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How GoDaddy's Quest For Respect Led To an Improbable Partnership With MIT (fastcompany.com)
harrymcc writes: GoDaddy, the world's biggest domain registrar, remains most famous for its tacky Super Bowl ads and controversial founder, Bob Parsons. But in recent years, the company was sold, hired a CEO from Microsoft and Yahoo, and has made a major effort to reinvent itself as a serious, uncontroversial, technologically-savvy outfit. And now it's partnered with MIT's Media Lab in an ambitious experiment--which I wrote about over at Fast Company--involving placing sensors around downtown Boston to collect big data that could help the small businesses which line the city's streets.
Sensors that track customers? Sounds like a very strange definition of uncontroversial, but that's just me...
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Assuming the service is good, there should be brand recognition among current customers. But new customers might be more attracted by different brand name.
Don't forget they supported SOPA.
Do you recall when Cartoon Network mounted led lights promoting a Adult Swim on street lamps in Boston? Only to be called 'terrorists', then 'hoax terrorists'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_Mooninite_panic
As for this:
"The company also plans to mash up the Downtown Crossing stats with big data it's aggregated from its millions of small-business customers to see if it can correlate information across the physical and digital worlds. The clearer it is about what it's learned in Boston, the better positioned it will be to understand whether there might be an opportunity to turn it into a business."
Yeh for CISA, the "ISPs sell your private data to NSA" bill. ISPs all trying to find ways to use all this data they've collected on their customers.
From a company/CEO that endorses SOPA (despite its retraction after the boycott), Gitmo/water boarding (despite the later change after the public outcry), and goes out of its way to help law enforcement cease assets against its own customers without even a court order.
Putting sensors everywhere in the street to surveil passers-by seems like a perfect continuation of the same fascist big brother government-knows-better mindset. I'm not sure changing the CEO is going to change anything about the company itself, except may be get a CEO that is better at keeping his mouth shut (than the last one).
if placing yourself on a poster with a scarcely dressed female servant, clearly depicting that women are some sort of lesser beings which sole purpose is to server men, then they would probably do that too!
Oh wait....
By all means write the story but to me this comes across as bartely concealed advertising. I was also under the impression that it is bad form to submit ones own work to Slashdot. Godaddy are also (and always will be) a scummy company. Im suprised Dice are not charging them advertising rates. Tell me.. do Fastcompany have a minimum number of clicks required in order to be paid for the article/advert ?
and ignoring complaints about it.
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/li...
Thats ok though, IPTABLES fixed that problem.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
How much did this Slashvertisement cost?
These sort of dirty tactics are the reason why their reputation is/was dirt.
They lost my respect for being scumbags. That's a life, they never had it in the first place.
Never use a web based WHOIS to check if a domain has been registered. Two separate checks, and the domain was bought by GoDaddy, who didn't even offer up a way to buy it back even though I would have shelled out money for it.
Use the whois package on linux in combination with dig.
My favorite was when I sent their support a pcap showing which one of their servers was sending RST instead of serving my client's website (their choice...) and they dismissed it because 'there's nothing wrong with our servers'.
It's not like there's nobody cheaper or better - such an amazing testament to the power of advertising.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Godaddy weaseling a partnership with MIT is sad enough. Considering what is known about godaddy and it's principles and methods, the fact that the project is to be big-brother (uhh, i mean data) information collection is pretty disturbing.
What kind of summary is this? Sensors that sense...? How stupidly vague are trying to make this sound? ..."involving placing sensors around downtown Boston to collect big data that could help the small businesses which line the city's streets."
Seriously? We're a domain registrar with shitty prices and worse service than most of our competitors but hey let's put sensors around Boston and collect some of that good ol big data. Yaaaaaaaay
The company that hired Danica Patrick as a spokesmodel wants to be taken seriously? Why would I take seriously a company that picks a spokesmodel with a literally poor track record? She has one of the worst records in Nascar and would have washed out years ago if she was male.
If you're going to pick someone just because they are female, at least pick someone with a good track record. Pick someone who has merit (there are female drivers with good track records) if you want taken seriously.
It makes me wonder if they do the same kind of social promotion for their professional work. Is the person working on this a qualified processional?
FBIFM to criticize branding, but they started by choosing a brand that sounds like it was ripped straight from a pedo-porn movie.
What? Wait. Is it just me? It's just me, isn't it?
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
How about their servers still being horribly under powered? I have migrated many clients off of godaddy to another service using the same "base level" accounts and have a 400% speed increase in their wordpress,joomla, etc than on godaddy.
Godaddy feels like most of the time their hosting is on servers from 1998 and overloaded with 10,000 sites per 4 processor Pentium III server.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'll be honest: They lost my respect the first time I heard of them. The name "Go Daddy" is super creepy. I find it hard to take a company seriously when it chooses a name like that. And then I logged into the site at one point when I was helping someone, and the negative associations were reinforced. The whole thing always felt like a spam/scam site. I think I saw one of the commercials once, and I wasn't particularly offended or anything, but again, it reinforced the sense that the company seemed trashy/scammy/spammy.
Even the logo-- that dude with the sunglasses-- I don't know why but he looks like a perv to me. I think it's the "Go Daddy" association, which always sounded to me like it was somehow hearkening to the concept of child molestation. The words "Go Daddy" look like they're written with sloppy and perhaps childish handwriting, as though a child is telling "daddy" to go away. I want to ask, "Is it because Daddy did something bad?" He looks creepy, wearing sunglasses and has some kind of a star stuck to his bald head. And what are those orange lines emanating from the top of his head?
Is it just me? I can't be the first person to think this. Seems like really bad marketing to me, but I've never heard anyone else mention it.
~ I would first like to suggest some changes to GoDaddy's branding.
~ Excellent! What would you suggest we change?
~ The name?
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I really can't imagine who thought this was a good idea, but it doesn't seem to have done their sales any harm.
It''s obviously true that any advertising or marketing is ok as long as it creates some impression, whether good or bad. In the UK, the "go compare" insurance ads are simultaneously the most hated and most recognisable ones on TV.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Never use a web based WHOIS to check if a domain has been registered. Two separate checks, and the domain was bought by GoDaddy, who didn't even offer up a way to buy it back even though I would have shelled out money for it.
If they really do that and it bothers you - use it against them. Make a script that does two separate checks against every word (and two-word combination...) from the dictionary. If they auto-buy it all, it'll cost them.
"GoDaddy, the world's biggest domain registrar, remains most famous for its tacky Super Bowl ads and controversial founder, Bob Parsons."
Who the fuck is Bob Parsons? The only reason most people know of them is for Danica Patrick.
Just another day in Paradise
MIT was a direct contributor to the persecution and murder of Aaron Swartz, and I would uninvite MIT to anything I was ever involved in, and I would encourage everybody else to do the same.
To say that MIT could help the reputation of GoDaddy (supporters of ACTA), is a joke at best.
Well, that sort of ties in with the Susan Tedeschi song.
"It hurt, it hurt, it hurt so bad...
You were the best man, I ever had...
But how was I to see...
That the biggest fool, was me?
Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it,
Lord no...
Please come back to me..."
Something along those lines, at any rate. She has put the mic away during Blues Fest and filled an entire outdoor area with just her natural voice. She's got power in them pipes. Serious power. The song, during certain times, sends shivers up my spine. She's very talented and an altogether good person, by all accounts.
So, wildly off topic but another sort of interesting thing.
How many times has GoDaddy been in the news for supporting anti-freedom or anti-net neutrality legislation?
Can anyone else remember other ways GoDaddy has abused its position as a registrar? I don't remember the specifics.
They are an evil company, and I'll gladly take my business to another registrar, whether it's cheaper or more expensive.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
It's not just you, there are plenty of people who feel this way. I am not the kind who feel the same way for the record. People like you have a strong association with men wearing sunglasses who call themselves "daddy" and associate this kind of imagery to molestation especially child molestation. Your interpretation of the typography further reinforces your imagery.
My question is why would somebody publicly proclaim with a veil that they're child molesters? Do they admire their feelings for molestation so strongly that they can't help but make public clues to the world about who they are? To me it's like a member of Al-Qaeda who called himself "Terry Wrist" who joined American society to start an air transport company called "World Trade Transport" and featured a logo of a plane heading towards a pair of identical skyscrapers while Terry's main goal is to conduct terrorism in America.
I sincerely doubt that the founder of go daddy is a molester of any kind and that you are just a moron who perpetually thinks about molesters.