NamesCon Global 2020

 

Erin McKean is the founder of the not-for-profit Wordnik.com, the world’s biggest online dictionary. Before founding Wordnik, she was the editor-in-chief of American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press.Her goal is to make every word in the English language “lookupable” – including the 52% of unique English words that aren’t currently in any dictionary. Erin is the author of three Weird and Wonderful Words books, the best-selling novel The Secret Lives of Dresses, and (most recently) The Hundred Dresses, a field guide to dresses. She’s written regular columns for The Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal and her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, PAPER, Foreign Affairs, and Sew News. She’s served as an advisor to the American National Corpus, the journal American Speech, the Wikimedia Foundation, and serves on the KPCB Design Council, and is an honorary fellow of the Society for Technical Communication. She blogs at dressaday.com and tweets as @emckean. When you meet her, please tell her your favorite word.

Bhavin Turakhia has been in the domain name industry for over 20 years, and has achieved success that most of us could only dream of. His is a fascinating story, starting out as a young person in India, and bootstrapping a small web hosting startup that he turned into a billion dollar empire. Bhavin is a problem solver, leader, and visionary with tremendous insights to share about leadership styles that work in the tech space, and how our industry can develop real business strategies that produce results. Turakhia joins us on the NamesCon stage to share vital insights and statistics on the ngTLD industry, followed by a fireside chat and Q&A, where we will learn how he achieved his successes, and we explore the lessons that companies in the domain space can take away from his experiences.

Richard Lau is well known throughout the domain name industry having started the NamesCon conference, being involved in many registrars, and being an avid cheerleader of the WaterSchool charity. After founding NamesCon (now owned by WHD/GoDaddy), Richard has moved on to concentrate on developing out domain names such as Resume.com (now sold to Indeed), and more recently Logo.com, a powerful, automated logo generator.    

Kate Buckley is the founder and CEO of Buckley Media, a premium domain and branding agency specializing in brokering and monetizing ultra-premium .COMs. Her background includes top ad agencies, as well as two decades with the Castello Brothers, branding and monetizing their portfolio of premium .COMs. Kate’ is also an award-winning poet and author—and the Poet Laureate Emerita of Laguna Beach, CA. A ninth-generation Kentuckian, she’s made her home in Southern California since 1998.

Responsible for Domain industry engagement and domain strategy for GoDaddy.

Akram Atallah is the CEO of Donuts Inc.

Rolf is a disruptive innovator by trade and by practice and is a long-standing, recognized pioneer of Internet access, Domain name registrar and Web Hosting services in Europe and Scandinavia. He has founded multiple technology businesses in a multitude of innovative spaces, which include Web Conferencing, Web Hosting, Mobile Applications, ISPs and VoIP. Trained in Computer Science and Business Informatics, he has held roles for several major and publicly traded technology companies such as Telia Internet, the Internet group of the largest Swedish Telecoms company, as well as NetConnect Systems, a business he built from a handful of people to the dominant European web-conferencing business. Rolf has experience from more than 10 M&As and 2 IPOs with companies he founded. Rolf´s many startups are always timed to take advantage of a major technological and industrial shift. In 1998, he founded Active ISP, a pan European registrar that was the first of it´s kind to fully automate domain name registration and web hosting. RiksNett, the second ISP he built in 1995, became the largest competitive ISP to the Norwegian Telco incumbent. The Registry behind the new domain extension .global was founded by Rolf and a small experienced team. This new domain extension became one of the most successful new branding options online for businesses. Rolf is a veteran of the Internet domain space and is currently the Chairman and CEO of DNS Global and Desktop.com.

Mac Nagaswami is the Co-Founder and CEO of Carvertise - an advertising company that specializes in the new media format of car advertising. Since founding the business as a student at the University of Delaware in 2014, Mac has grown Carvertise to become a multi-million dollar company with 150% year-over-year revenue growth. With a driver network of over 300,000 registered drivers across the USA, Carvertise has successfully launched 100’s of advertising campaigns across the country for brand partners such as Crayola, Sprint, Empire Today and Buffalo Wild Wings. Carvertise was named DIW's Startup of the Year and has been covered by major press outlets including Forbes and Inc Magazine.