Geo-generic Predictive Domaining (GGPD) - the art and practice of anticipating a trend or new technology and applying it to the geogeneric domaining industry, if possible. Especially attractive about GGPD is that once you have identified the term(s) associated with the upcoming trend or nascient industry it can be applied to numerous geographical locations.

Of course what is necessary is that the opportunity is applicable and amenable to geographic locations - at one time “motherboards” might have been a hot term but a person who registered 500 city domains with the “motherboards” suffix would have been a person who didn’t understand that it was unlikely that every city needed a site dedicated to motherboards.

Lawyers, on the other hand, represent a generic that begs for representation in every city, “realestate” is another term that can be applied to each geographical region. So Geo-generic predictive domaining requires the domainer to recognize which future valuable generics will require sales and/or service outlets in separate and finite locations.

In 2005 a few of us were talking about industries that were going to be really huge in the future but nothing at the moment and we thought of “robots” and “robotics”. Of course domains like “robots.com” and “robotics.com” were taken as were the double generic combinations like “sexrobots.com” or “robotslave.com”. Some of the geo-generics in those verticals were gone as well - “newyorkrobotics.com”, “californiarobots.com”, “losangelesrobotics.com”, the most populous and desirable names had already been registered.

The question was - would Spokane, Washington need a robot sales outlet, would Calgary, Alberta support one or more robotics companies and would there also be a market at the same time for one or more in nearby Edmonton? What would be the nature of the work that a robotics company might do? Would it be largely at the customer’s location, would it be a central depot or perhaps some combination of both? If you needed a new robot would you go to the nearest robot store or would you just order from the internet? Both? Neither?

Then, put yourself in the shoes of the person who wants a robot, or who needs some repair work done to the thing. Do you want to see a live demonstration never forgetting that robots may well and probably will be so ubuquitous that you can just take a look at your neighbour’s. What will go wrong with your robot and when it does will there be such a thing as a robot repairman? Will robot repair mean replacing a module - snap broken module out and snap replacement module in?

Many questions but somewhere in our examinations and predictions we decided that at some point in the developing robotics related businesses that there would be a need for locally based experts. We foresaw many possibilites where one day the potential existed for there to be no need for a local business related to robotics but that at least once there would be a time where the company that owned their cityname and “robots” would have a distinct advantage over their competition, thereby making the domain name valuable and desirable.

When we then further investigated what geo-robot(ic)s.com domains were available it turned out there were many good ones, maybe even great ones. “CanadaRobots.com”, “MexicoRobots.com”, “AustraliaRobots.com”, “MexicoRobotics.com”, “LondonRobotics.com”, “MichiganRobots.com”, “HawaiiRobotics.com”, “DenverRobotics.com”, “TorontoRobots.com” - plus another 50 big cities, states, etc.

Just a few days ago a company called “Boston Dynamics” released a demonstration video of their various robots in action. We were watching it in awe thinking “It’s There Now” - and now having watched the video a half-dozen times there is a sense of being aware that one is witnessing the start of a gigantic overturning of a way of life, the start of an era equivalent to the automobile era but even more profound. Imagining some huge company like General Motors just immediately shutting down their auto manufacturing plants and converting them to robot assembly lines doesn’t seem improbable today after we viewed the video.

Suffice to say that we who invested in geo-generic dot coms in the robots and robotics verticals are happy today and so it seemed a good time to write about Geo-Generic Predictive Domaining. We are of course trying to figure out what those domains are now worth and whether there are end-users ready to develop them. Certainly there aren’t a lot of locally based robot related companies that I know of and I suspect that there are lots of cities with populations of over 50,000 where the dot com geo-generic robotics domains are still available.

We would buy them but it isn’t our process to look for the lesser geogenerics. The robots domain venture was just a part of what we are doing and if we took all the good geo-generic dot coms that are available in our predictives catalog we would be overwhelmed and that is not our goal. However, even though we went for the most desirable cities in our registration frenzy we also took our hometowns which aren’t generally considered to be first tier geos like “canada”, “london”, “newyork”, “california”, “seattle” or even “calgary” just because they were OUR geos. Certainly if you have read this far our advice is to check for your city and “robots” or “robotics” (dot coms of course) and if they are available register them. There might even be a few TLDs of great desirability still available but we don’t go outside of the dot coms so we have no idea.

We use “newyork”, “california”, “seattle”, “losangeles”, “chicago”, “dallas” as indicators for where a new “predictive” is currently at, acceptance-wise. Most times if we think of a predictive and those afore-mentioned geos aren’t taken we will not bother either. Had we more money to invest in predictive domains then we would but the problem is if you decide that transporters or holodecks (in the Star Trek sense) are going to be really big one day then you have a choice. First choice is that you can register “NewYorkTransporters.com”, “CanadaHolodecks.com”, etc - maybe 20 prime “geo-generic-predictives”.

If you do that then you probably have to be at least three years ahead of the trend if “newyork” and “chicago” are still available so you might have to wait another 2 years until the “denvers” and “cincinnatis” start to get taken. At that point you would know that whatever predictive you had gone for was going to be at least a modest success. Then you have another choice as you now have the opportunity to buy any and all of the next 450 or so best domains. We have about that many in our list of desirable geo-locations and can’t help but notice that the .MD group took 450 dot MD geos like “seattle.MD” so we feel we weren’t too far off with our estimate of desirable cities.

Of course you could have bought all 450 to begin with but when you start getting into predictive domaining there are going to be losers, a technology may catch on but the phrase used to popularly describe it may end up being slang, as if you had bought 450 “ChicagoBarbaraDoll.com” domains but then they ended up being “Barbie Dolls”, not “Barbara Dolls”. Great.

Most of the time the very best geogeneric predictives are already taken before you become aware of them, particularly the dot coms - if only because domaining is so huge and so many people are doing it. The question then really becomes one of watching a certain “tier” of geos. We have a few mid level cities like “New Haven” or “Tacoma” that we like to check and if one of them goes we become more certain of the future popular acceptance of our predictive name. If you have about 20 of these “4th tier” cities then chances are that someone will just register their home town and the predictive generic and not bother with any others - a sure indicator of imminent popular acceptance.

At this point there are usually most of the 2nd and 3rd tier cities still available as well as the odd 1st tier one - this is the point at which we will buy 50 domains or so, depending on what we superficially deem to be the most appropriate cities to be based on whatever the predictive generic is. If “aquahomes” was our predictive generic then we would probably eliminate some of the bigger desert cities in favor of smaller cities nearer the Great Lakes.

Finally, we take into consideration that if you are the first person to figure out that a certain predictive generic will be geo-dependent and you register all of the even remotely desirable dot com domains then you are going it alone. We believe that having other companies setting up in desirable land that you could have had will make others want and need to do the same and you will realize a greater success than if you had controlled the whole vertical.