I just received an email from Rick Latona announcing that he is raising money for his climb of Mt. Kilimanjaro in March. The money he and his group are raising will be donated to The Water School to support simple, safe, strategic, and sustainable clean water solutions to the developing world. Through their programs, TWS provides clean drinkable water using extremely inexpensive and locally available materials.

There is a fairly large group of people from the domain community who will be making the trip, and the complete list can be found on the Kili2010 website. Rick’s fundraising goal is $19,340, which amounts to $1.00 per foot that he and his group will be climbing.

You can make a donation directly on Rick’s pledge page or you can donate to one of the other climbers. My company just made a pledge to help Rick achieve his goal, and I hope you will think about doing the same.

I’m not writing this post because Rick sent me bottles of wine.  I am writing this post because I think we all have a great opportunity to observe the launch of a new brand on a generic domain name – Vino.com. By following the progress of this company from its infancy, I think we can all learn quite a bit for our own projects.

Over the coming weeks and months, keep your eye on site changes.  Do Google searches to see how rapidly pages get indexed by searching site:vino.com. See how the pages rank for competitive terms like “wine of the month club,” “wine club,” “vino,” and other related search terms.  See how Rick and his team go about building and getting back links for the site by searching for link:vino.com in Yahoo Site Explorer.

You might even consider signing up for the service. For $69/month, you will get some unique wines, but more importantly, you can see what offline marketing efforts Rick and his company are making to promote their brand. As a wine of the month club, the hope is that people won’t cancel their subscriptions, so you can see what they are doing to keep membership active.

It’s not often that we have the chance to follow a start-up, but Rick has given us this opportunity.  As much as its important to follow the success of Vino.com, it will also be great to learn insight about how an entrepreneur builds a business on a great generic domain name. Rick announced that Latona’s has launched a consumer products division, and that is going to be interesting to follow as well.

I recommend these things to follow along as Vino.com grows:

• Join the newsletter
• Test the customer service
• Navigate the site
• See SEM efforts in Google and Bing
• Sign up for the club

My hope is that Rick will share some insight into the site’s growth. It would probably be in his auction company’s best interest to show how an entrepreneur can take a generic domain name and build a business on it.