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I buy a lot of stuff, from gadgets, to clothes, to cars to all kinds of things my fast paced modern lifestyle requires. Throw my wife and family into the mix and there’s a whirlwind of consumption that makes Twister look more like a board game than a blockbuster movie.

With all of this hard earned income being spent, what are we gaining? Allot of stuff, sure, that’s why we’re buying things in the first place, because we need stuff… but I mean what do I gain as a consumer? What power am I acquiring and effectively using to improve my life?

They say the consumer has the ultimate power; they can sway markets and dictate the growth or demise of any business all through how they spend their dollars. Sure, where I choose to spend my money combined with all of the other buyers out there does affect the market, but is that the end of where our power lies?

I personally question whether my power as a consumer ends there. I think that with all of the hard earned income I dispose of on a daily basis I can influence things much more than just through my buying choices. With the advent of the Internet which allows me to interact with others in ways never dreamed of there has to be a better way that I can band with other consumers so that we may influence the market to meet the needs of our specific lives.

Specific life is the key term in that statement, feedback to manufacturers has been around for a while but that isn’t what I’m talking about. Some unnamed feedback form will never give the manufacturer the data they need to cater to my specific needs. I’m talking about something different, a vehicle that will allow me to leverage my buying power to its utmost, and maybe even assist with future purchases down the road.

That to me would be the vehicle that would enable me to fully leverage my true power as a consumer, and we hope to bring that vehicle to the market very, very soon.

As time progresses, pressure builds and we have so much to do with so little time. I can see competitors start to “get it”, I can see users start to demand it, I can see us working toward delivering it, and it's just not happening fast enough. Although I have to say that weirdly enough it's happening much faster than any of us originally anticipated.

We're hoping to have an Alpha launch of a portion of our service by the end of March, and although that may be a little too aggressive we're striving to put ourselves into a position where we can talk more feely and acquire more feedback, since without the feedback how can we design our service to meet our future user's needs. In the interim we plug away, focus on recruiting and building the best combination of contractors and employees we can find, and reveal little pieces of the puzzle as we can.

Speaking of which, I am very proud to be able to publicly announce that my Co-Founder is now in a position to reveal himself. Frank, welcome to the front lines, I look forward to you contributing publicly as much as you have been behind the scenes up to now…

I ended up heading down to the domainfest conference in the Hollywood hills this week, mostly because there are a few aspects to our new startup's business model that tie into the domain monetization market, but also because I knew it would be an opportunity to see all of the great people I've had the pleasure to get to know over my many years in the domain industry now that I’ve headed off on my own into a somewhat different vertical.

There were quite a few interesting sessions over the two days I was in L.A., but the one I found most intriguing was a keynote by Michael Arrington of Techcrunch fame where he touched on a synergistic convergence between what a ton of people are calling the web 2.0 phenomenon and the domain monetization space. Specifically, he cited the examples of what Demand Media is doing with a few of their micro portals, and how the learning from those efforts are fueling the hinted launch of a new Enom parking service that integrates social networking and user generated content sometime this year. Although Enom will more than likely require you use them for monetization in order to leverage this new platform, imagine if a new startup came out that offered something along the same lines which was also able to plug into any monetization provider you wanted? Well, enough hints for one day…

All in all the decision to head down was a big success. I received a ton of positive feedback on the little that could be divulged about our plans as well as lined up potential new partners and future customers for after we launch.