How A $70 URL And A Play Led To Latino E-biz

MIAMI, FLA. -- Kyle McNamara wrote an e-mail to the owner of the domain name Espanol.com when he was teaching at the University of New Hampshire in 1998.

McNamara asked if he could have the domain name and the owner told him to send the $70 registration fee and it was his. McNamara did.

Today, McNamara is the CEO of a Web company based in Wakefield, Mass., that is trying to become a mass online retailer for the Spanish-speaking world. The domain name, espanol.com, is worth at least $15 million, the money invested so far in the company that was founded in October 1998.

Among the investors in Espanol.com are Telemundo, the Spanish-language broadcasting company; Advent International, a private equity investor; and Grupo Ferre Rangel, the company that publishes the Puerto Rican newspaper, El Nuevo Dia.

"I just wanted to have a solid dot-com name for a product I was building -- an online education system specifically for languages," said McNamara on Wednesday at the first Jupiter Communications Latin America Internet Commerce Forum in Miami, where he is a panelist.

In addition to the espanol.com domain, the company also owns portugues.com (Portuguese); compra.com, the Spanish and Portuguese word for "buy;" econfianza ("e-trust" in Spanish); netconfianza ("Net trust" in Spanish); and Afiliodes.com ("affiliates" in Spanish), McNamara said.

McNamara is an example of how serendipitous events can lead to new Internet businesses. He is a self-trained database programmer from a family of entrepreneurs who now finds himself in the middle of one of the hottest sectors of the Internet, selling culturally based goods to not only the Spanish-speaking population of Latin America and Europe, but also in the United States, one of the fastest-growing demographic sectors, and one that advertisers are beginning to see as a profitable market.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates Latinos will become the largest minority group in the United States by 2005, at 11 percent of the population. It is a young population, with an average age of 26 and a difficult market totarget, as Latinos come from more than a dozen different countries, each with a distinct culture.

McNamara said he starts with a love for Spanish culture and a knowledge of database programming and networking.

"I knew how to do e-commerce and I know Spanish," he said. "I knew I could do this. I put up the site, working three days straight."

In the summer of 1998, Espanol.com was a student website with its main content being a play that McNamara wrote in Spanish as part of a master's degree program in Spanish and Latin American literature. He found the site was drawing visitors from Latin America and Spain.

"We had very strong traffic, people were just typing the name into browsers," he said. "It dawned on me -- I could do this."

He put up a beta site for Espanol.com while he worked as the lead programmer for another Boston net retail start-up.

"In October of 1998, I realized I had misjudged: The market was happening now," he said. So, he went to work on Espanol.com, maxing the limits on his wife's credit cards until he picked up his financial backing.

"I expect to get an e-mail one day that will say: 'You owe me dinner,'" said McNamara, referring to the former owner of the domain.

McNamara is uniquely skilled to build Spanish language websites. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and Boston Irish, the 28-year-old has a degree in Spanish and international affairs from the University of New Hampshire that included studies in Spain, Costa Rica, and Puerto Rico.

Espanol.com Closes $12 Million First Round of Financing

WAKEFIELD, Mass. -- Espanol.com, the first "large-scale" online retailer for Spanish-speakers worldwide, has received $12 million from several sources. Individual investments were not disclosed, but contributors included Advent International; Grupo Ferre Rangel, publishers of Puerto Rico's El Nuevo Dia; Advent-Morro Equity Partners; partners of the advisory firm Violy Byorum; Masthead Venture Partners LLC; Cornerstone Equities LLC; and Beacon Investment LLC.

Posted By: GustavoMuy buena historia Corso, tomo nota...CibéricaInternet en Español

Posted By: Corso

Afiliodes.com ("affiliates" in Spanish)

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Interesante historia, Dominero.:: el roce hace el dominio ::

ANDREW SNOW
Founder
Mr. Snow, a New York attorney and MBA, has an enviable record of taking Internet marketing to the next level. As founder of Globabel.com, he helped expand world wide Internet usage by promoting technology that allows the utilization of Non-Roman scripts in the Internet Domain Naming System. (DNS)

Posted By: elcheverevoy a tener que buscar a rufi aqui en venezuela y entrevistarlo

Te gane de mano hace tiempo

Posted By: DomoCasiSapiens...creo ya lso habitos estan formados...