Later this week I’ll be “hitting the road”. It’s a very busy time of the year, with multiple international conferences being held in various parts of the world. I’ll end up being “on the road” for nearly 3 weeks, which is quite long even by my standards.
While it would be impossible (and not terribly productive) to attend every single possible conference, there are several that are useful for me and for the company. Over the coming weeks I’ll be attending several of these!
This June marks 10 years since Montenegro became an independent country and to celebrate that as well as the 8 year anniversary of the launch of the .me domain name extension, the .me registry is organising a half day conference this Friday: “The .ME domain – a national brand worthy of Montenegro’s Independence Jubilee” and I’ve been invited to speak. I speak at a lot of different conferences and events around the world, but being invited to speak at this one is a true honour.
Next week ICANN is organising a conference for its registrars and registries, which will be in Amsterdam. So I’ll be heading to Amsterdam straight from Montenegro. The event will be more “business” and “operations” focussed than the “normal” ICANN meetings. It’ll be a good opportunity to touch base with a lot of our registry partners and also to “flesh out” some of the operational issues that some new ICANN policies cause for us.
After Amsterdam I’ll be heading to Orlando, Florida for the INTA meeting. INTA is the international trademark association, so its members are primarily interested in trademarks and intellectual property. I’ve been invited to speak at their annual meeting, which was an unexpected honour. I’ll be on a panel focussed on domains, ICANN and new TLDs: “Internet/E-Commerce Industry Breakout: Beyond Trademarks—The Latest Challenges for Trademark Lawyers in Dealing with ICANN, New gTLDs, and the New Internet Landscape”.
Heading to Orlando works out quite well, as I’ll then be able to join our head of sales at WHD.usa in Phoenix. WHD is one of the more important events on our calendar these days, as it’s where we are able to meet a lot of the different vendors for hosting related products and services, as well as those infamous “value added services”. Infamous mainly because the term “value added” drives me nuts 🙂
After Phoenix it’s back to Europe again, this time to The Hague for Domaining Europe. I’ve been attending Domaining Europe for the last few years and it’s always a good event to attend.
I don’t normally bother mapping my travel itinerary, as it’s usually A to B to C or something relatively straight forward. This time round it was interesting enough that I actually did.
So going by airport codes only you get:
DUB-IST-TGD
TGD-IST-AMS
AMS-JFK-MCO
MCO-PHX
PHX-DTW-AMS
AMS-DUB
Which plotted on a map ends up looking like this:
That’s a total of 26931 km (16734 miles) in a single trip!
If you’re attending any of those events and want to grab a coffee, or something stronger, please let me know!
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