“Not every day is going to offer us the chance to save somebodies life, but everyday offers us an opportunity to affect one.”

Mark Bezos – TED Talk 2011

I was happily working along when I noticed the talk make it to the TED podcast and decided to watch it again… On a Sunday.

I think there are a lot of steps between the world today and that hypothetical but for now my position on this is that within 10 years a new profession will peer its head into the business community, one of game theory/dynamic advisory. Universities will offer courses in game dynamics/theory optimisation to meet a growing need for professional game theory advisors. Why be a business advisor when you could specialise in game theory? But for the most part, right now the only people looking to apply the methodology are game designers and selective “Internet” start-ups and entrepreneurs.

GoDaddy, easily one of the largest brands in the domain name business is the latest to fall victim to their own success. I will bore you with the details of the seemingly basic change they made later, for now I want to focus on the underlying change that makes my jaw drop.

GoDaddy has for the moment anyway, adjusted their home page strategy from selling their domain registration services and earning trust from new and old customers to something that sounds similar but is in fact extremely different.

GoDaddy’s home page today is still focused on selling their domain registration services, but in place of earning trust they have made what I believe to be a critical mistake. Rather than earning the trust of their users from their core focus, they are leveraging (and I would go as far as saying “SPENDING”) their trust.

The home page of GoDaddy today has selected by default the .co extension rather than the widely known .com extension for their domain registration availability search. If this all sounds like about the same thing to you then you are one of the many not educated in domain names but might think surely when I go to the biggest domain registration service to check a name it would be for the one everyone knows.

The point being GoDaddy’s trust is what gets existing users to refer their friends to GoDaddy. But if GoDaddy spend that trust to make short term gains, by selling .co names to people that don’t know the difference between .co and .com they are making people question if sending friends to GoDaddy is still a wise move.

The CEO of GoDaddy (Bob Parsons) has a list of rules for success in business and life in general. I would suggest adding this one to the list:

Earn Trust, but never spend it.

Trust is difficult to earn. But once it is spent it is difficult to start again.

Anyone feel like undertaking a study near the Newcastle area of this nature give me a buzz

Now if you know me then you’re probably thinking: How can I (the personal that will wear ‘crocs/flip-flops’ to well… anywhere) make the world a sexy place?

There are a great deal of ‘things’ out there that have been cast aside and ignored purely because they are not known to be all that appealing. It is this lack of sexiness I hope focus my attention.
These boring ‘Things’ take many shapes. Problems to professions, products, places and dare I say it people are susceptible to being boring.
I have seen lots of examples where people are re-engaging the boring to make them interesting from the X-Prize Foundation that I have posted on within my Blog through to my own experiences in making Wine literally more sexy (Kama Sutra Wines, which I must remember to post about one day).

The recently made sexy ‘thing’ that pushed me over the edge and to set this mission into stone was a simple video (now a series of videos) aimed at making Science sexy. See video below:

These videos would not have taken a considerable amount of time to produce. However, they have repackaged something known not to be all that sexy (Science Documentaries) into something that the millions can enjoy in their own time. This is an example of someone making the world a sexy place and in the process educating millions. It brings to light another interesting question. What else could benefit from being just a little sexier?

This technology has all kinds of highly practical applications and I personally cannot wait to see where this will develop throughout the years.

Emotiv systems is selling the unit to developers now… in the USA only…
(hope Australia isn’t toooo far away)