Cambrian House

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Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community using a wisdom of crowds based approach to discover new business and technology ideas. These pages are being kept online as a technology demo to showcase Chaordix™.

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Regional Domain Name Sublet

lincoln
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  • Submitted by: lincoln
  • Created: Mar 28, 2007, 3:45 pm
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The Idea

Every Joe's Pizza in the world could benefit from having joespizza.com, right? Their only reason for having a website is so the local people can order online or see their menu, right? Does it matter if someone in Kansas can see your site? This idea is that visitors from within the locale are directed to their local Joe's Pizza.

Process flow:
Joe goes to our site
He adds his domain to be sublet
He claims the Southern CA area
Joe points the system to his existing site
Other locales for that name are now up for grabs
Others log on and claim their "locale" (TBD, along with pricing)
If lots of interest, locales could be auctioned
Joe gets a cut of the action, and we get the rest
If his domain is popular, he can make a lot of dough
If it isn't, who cares, any non-claimed locales go to his site anyway

I thought of this idea when I was...

I've always thought it was a shame that one little company that shares its name with hundreds of other companies is the only one to benefit from a domain name. I'm not sure what actually spurred this on when this exact idea came to me, so we'll chalk it up to celestial events.


Comments Posted

micco
micco Posted: March 30, 2007, 1:44 pm

What actual URLs would your system use? Would you use third-level domain names to distinguish different locales, something like sandiego.joespizza.com and newyork.joespizza.com? Or, assuming that valuable domains like joespizza.com are already taken, would you use third and fourth level domains on top of your service's URL, like sandiego.joespizza.mylookupservice.com?

Or would you use some kind of dynamic mapping so if I hit joespizza.com from an IP address in southern California, I'd get the so-cal version and if I hit the same domain from an IP in New York, I'd get the New York version? If this is what you have in mind, you'll have to overcome the fairly high error rate in IP geo-location. Plus you'd have to actually be able to register all these valuable domain names, something which is overcome by using third- and fourth-level domains on top of your service's domain.

What kind of value does this kind of URL manipulation add that isn't handled by currently existing regional directories and search engines?

 

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