Michael Reed & Alan Ezeir Founders of GDI

Before you can begin enterprise - any enterprise - clients need to be able to find you. On the Web, your address is your domain name; the part of an Web address that comes after the www. With the unparalleled progress of the Web, dot com domains continue to sell like hotcakes. At present, there are greater than 20 million dot com domains, and over 34 million total domains registered worldwide. Business specialists forecast that more than 500 million domains will likely be registered within the next ten years. Actually, reliable sources from corporations like Intel are predicting that each private pc in the future will have its personal domain name.

In 1998, the dot com craze was starting to ramp as much as unbelievable proportions. So many Web firms sprouted up in Silicon Valley, and elsewhere, that firms not swept up in the hysteria were considered to be missing out. However, while most individuals were focused on issues like Content material, Banner Adverts and Bandwidth, Michael Reed and Alan Ezeir, the CEO and President respectively of Global Domains International ,acknowledged another opportunity that was largely ignored; they wondered, "Apart from dot com, are there different extensions that companies may use as a domain name?"

Mike and Alan were conscious that in the mid 1990's, the Web Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigned every nation a country code. These codes were designed to provide each country an address to make use of for their own Web needs. For example, the United States was assigned .us, Australia .au, Eire .ie. "We knew that good, simple-to-remember country code may very well be marketable globally as a viable alternative to .com," stated Alan. "And so," Mike added, "we ordered some pizza, locked ourselves in a room, and went through the whole record of countries to pinpoint the best code."

Finally focused on the domain extension .WS - which belongs to the tiny island nation of Samoa, deep within the South Pacific. "We thought that the abbreviation .WS may very well be efficiently marketed worldwide as the 'WebSite' prime-level domain," stated Mike. "There were a small handful of different viable choices, however by way of resolve and perseverance, we discovered that some international locations were already using their domain regionally, and never thinking about turning into an 'open' or 'world' registry. With a population of lower than 200,000 people, Samoa had yet to make the most of their domain on a large scale. And, none of the other international locations' domains in comparison with the potential branding power of .WS to signify 'WebSite'. In spite of everything," Mike happily exclaimed, "everyone in the free world is aware of what a website is!"