Monday, October 24, 2011

Week 7 - A Not-So-Easy Solution for the Starving College Student

What's a problem that all college students encounter quite a lot? The answer is having no money. It's not easy to hold a job while balancing school work at the same time. You have to have money, but at the same time you have to have good grades. What are you going to do? For those college students who are technologically advanced, the answer can be found in networking. How does networking work?


How the Internet Works
Every node on the internet needs an IP address to communicate. An IP address (IPv4) is a set of four bytes, of four 8 bit numbers, for example 128.230.84.49.  The first 2 sets of #’s is the network address (Exp: 128.230 = SU), the 3rd number is a Sub-net (Exp: 84 = hinds hall), and the last number is the actual host (system). The internet is running out of IP addresses so they have to add some, creating a new form of IP address known as the IPv6. What we see when we type in a website is known as a domain name, an alias for an IP address. ICANN.org (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is the governing body that manages domain names including the suffixes whether they are restricted (,gov, .edu, .mil, etc.) or unrestricted (.com, .net, .org, etc.). 

Domain Names
Can you buy and sell any domain? This is where the money lies and where you can make a nice investment if you play your cards right. Domains can be bought for $10 if they have not been claimed and if that domain name becomes popular then one can sell it for much, much more. For example, in 2007 porn.com was sold for $9.5 million and in 2010 sex.com was sold for $13 million. A more common example is a SU professor, Jeff Rubin, bought the domain yaz.info for baseball player Carl Yastrzemski and sold it for $5,000 to Bayer for their morning-after pill Yaz. 

Domain Disputes
One thing you have to worry about when investing in domain names is to not "steal" a domain name from someone or a company then later try to sell it to them because they could file a complaint and the domain would be automatically become theirs. All domain name disputes go through WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization)
Examples of Disputes:
   1) Your domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complaint has rights
   2) You have no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name
   3) Your domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith
When filing a dispute, it costs $1,500 for a single panelist to review the dispute and $4,000 for three panelists.

Where the Money Is At
Like mentioned before, this is not necessarily easy to succeed on and also may take a while for the domain you choose to actually gather some worth. For those more technologically advanced, and with more time, one could create a domain and then actually do something with it rather than just waiting for the domain to gather worth. You can create a website with information that people would be interested, gather traffic, and gain worth that way then gain advertisers to make the money. However, this is much more complicated and time consuming so you may just want to stick with a simple part-time, typical college job.

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