MAS o Menos

In April, I celebrated 10 years of my coffee site INeedCoffee.com.  For some reason I thought that my second site DigitalColony.com had a September birthday.  I was wrong.  After digging through old backup discs, I have uncovered that it went live in May 1999.  Happy belated birthday!

Digital Colony logo from 1999

Last year I stopped adding new content (other than labs) so I could focus on the CoffeeHero project.  Also, I hate Blogger and need to revamp the site with a better content management system.  That project will have to wait until next year.

My business card from 2000 with the “no longer accurate” phone number smudged out.

I’ve always loved the name Digital Colony.  Other people seem to like it too.  In the past decade, I’ve seen several companies launch (and fail) using the name Digital Colony.  I own the dot-com.  I also have the user-name digitalcolony for GMail, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, Facebook, MySpace, Blip and 10 more that I can’t think of at this moment.  Despite all this, new companies still launch (and fail) using the DigitalColony name.  Can’t they think of an original name?  Another one just launched this year.  I’ve outlasted them all.  I’ll outlast this one too.  The DigitalColony.com domain is registered through 2018.

The Digital Colony Scfi-Fi retro logo from 2004-2007.

Where did the name come from?  I found these sentences which I wrote back in 2000 that explain.

I named the company Digital Colony because in many ways the Internet today is a lot like colony. When a colony is setup there is plenty of work to do. Digital Colony is here to get some of that work done and help the smaller businesses accomplish their web goals.

That still rings true, except for the focus being on smaller businesses.  I get more enjoyment when I am my own client.

Tags: digitalcolony, history