Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

In a recent essay, Paul Graham recommended that startups should own their .com domain name or risk being considered marginal or weak. However, .com domains can be very expensive, especially for younger startups. We used the CB Insights database to analyze the trends in startup domain suffixes over time, such as the rise of the .io suffix.

Traditional .com domains still dominate amongst the more than 25,000 tech companies funded since 2010, with 20,000+ companies choosing a .com domain for a 81% share of all suffixes.

But other domain suffixes are also popular. These include .net and .co domains, which proved to be the most popular, followed by .io which saw nearly 350 funded tech companies choosing that domain. After the top 3, the list is populated mostly by more geography-specific domains such as .de (Germany), .cn (China), and .jp (Japan). Also, .tv has been used by more than 100 companies, including well-known services  Twitch.tv, blip.tv, and acfun.tv. The .ly domain, often considered  a go-to suffix for Silicon Valley startups, isn’t really all that popular....

For companies like Zenefits, the very name unicorn–a venture-backed private company sporting a valuation above $1 billion–carries irony. The term derives from historic rarity: the idea that an eBay or a Google or a Facebook is a kind of magical occurrence, one that single-handedly turns a portfolio into a blockbuster, a venture capitalist into a superstar. Now it’s a downright common benchmark and one that’s invoked with a sense of dread as their numbers grow. We count 140 unicorns globally, up from 75 at the end of last year. Most are U.S. firms, but it seems like a new one is minted every week or two in China or India.

Unicorns, critics say, represent the next risk bubble: so many largely unprofitable firms lacking in rigorous auditing or public disclosures. “We may be nearing the end of a cycle where growth is valued more than profitability,” veteran venture capitalist Bill Gurley of Benchmark tweeted in August. “It could be at an inflection point.” Skeptics point to the mediocre post-IPO performance of former unicorns Pure Storage and Box as evidence that the chickens have come home to roost. Reports of startups with unworkable business models surface with increasing frequency....

Technology is one of main themes of this year’s Cannes Lions. There are numerous sessions on technology and tech companies are highly visible at every event. More importantly, we can easily find technology elements in majority of the winning campaigns- a perfect reflection of what’s happening in the creativity industry.

In the past three days, I attended multiple sessions on how new technologies are impacting all aspects of creativity, and I realized that technology doesn’t only empower us to achieve things that we want to do in new and more efficient ways, but is fundamentally changing the rules of the game....