May was a busy month for the .CO team starting with sponsoring Web 2.0 at the beginning of the month and culminating in a sponsorship and participation at the Annual INTA event in Boston, MA.  We made quite a showing at INTA from branded phone charging stations showing our favorite “.COmmercial“ to a “ginormous” booth in the Expo hall where we actually held a series of briefing sessions educating trademark lawyers on how help their clients to protect and extend their brands with .CO domains. 

We were thrilled to see that many of our registrar partners and the leading corporate portfolio service providers were also at INTA this year, including Melbourne IT, EuroDNS, Encirca, Net Names, SafeNames, Brand Shelter, MarkMonitor, CSC Corporate Domains and many others.

With our aggressive launch plan and our dedication to the rights protections for the trademark and business communities, INTA was an absolutely essential event for us to attend.  Even in the face of what is lovingly known in the industry as “TLD Fatigue” – we were very happy about the reception we received.  The trademark attorneys were not only happy with our rights protection mechanisms, but we got quite a bit of positive affirmation from  individuals, firms and companies wanting information on the .CO extension to build content and extend or grow their existing brands.

I’ve included the ”briefing session” we delivered with our Validation Agent, Bart Lieben of the Laga law firm, that gives more detail on not only protecting brands with .CO – but how .CO can help you to extend your brand’s reach.

As we come upon the eve of Landrush, I am excited about what is to come.  This phase is a great opportunity for brands that feel they may have missed Sunrise to still protect their marks as this is not a first come, first serve phase.  This is also the best time for all companies to register extended marks and also priority and keyword domains that they may want to use to help augment internal marketing initiatives.

So as we close on another year of INTA, I am confident that many trademark owners are more aware about, more excited about and more involved with the .CO extension than ever before! 

Onward and upward!