you go to the telecom services restaurant. Take their advice when ordering off the menu, let them critique the service, and most importantly, they will assist in paying the ‘tab’ in the most efficient manner.

At first, customers paid by the hour on a tiered speed based connectivity rate. These systems were almost exclusively text-based, except for AOL, and it was very hard to entice advertizers to embrace these systems. Why spend your advertizing dollars in some clunky text-based or low resolution graphics environment when you had TV, radio, or glossy print periodicals that could really show off your product or service in style. As a result, the pre-Internet online services were forced to rely primarily on subscriptions as their chief revenue source. Only AOL has managed to make the transition to the Internet age as a subscription system, and we suspect that nowadays, even AOL derives the major source of it’s income from advertizing dollars. Today, even if you only have one web-site, you can derive advertizing income from the domain by participating in one of the many advertizing revenue sharing services. We use Google’s AdSense program and we are very pleased with the results. We are often rebuffed by some of our web-site hosting clients when we suggest employing an advertizing revenue sharing service as an essential component of their web-site design. Many reasons are given. Our customers say things like, “we don’t want to clutter up our appearance” or “we don’t want anything to detract from our primary focus”. In some instances, we have agreed that advertizing on a particular web-site may not be appropriate. But, in the vast majority of cases, we think it’s a bad idea to pass on this potential source of revenue for a number of reasons.

Because, by definiton, the Internet is a world-wide means of communication with a stellar array of pathways and signposts that lead visitors to a web-site, and even with the best-of-breed web-site activity tracking systems/software in operation, one has a hard time figuring out why some of those visitors show up. We try to point out that, whatever ‘product’ or ’service’ or ‘important message’ you may be attempting to promote or sell, may have no bearing on the reason many web-site visitors chose to come to a particular web-site. Even with good traffic analysis, it’s darn near impossible to ascribe a ‘why’ to particular categories of web-site visitor’s. We contend that these types of visitors constitute a ‘natural’ Internet audience and you may not be serving them at all. Just one conceptually-related or eye-catching advertizement on your site that a visitor choose’s to ‘click-through’ may be the very thing that is memorable about your web-site. That ad will immediately generate some revenue from a service like Google’s AdSense and it may also make a repeat visitor to your web-site.

Our web-site hosting customers often question whether it’s a good idea to potentially promote the ‘competition’ because most advertizing revenue sharing services will eventually produce ads shown on your web-site that essentially are in direct competition. The answer is, yes, it’s a great idea to promote the competition. First, it shows that your web-site is ready to compete in the planet-wide marketplace of products, services, and ideas. Nobody can maintain a monopoly or a ‘corner’ in this global environment. We believe having ads from the competition on a web-site demonstrates it’s readiness to be a ‘player’ in the global game, no matter what your size is as an organization. Right up front, it demonstrates that you are at least confident of your ‘message’ standing directly next to the competition’s ads. Furthermore, having ads from direct competitors prominately displayed on your web-site automatically lends a certain legitimacy to your main focus. Most importantly, your web-site ‘content’ may end up being not exactly what a visitor hopes to find. However, if the visitor does find exactly what’s needed from a ‘related’ competitor’s ad on your site, then at least you have a chance at being remembered as a stepping-stone towards that vistor’s goals, otherwise, you may be just another ‘dead-end’ search pathway.

Commercial real estate owners and real estate management companies appear to be content to let ‘outside’ service providers like the major phone companies or cable operators to deliver Internet connectivity on a tenant-by-tenant basis. This is the result of two quickly discernable factors. Before the Internet, the PUC regulations for telephone services provisioning were the sole responsibility of the Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier (ILEC) to the building ‘demarc’ and, internally to the building, the connection to the demarc was done as an ‘install’ contract by the ILEC or an independent telephone contractor. This was an area where, technically, real estate owners and management companies were hard pressed to develop an economical in-house engineering and generic equipment service for their tenants. Secondly, there was no economic way to become a telephone ‘exchange’ carrier to participate in the monthly revenue stream from the recurring service fees for the actual usage of a telephone system.

The arrival of the commercial public Internet has changed the overall picture. We have developed an approach that allows commercial building owners and management companies to participate at all levels of provisioning Internet connectivity services and sharing in ongoing operational revenues either in a partnership or sub-contract arrangement without a major expense. They can finally make some revenues from services already provided in their buildings where before those revenues were all collected by outside agents.

A shared, high-speed, dedicated wholesale data circuit, a few hundred dollars worth of networking support equipment, and a square yard or two of floorspace preferably near the building’s demarc for telecommunications are really all that is needed. Of course, building owners or managers might need a little consulting to understand how this could happen easily and they might also need a partner or sub-contracter to assist in the continuing operation of those Internet services. This is where BusWorks and “R and D Enterprises”, our overall Partnership, can help. We can show you how to pre-market your building, build a rate structure that beats the major phone companies and cable operators, and make the whole system profitable with only about 5-15% of your building tenants participating in the program.