Raymond King has been a noted innovator and entrepreneur since he started a company while still in high school. His next project, Semaphore, Inc., was created during his sophomore year at M.I.T., and began as a project management software package. By 1990, it was rated #1 in its space by ARCHITECTURE magazine, and grew to over 100 employees, serving 2,500+ clients. Ray went on to co-found SnapNames.com. It was his first major role in the domain name space and they invented several new ways for people to acquire domain names; it grew to more than $49 million in annual revenue by 2006.
Ray has had a personal passion for wikis for years, which even led him to found ICANNWiki, a vibrant wiki resource that links together the ICANN ecosystem. He is a native and long-time resident of New York City, but has been in Portland Ore. since co-founding SnapNames.com—his current farm outside the city, complete with tractor and goats, is a definite but welcome departure from his days in Manhattan.
Except where otherwise noted, all postings by Ray King on CircleID are licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Eight years ago, we made the decision to apply for ".gay" with encouragement from Clyde, my gay brother-in-law, among other passionate members of my family. Although we lost him recently, his memory has only increased our determination to see it through. I know Clyde would be proud of our vision for .gay, and all of the planning and community engagement that has gone into making sure we get this right. more
As an applicant in this new gTLD round with quite a few overlapping strings, I've had a keen interest in the various proposed auction platforms. In the past six months the ideas behind private auction have matured significantly and I now see it as a strong mechanism for resolving contention. Following are my observations. more
To date, end-users (of all levels of technical ability) who are trying to find a good domain name to establish an online identity have been endlessly frustrated by the lack of a method to fairly re-allocate "used" domain names. A full resolution to that problem is a separate (and much bigger) discussion... more
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