For sale: GoDaddy, asking $1 billion or best offer

By Fahmida Y. Rashid September 13, 2010

Founded in 1997, GoDaddy is privately held by ex-Marine Bob Parsons and is well known for its racy advertising, featuring race car driver Danica Patrick and other scantily clad women. As one of the largest domain name registrars around, GoDaddy currently manages more than 43 million domain names. It also sells e-commerce, security, and other add-on services for people to manage their Web presence.

According to the Wall Street Journal, GoDaddy had revenues between $750 million and $800 million in 2009. Some reports claim the company generates revenues of $2.7 million a day.

GoDaddy filed (and withdrew) papers announcing an IPO in 2006, and rumors resurfaced earlier this year that GoDaddy will go public again. On Sept. 2, Parsons announced on his campy video blog that he was considering selling the company.

With this announcement, GoDaddy is seeking bids from private equity firms. Private equity firms like domain name registrars because of the steady and predictable flow of fee-based subscriptions.

However, $1 billion seems a little much for a company that essentially holds domain names and hosts Web sites. Web.com bought much-smaller-competitor Register.com for $135 million earlier this year.

Qatalyst Partners, headed by heavyweight tech banker Frank Quattrone, will shop GoDaddy to interested buyers.
Qatalyst recently advised 3PAR during Dell and HP’s bidding frenzy. With Qatalyst at the helm, Parsons might just get his asking price.

Fahmida Y. Rashid

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Computing

Quest Pro 2: What we know about Meta’s next premium VR headset

From a side view, you can see how glasses can be worn along with a Quest Pro.

While Meta’s Quest Pro is one of the best VR headsets available, it never reached its full potential as a laptop replacement for spatial computing. Meta hasn’t given up on making a work-centric solution, and rumors suggest a Meta Quest Pro 2 is still in development. Here’s what we know so far about Meta's answer to Apple's Vision Pro.
Meta Quest Pro 2 release date speculation
It’s difficult to make a solid prediction on when Meta will launch the Quest Pro 2. Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth made it clear in an Instagram AMA that Meta is continually prototyping new VR headsets to find out what’s possible with current technology. That gives Meta more flexibility than manufacturers that research for years before doing hardware testing.

If Meta is satisfied with the performance of the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 and LG can deliver enough micro-OLED displays, the Quest Pro 2 could arrive as early as this October at Meta Connect 2024.

Computing

Does RAM speed matter for PC performance?

Installing RAM sticks in a motherboard.

RAM is one of the primary components in a PC, and it's important that you have at least a certain amount of RAM depending on what you want to do with your PC. However, there are more things to RAM than just capacity: Frequency and latency are important considerations, too.

The question of whether RAM speed matters is especially important now that we have two generations of RAM available, both DDR4 and DDR5 -- and they have vastly different speeds. The official maximum clock speed for DDR4 was 3200MHz, while DDR5 starts at 4800MHz, an increase of 50%; however, you'll easily find RAM kits reaching above 7000MHz. Although latency significantly went up, from CL14 on most 3200MHz DDR4 kits to CL40 on most 4800MHz DDR5 kits, DDR5 is still found to be faster.

Computing

The 6 best 2-in-1 laptops for drawing in 2024

Portal RTX running on the Surface Laptop Studio 2.

Whether you're a seasoned professional or enjoy drawing as a hobby, investing in a 2-in-1 laptop is a great idea for all sorts of artists. Drawing on a laptop makes it easy to quickly share your creation with others, which is especially useful if you're doing it as a professional–negating the need to upload your pen-and-paper sketch to the computer before sending it to a client. Moreover, working on a laptop lets you undo mistakes, zoom in to better handle small details, and quickly change utensils.

There are a lot of perks to drawing on a 2-in-1 laptop, but not all of them are great for creators. Some have unresponsive displays that can't register all your movements, while others might have a lackluster resolution or color spectrum that turns most images into a muddled mess. Because of that, it can be hard figuring out which laptop is best for your needs. And if you'll be spending a good chunk of change on the laptop, you'll want to make sure you get it right.