Juan Diego Calle’s STRAAT Investments Reveals gTLD Applications

Earlier this morning, Paul Sloan published an article on CNET about the new gTLDs, and he mentioned that Juan Diego Calle, founder of the .CO Registry, “is going after 13 new TLDs through the investment company that backed .co Internet.” I just received a press release from Calle’s STRAAT Investments detailing the company’s newest investment in gTLDs.

STRAAT Investments is applying for 13 domain extensions, and they will also be assisting one other applicant with a 14th TLD which will be revealed publicly tomorrow. The 13 TLDs are:

  • .APP
  • .BOOK
  • .CORP
  • .DESIGN
  • .GMBH
  • .GROUP
  • .INC
  • .LAW
  • .LLC
  • .LTD
  • .MOVIE
  • .TECH
  • .WEB

Straat will be leveraging its existing infrastructure and the assets of .CO to efficiently launch their new TLDs, but the .CO team will stay focused on growing the .CO space. Each TLD under management will have its own brand team, although I am quite sure they will also leverage its learnings from the past few years marketing .CO domain names.

One big question is how potentially hundreds of new TLDs will impact .CO, and the company acknowledges that there will be an impact. According to Jose Rasco, Managing Director of STRAAT, “New TLDs will definitely add some competitive pressures to .CO when they are launched. But in the long run, they will help us in transmitting the message to the general public that there is much more to the namespace than .com, that there are credible alternatives as evidenced by our successful launch, and that there is an unmet demand for new products.”

One thing that is apparent is the corporate TLD applications. One reason many .CO are buying .CO domain names is because .CO can stand for “Company.” STRAAT likely has seen this with its clients, and they are applying for TLDs like .LLC, .LTD, .INC, and .GMBH to sell to companies using these various business abbreviations.

ICANN’s “Reveal Day” is scheduled for June 13, 2012. All gTLD applicants and extensions will be announced during a press conference.

STRAAT Press Release follows:

STRAAT Investments announced today that it has applied to ICANN for 13 generic top level domains (gTLDs). Among other things, STRAAT is the parent company of .CO Internet, the registry operator of the fast growing .CO domain extension.

STRAAT and its partners have committed the resources and capital to successfully acquire and launch the following gTLDs:

  • .APP
  • .BOOK
  • .CORP
  • .DESIGN
  • .GMBH
  • .GROUP
  • .INC
  • .LAW
  • .LLC
  • .LTD
  • .MOVIE
  • .TECH
  • .WEB

“We are confident that significant unmet demand exists for more relevant, alternative TLD options,” said Jose Ignacio Rasco, Managing Director at STRAAT, “and given our experience with the .CO launch, our team is uniquely qualified to maximize the value of these gTLDs.”

While STRAAT intends to acquire these gTLDs outright, it anticipates an orderly and rapid resolution of contested strings, without the need for a formal auction. According to Rasco, “while all 13 of our applications should face contention, we expect our fellow applicants will be equally motivated to focus their resources on operating the extensions, minimizing risk, and improving the underlying economics.”

The success of .CO has widely been referenced as the case study for the potential of new TLD’s. Less than two years from launch, the .CO registry has achieved over 1.3 million domains registered by individuals and businesses in over 200 countries worldwide.

Leveraging its experience and proven methodology, .CO’s management team has an existing platform ready to successfully brand and market these exciting new affinity domains. Acquired TLDs will be added to .CO’s product portfolio, where they can benefit from economies of scale and scope.

With respect to registry operations, STRAAT has decided to expand its existing relationship with Neustar, Inc. (NYSE: NSR) to serve as the back-end operator for all thirteen TLDs, as it has for .CO since 2010. Neustar’s proven experience and reliability will be paramount for the successful launch of these new extensions.

About STRAAT

We are STRAAT, an investment company run by entrepreneurs and internet geeks. We make domestic and international investments across the capital structure, primarily focusing on technology and real estate. With roots in the acquisition and development of real estate since the early 80’s, our principals began investing in technology in the late 1990’s. Our goal is to create value by focusing on what we know, backing entrepreneurs with the right experience and incubating companies ourselves, when appropriate. We are inspired by our entrepreneurs’ vision, drive, and passion. We continue to seek opportunities to deploy our own capital and that of our extensive network of partners and high net-worth family offices, into exceptional web-based product and service companies. For more information, visit www.straat.co.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

8 COMMENTS

  1. What I am missing with the .DESIGN?
    I seen several applied for that extension.
    What is the interest, what will be the buyers?

  2. he insults the domain community and attacks. if it wasnt for domainers, .co would not be where its at today. simple as that. domainers and speculators made .co where its at. surly not overstock. look what happened to that.

    if he expects us to forget his smack talking agenda against the domainers, i hope he sinks.

    just my 2 cents.

  3. I can see only two reasons for a .co
    One- to protect a brand
    Two- to develop a site when all the extensions for that name are parked. Parking in my estimation is a blight to the internet. There are millions of casual users who go through a very frustrating experience when surfing, by constantly running into parked pages that lead into a maze of useless advertising and have no relevance to the original search. Perhaps the new Tdl’s will force the parkers to either sell or develop the names that they own. That could unleash the great potential of the internet.

  4. The wisdom has been real estate is a good investment because they can’t make more land. For the longest time, I’ve felt that domains are the land that we build our houses or businesses on. If this works, then I think the trend for domain values will begin capping out. If they can just make more domains whenever investors want more, then where is the value?

  5. I agree, Paul, and most industry experts feel that this will only create further consumer confusion, and will actually increase the value of the “gold standard” .com extension..at least for the next few years. The fact that “dot com” has been essentially engrained into the consumer psyche since the beginning of the internet, simply cannot be ignored.

  6. Whoops. typo above. *ingrained.

    Speaking of typos, one of the reasons the .co extension is a “success” (up for debate) is obviously because it’s one of the most common typos for .com. Advocates love to tout how it could easily mean “Company” etc etc, but honestly at the end of the day, if you take away the traffic “leakage” a .co domain may benefit from it being a typo, it’s really no different than .biz or a .info extension. However, traffic leakage works both ways, which only reaffirms why a .com domain will continue to be the “meat and potatoes” of the industry. You can’t expect to launch a brand under a clever new GTLD and not expect to lose significant traffic to the .com equivalent of the brand along the way. When the dust settles, businesses will finally realize this. Although it should already be pretty obvious that consumer browsing habits die hard and slow.

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