Speakers in New Zealand for the Knowledge Wave conference will return home with some virtual New Zealand real estate in
tow - and a possible identity crisis!
Wellington based global domain name registration company www.Pdom.com is gifting all speakers at the knowledge wave
conference in Auckland this week their own piece of NZ cyberspace - a.co.nz domain name based on their name eg
www.PaulKeating.co.nz.
Pdom CEO Robert Wiles who is attending the conference, said gifting domain names is a very personal way of presenting
New Zealand as a country of innovators and entrepreneurs keen to compete in the global market place.
“Global growth in personal domain name registration means people that can’t find their preferred name as a dot com and
are turning to other country extensions to secure the name they want,” said Mr Wiles.
“For example there are over 40,000 Mary Smiths in the world so www.MarySmith.com is long gone, but MarySmith.co.nz is
still available. People will look to New Zealand to register their preferred personal domain names as virtually all the
world’s common first names and surnames are already registered as .coms, .nets and .orgs.”
Pdom’s research revealed that all but one of the speakers’ names were available as .co.nz extensions.
“Given their availability, and in honour of the Knowledge Wave conference we wanted to gift the speakers their own names
so they could take home their very own piece of New Zealand cyberspace.”
Mr Wiles says although companies prefer a domain name from their own country - individuals do not necessarily show the
same loyalty.
“The internet has no physical boundaries. A person can live in Boston, have a net identity based in New Zealand and a
personal website hosted in the United Kingdom.
“Whether this means the Former Prime Minister of Australia Paul Keating will claim allegiance to the All Blacks because
he has been gifted NZ cyber citizenship remains to be seen.”
Wiles said New Zealand is a more attractive option than many of the other county extensions, which remain unattractive
as they are either too big, too expensive or restrict their domain space solely to companies and organisations.
Currently there are around 100,000 domain names have been registered in New Zealand.
“Compare this to 29 million domain names registered worldwide as .coms, .nets and .orgs and the .nz space is ripe for
growth as people realise they can still register their ideal net name as a .co.nz. “
“New Zealand is a gold mine with millions of untapped names,” Wiles said.
- Ends -
Pdom: Launched 5 June 2001, www.Pdom.com is a Wellington based global domain name registration and trading company
focussing on the new trend towards people securing and establishing their own personal identity on the Internet.
Contact:
Robert Wiles
CEO Pdom: +64 4 470 7835
Home: +64 4 973 7332
Mobile: +64 21 769 789
Jo Coughlan
VP Public Relations Pdom: +64 4 499 4809
Mobile: +64 21 522 142
Home: +64 4 972 4437
Speakers to be gifted.co.nz domain names include the following:
- Rt Hon Helen Clark
Prime Minister of New Zealand
- Hon Paul J Keating
Former PM of Australia. Visiting Professor of Public Policy, University of NSW
- Dr Edward De Bono
Creator of Lateral Thinking
- Brigadier General George Yong-Boon Yeo
Minister of Trade and Industry, Singapore
- Dae Whan Chang
President and Publisher of Maeil Business Newspaper and TV
- Sean Dorgan
CEO Industrial Dev Agency, Ireland
- Professor Michael E Porter
Bishop William Lawrence University Professor, Harvard Business School
- Dr Robin Batterham
Chief Scientist of Australia
- Professor Nitin Desai
Under-Secretary-General of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations
- Dr Jilly Evans
Director of Pharmacology, Merck Research Laboratories, USA
- Dr Donald Brash
Governor, Reserve Bank of New Zealand
- Dr Horace "Woody" Brock
Founder and president of Strategic Economic Decisions
- Judge Mick Brown
Former Principal Youth Court Judge of New Zealand and Adjunct Professor of Law at Waikato University
- John Seely Brown
Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp.
- Rick Christie
Chairman, Science and Innovation Advisory Council
- Dr Richard Foster
Author, Senior Partner and Director of McKinsey & Company, New York
- Professor Nehemia Levtzion
Chair of the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Israeli Council for Higher Education
- Gurion Meltzer
Senior Figure in the Israeli Business and Academic Communities
- Dr Yuan T. Lee
President, Academic Sinica, Taiwan
- Professor Jorma Routti
Chairman of Creative Industries Management Fund, holds a Chair at Helsinki Technological University
- Sally Shelton-Colby
Deputy Secretary General, OECD
- Professor Shih Choon Fong
Vice-Chancellor, National University of Singapore
- Professor David J Teece
Director, Institute of Management, Innovation and Organisation, University of California, Berkeley and Mitsubishi Bank
Professor
- Robert Wade
Professor of Political Economy and Development at the London School of Economics
- Norbert Walter
Chief Economist, Deutsche Bank Group
- Professor Lord Robert Winston
Chair of House of Lords Science and Education Committee, Professor of Fertility Studies and Chief of Service for
Reproductive Medicine, Hammersmith