Tag: kevin ham

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News

Reinvent Inc. issues press release on purchase of ThreeWords.me, the web app built by 18-year old Mark Bao

ThreeWords.me

Reinvent Inc. issued a press release on Wednesday, officially announcing the purchase of ThreeWords.me. 

“We are always looking for great ideas to nurture and develop,” said Dr. Kevin Ham, CEO, Reinvent. “ThreeWords.me is a simple application that has the potential to transform the way people express and track sentiment online. We are starting to make gradual improvements to the site with a full relaunch to feature an updated platform that will retain simplicity but boast deeper functionality.”

Though the official press release went out this week, news of the purchase by Reinvent had already been reported by Mashable on January 19th, shortly after Mark Bao, the 18-year-old technology entrepreneur, had put the website up for sale.

Check out the full press release below.

Vancouver, Canada, February 2, 2011 — Reinvent Inc., an emerging business incubator for innovative online start-ups, today announced the acquisition of popular web application, ThreeWords.me (http://threewords.me/). The application launched on December 22, 2010 and has since experienced rapid growth, approaching 5 million visitors and 17 million page views in just over a month.

“We are always looking for great ideas to nurture and develop,” said Dr. Kevin Ham, CEO, Reinvent. “ThreeWords.me is a simple application that has the potential to transform the way people express and track sentiment online. We are starting to make gradual improvements to the site with a full relaunch to feature an updated platform that will retain simplicity but boast deeper functionality.”

ThreeWords.me has been a labor of love and I’m excited to hand it over to the team at Reinvent,” said Mark Bao, 18 year-old creator of ThreeWords.me. “The company has an incredible vision matched by technical expertise. I believe that they will be able to take what I started and create a revolutionary new way for people to express their opinions online.”

Reinvent is an expanding incubation house for strategic, creative and passionate entrepreneurial businesses. The company’s portfolio currently includes socially conscious daily deal site, GoodNews.com and Black Friday resource site, BlackFriday.com. In addition to the incubator projects, Reinvent is also a pioneer of domain names and advertising networks with a massive online global network that currently receives 30 million unique visitors a month. Reinvent’s founder, Kevin Ham has garnered international attention and accolades for building one of the largest domain companies in the world. In 2008, Dr. Ham was the recipient of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in Technology for the Pacific Region.

About Reinvent Inc.
Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, Reinvent Inc., is a global Internet company founded more than ten years ago that specializes in business incubation, direct navigation, online advertising, syndication and domain ownership. The company also recently received the AlwaysOn Global Top 250 Private Companies in 2010 distinction. For more information about Reinvent Inc., visit http://www.reinvent.com/. For more information about GoodNews.com visit http://goodnews.com. For more information on BlackFriday.com visit http://blackfriday.com.

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News

Reinvent’s Group buying site GoodNews.com heads to Edmonton

Good News Edmonton

Kevin Ham and his staff at Reinvent have been staying busy the last couple years developing their network of domain names into independent businesses through their lab.  But the last week has been even busier for Reinvent’s Kevin Ham, who is reported to have purchased ThreeWords.me, the viral web app created by Mark Bao. Now add to that the expansion of Reinvent’s group-buying site GoodNews.com into Edmonton (or #YEG on Twitter, which refers to the airport code for Edmonton International).  

In a message posted to Twitter, the company writes, “We’re super busy in the office today getting prepared for launching @GoodNews_EDM tomorrow!”.

GoodNews.com is a little different than other group buying sites.  The site’s motto has evolved over the past few months into, “Good Deals + Good Businesses + Good Causes = GoodNews.com”.

How does GoodNews do this? 

According to GoodNews.com, “To accomplish this, we’re working with local businesses to put together amazing deals, and then pairing every deal with a meaningful local cause. A portion of the proceeds from each deal purchased goes directly to the cause. Now it’s easy for all of us to donate and contribute to our local community.”

With group buying a hot business in 2011, the competition is fierce.  But GoodNews seems to be making a difference with its first expansion into another major city from Vancouver to Edmonton. 

Owning and operating Vancouver.com has helped GoodNews.com grow in its short time online within Canada.  Now with the site offering daily deals in Edmonton starting tomorrow, it looks to be competing with GroupOn and other major players in the group buying space.  Despite GroupOn having a huge footprint worldwide, one thing the group buying giant might not realize is that Reinvent has a network of over 600,000 category killing domain names at their disposal to market and advertise their business.

Vancouver and Edmonton are just the beginning 

If the number of Twitter and Facebook pages GoodNews has set up is any indication of the company’s plans for expansion, Canada is just the beginning. 

The company has both Twitter and Facebook pages set up for Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, and several other cities within in Canada.  But other pages are also springing up in other countries like Sydney, Australia.

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News

Kevin Ham’s Armageddon.com and Heaven.com undergoing changes

heaven

In May it appeared Kevin Ham’s Gospel Media Network of domain names was taking a backseat to other ventures like GoodNews.com and Vancouver.com, but names within the Gospel Media Network are undergoing changes, the latest makeover to the domain name Heaven.com which now has a landing page that allows visitors to subscribe to be notified when Heaven.com launches.

Armageddon.com currently displays a Apache 2 HTTP test page.

In 2007, Kevin Ham purchased Heaven.com and work of developing out sites Armageddon.com, God.com (and others) in a progressive and integrated manner was said to be taking place in 2008, but instead other sites were launched by Reinvent, such as BlackFriday.com and Vancouver.com.

It looks like this month, big changes are underway for several of the domains within the Gospel Media Network as the registrant records for Armageddon.com changed yesterday and Heaven.com was updated on June 1, 2010.

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News

Kevin Ham has some competition from Vancouver Group-Buying startup, Grooster.com

Grooster
Group Buying websites like GroupOn allow users to find local deals, but offers still aren't available in every city or town. Grooster is currently focusing on Vancouver, with plans to branch out to Calgary before going nation wide in Canada.

Domain Guru turned Developer Kevin Ham who has been launching a number of businesses on his domain names like Vancouver.com and BlackFriday.com, has some competition for his latest group-buying venture, GoodNews.com — and the competition is coming right out his his home city of Vancouver.

The site is Grooster.com started by a Vancouver mother, Lesel Radage, who plans to take on the big players in the Group Buying space.

In an interview that appeared in the Vancouver Sun, Lesel told the reporter about her Group Buying venture:

It’s such an interesting space, the startup costs are relatively low,” said Radage, who started Grooster with her childhood friend and university roommate Trish Mandryk. “Our competitive advantage we think is being local; that is pretty important.”

The Vancouver Sun has also has a funny reference to a parody website called Nopuorg (Groupon spelled Backwards), for those of you tired of the group buying craze.

And if all that consumerism gets a bit much for you, check out Nopuorg, a parody (Groupon spelled backwards) with such tongue-in-cheek offerings as $15 for $30 worth of ballet, with the review: “Some people love The Ballet. They should marry it.”

Will Local Group Buying websites and domain names, trend up?

While Group Buying websites, take on city by city across the country and the world, could local group buying websites dedicated specifically to one local area, be the beginning of another trend?

There are a number of domain names available in this market (for example, VancouverDailyBargains.com), but before you leap in and buy up a bunch of local “Group Buying” related domains as an investment, you will likely be better off if you have a plan for an actual website, since city + groupbuying domains are widely available.

For fun, we registered LocalGroupBuying.com while writing up this story today, one of just a handful of names hand registered here at Fusible in recent months.

Recently, group buying type domain names have been selling in the aftermarket like DailyBargains.com ($10,500) and MassBuy.com ($2,700). HomeRun.com sold for $130,000. Though the name doesn’t ring of group buying, HomeRunDelivers.com which launched a group buying website picked up the name to strengthen its brand.

Surprisingly, there doesn’t appear to be any WordPress themes available yet to help webmasters launch their own group buying websites quickly.

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News

Good News, Get a chance to learn from the best in the Domain Industry, while getting paid

GoodNews.com
If you want to learn from the best in the domain industry, Kevin Ham is one of the top.

The chance to learn from the best in the Domain Industry while getting paid doesn’t come along that often, so imagine if you had the opportunity to work for Kevin Ham while being paid a competitive salary, getting profit sharing and benefits, and working in a really sweet office in downtown Vancouver.

Now on the verge of officially launching his next biggest venture with GoodNews.com (a Group Buying website), Kevin Ham has launched an aggressive hiring campaign seeking a Marketing Director, Lead Designer, Lead Web Developer, QA Analyst, and web developers at all levels.

The Marketing Director, will be part of the Exec team and will report directly into the Chief Operating Officer. Ideal candidates for these jobs should have social media and startup experience, according to the Desired Skills listed.

About Good News

Welcome to GoodNews.com where we believe that social commerce can be done better and with positive impact on our community. GoodNews.com is the new online destination for social commerce utilizing local deals and group discounts with a percentage of proceeds donated to non-profit partner organizations. We have daily deals in Vancouver, BC Canada, and will be expanding rapidly in domestic and international markets. Backed by our parent company, a Top 100 web network that enjoys vast Internet exposure, we are a fun, well-funded and fast-growing organization headquartered in downtown Vancouver merging meaningful giving with commerce and community – now that’s Good News!