I’ve lived in Austin for the past 13 years and counting.
I originally lived in Pflugerville, a suburb just north of Austin, for 4-5 years when I first arrived. However, my wife and I (and our growing family) have called Northwest Austin our home base for the last 9 or so years.
Austin has grown quite a bit over this time and still growing. In fact, many hope that folks will stop moving to Austin to curb soaring real estate prices and reduce the economic constraints of congested traffic, to put it lightly.
Nevertheless, it’s been a fun experience watching Austin burst at its seams in exponential growth.
One of the areas of growth is watching and partaking of the many festivals Austin has birthed over the last decade or more.
There are quite a few festivals that reach both national and global status:
- SXSW.com
- ACLFestival.com
- UrbanMusicFest.com
- AustinReggaeFest.com
- AustinFoodAndWineFestival.com
- OldPecanStreetFestival.com
- and many more…
But even more so intriguing are the number of local festivals that are budding and taking root in the last decade or so.
A few months ago, my family and I visited Austin’s Bubblepalooza and had an awesome time. The weather was perfect and not too hot, and the kids had just enough to do to keep them entertained for hours.
This past weekend was no different, with the exception of 90-plus degree weather, as we attended the 11th Annual Austin Ice Cream Festival (presented by HEB) held just north of Town Lake on the East Side of Austin.
Not knowing what to expect and having another commitment Saturday evening, my family and I voyaged over to the festival just shy of the gates opening at 11am.
Not knowing what to really expect, we opted go early and leave by 1:30 pm so our kiddos could nap. And what a great idea that was!
Starting at 11am and ending at 10pm, the Austin Ice Cream Festival had a day packed with fun, food, music, movies and contests and much more.
We also enjoyed watching the Ice Cream Eating Competitions for Ice Cream Sandwich, Popsicle, and Little Pint.
And of course, we enjoyed all sorts of ice cream samples from a variety of vendors. In fact, one of my favorite vendors that we stopped at multiple times while there was Shaved Ice Island. I love their Summer Lemonade shaved ice!
Also, I loved the fact that they make good use of a decent domain name: ShavedIceIsland.com.
There were a few other domain spotting, but nothing really to write home about. CampGladiator.com manned a tent and was ready to work off all those ice cream calories.
Outside of those two companies, no one else prominently displayed their domain name, which I thought was weird.
Nevertheless, it was good to see the organizers having registered and developed AustinIceCreamFestival.com as a WordPress website.
Although is a good domain name, it would be wise to also defensively register the following domain names (keep others off your digital turf):
In addition, if the organizers wanted a fun way to drive more traffic and interactivity towards the web, they could also register, and develop or redirect the following emoji domains:
Although, I list the ccTLD for Western Somoa (.ws) in the emoji domain examples above, .to and other domain extensions are also viable options.
Emoji domains offer visual brevity in saving character space on long domain names while tapping into potential attendees curiosity to know what they’ll find when visiting such a domain.
For forward-thinking companies quick to embrace technology, using emoji domain’s to market events is certainly and up and coming trend for businesses to consider when differentiating themselves amongst competition.
In closing, we had a great time although we missed late afternoon activities and seeing the movie The Sandlot played on the big screen.
But there’s always next year when the kids are older and can hang a bit longer. 🙂
As a domain investor and business consultant, Alvin actively participates in daily domain auctions. Outside of auctions, he passionately shares his views, opinions, and vision for how businesses should and should not use domain names to generate greater customer growth and revenue.
