Earnings Call Excerpt
Tucows Completes Acquisition of NetIdentity: Transcript of Podcast With Tucows CEO Elliot Ness
June 15, 2006
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Host: Welcome to this Tucows podcast, featuring an interview with Tucows CEO Elliot Noss, on the NetIdentity acquisition.
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Host: I am speaking with Tucows CEO Elliot Noss about the recent acquisition of NetIdentity.
Elliot, what exactly are you buying?
Elliot Noss: We're buying a few different things.
First, we're buying an existing customer base, of retail Internet service as clients. These are customers who receive email services, Web hosting services, blogging services from NetIdentity.
Most importantly here, we're buying a collection of domain names that are surnames, and they represent a very large number of popular surnames throughout North America, Europe, and frankly around the world. The reason that we're so excited about those surname domain names is that we believe that that is an excellent way to allow primarily end users, individuals but also small businesses especially solo with the opportunity to personalize their Internet services.
So imagine now, the ability to have an email address like "Jeff@Smith.net", "Ken@Schafer.org". As anybody who's tried to acquire a domain name for personal reasons over the last two, three four years now knows it is next to impossible to acquire the surname unless your name happens to be something so completely obscure that it's still available. And for most people it's still the case that rather than rely on some of the alternative top level domains, their preference would strongly be in com, net and org.
So in terms of what we bought, the single most important thing is a domain name portfolio of surnames that we believe is the largest in the world of its kind.
Host: I see that on the NetIdentity web site there's a claim that in their portfolio they represent 70 percent of US and European surnames. Is that true?
Elliot Noss: Well, I'll tell you what we found out on diligence as we dug into that claim. What we discovered was that the basis for that was that five or six years ago that they had undertaken an investigation that looked at their surnames relative to US census data, and some sampling that they did. And I think that they came up with coverage in that 68 - 69 percent range. So obviously very close to that 70 percent.
And you know I'll tell you two things, certainly nothing that we've looked at has made us think that that's far from where that us but we will be clear, first of all we haven't done our own independent investigation using that census data in either the U.S. or Europe. Second, we'll certainly be going forward, you know, engaging in some of that investigation ourselves to see exactly where it is. You know I will tell you that certainly from our serving of the landscape, it was by far the best coverage of any such portfolio that we've been able to find or identify.
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