According to the seattletimes.com, entrepreneur Naveen Jain who founded Intelius and InfoSpace, has raised $6.7 million from investors for his newest venture, BlueDot, “which aims to form health-care and energy businesses from federal research”.
The company uses the new gTLD Blue.Tech for its website.
The domain name Blue.Tech was acquired in a private transaction from the .Tech registry which is owned and operated by Radix.
“BlueDot pays to license research that comes out of NASA and national laboratories within the Department of Energy and other agencies, Blue Dot then plans to spin out companies dedicated to specific technologies that have the potential for “big social impact.”
Blue.tech comes as a second big win for .tech, as it quickly gains popularity on the startup scene
Earlier this year in February, the winners of the Launch Hackathon ( in San Francisco) also used a .tech domain for their project, betagig.tech.
The start-up was the official winner of the Launch Hackathon and took home $250,000 as an investment from the event organizers.
The .tech TLD has also seen usage from popular & leading brands including CTA (the organizers of CES), Microsoft.
CTA showed off its brand new URL cta.tech at SXSW.
Microsoft is using the premium domain rewards.tech for its tech rewards program that helps developers hone their tech and programming skills.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/03/18/naveen-jains-intelius-begins-to-crumble-good/
His story is amazing, especially becoming a billionaire then loosing it all during one of the most craziest times in history.
He has a lot of legal issues, some are probably still ongoing, google his name with lawsuit, everything from the WA state attorney’s office to the SEC
I’ve always felt that .tech would eventually reach .co / .io status with startups who can’t afford the .com. I’d consider this announcement another small step forward in that direction.
To be honest the premium .tech, cost more than the .com, especially if you add up the renewals over a 10 year period.
i got 20 .tech for free
( promotion on checkdomain.de )
including :
Chrunch.tech
Emc2.tech
A promising development this is. Recently I registered scif.tech at standard fees. SCIF as in Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.
It looks like rewards.tech works only without the “www.” and as a redirect.
I like the .Tech extension, but one of the challenges is so many companies are called ____ Tech, and they have trademarks.
Several companies are called BLUE TECH and they have registered trademarks. Looks like this company, BLUE DOT, will be offering IP licensing, so not sure if there will be any trademark issues.
Why didn’t they get Blue.Dot (is Dot an extension) or buy BlueDot.com, or just reg BlueDot.Tech?
Yes it make sense for them to buy blueDot.com
I don’t know who is advising these people on branding, but in my opinion it is important for a sizable firm to have a company name which matches a corresponding dotcom domain. If you can’t get BlueDot.com, then don’t call the company BlueDot. As Rick Schwartz often says, there are many good dotcoms which can be bought on the secondary market without overburdening a company’s budget.
I can only think of one way in which an alternate extension can work well for a large company or any company whose website is central to its business, and that is to brand itself with the extension as a part of its name. For example, call the company QuickLoans.online and be at that domain. But you can’t then refer to yourself as QuickLoans, as people will confuse you with whoever is at QuickLoans.com.
Calling the company BlueDot and using Blue.tech for the website? Far from ideal, it seems to me. (And they have BlueDot.tech but aren’t forwarding it to the site.) Before adopting that strategy they should have consulted with Bill Sweetman, who I think would have advised them differently.
@ryan — Whoa, I felt sorry for Jain’s name choice until I read your link. How is he not in jail?
This brand is right out of the late 90s…eCyber.tech must have been taken. And then bad grammar in the home page animation? AdviceVacuum.tech