Juan Diego Calle is a Colombian-American entrepreneur who is best known for being the Founder and formerly CEO of .CO Internet SAS, the company behind the .CO top-level domain extension. In 2014, .CO Internet SAS was acquired by Neustar Inc. for $109 million. Mr. Calle is also involved with several other businesses, including Classic Motors, LLC, a Miami based custom car builder, dotHealth, LLC, which operates the .health domain extension and Building.co, a shared office space for growth stage ventures. In 2001, Mr. Calle co-founded TeRespondo.com, a performance based advertising network in Latin America that was acquired by Yahoo, Inc. in 2005.
Through his private investment firm, Mr. Calle has been an angel investor and advisor in the startup community having backed companies in a variety of industries, including GetAround, LaunchRock, TaskRabbit and 500 Startups, to name a few.
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Personal life
Juan Diego Calle was born on March 11, 1978 in Bogota, Colombia, where he was raised. At the age of 15, he and his family moved to Miami, Florida due to heightened security concerns that existed in Colombia at the time. He graduated from Gulliver Preparatory School in 1996 and then enrolled at the University of Miami to study Industrial Engineering. Mr. Calle dropped out of college to launch TeRespondo, a performance-based advertising network, which he later sold to Yahoo in 2005. He eventually returned to school in 2006, graduating from the Harvard Business School Owner-President Management Program in 2007. Mr. Calle currently lives in Miami with his wife and two children.
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Awards and honors
In 2011, Juan Diego Calle was named "Technology Executive of the Year" by the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce and was also recognized as "Entrepreneur of the Year" by the South Florida Business Journal. In 2013 Mr. Calle was also honored as one of Miami's "Ultimate CEOs" by The South Florida Business Journal.
The .CO domain
The .CO domain is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) assigned to the country of Colombia. Juan Diego Calle became involved with the .CO domain extension in 2006, when the government of Colombia was considering the possibility of liberalizing the country's .CO top-level domain extension. In 2009, Mr. Calle founded .CO Internet SAS, in partnership with Neustar, and presented a formal bid to the Colombian government to manage and operate the .CO ccTLD as part of a public procurement process. In 2009, .CO Internet was awarded a 10-year contract from Colombia to serve as the registry operator of the .CO domain.
Under Juan Diego Calle's leadership, the .CO domain launched to the public in 2010 and today has more than 1.6 million domain names registered by individuals and businesses in over 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Focused on appealing to innovators and entrepreneurs, .CO domains are currently being used by notable companies such as Angel List, 500 Startups, Vine, Le Web, Jelly, Brit + Co. and more. Major brands are also using .CO domains as branded URL shorteners, including American Express (amex.co), Twitter (t.co), Virgin (virg.co), Google (g.co) and Starbucks (sbux.co) and more.
In 2012, .CO was the first top-level domain to launch a Membership Program to provide .CO users with a variety of free perks and benefits designed to help them succeed in building and growing their business or brand online, including things like tickets to networking and educational events, productivity tools and SEO consultations.
Footnotes
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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