After using Namecheap, Godaddy and a number of others I have settled on Gandi because I find their whole attitude great. I really appreciate the way they dont try and upsell... ever. And a while ago they did a promotion where they gave out a free domain for every year you had been a customer. I believe they really do care about their customers and it shows in the way they do business and how they get out of your way until you need them.
My experience with IT education in the UK is genuinely atrocious. During secondary school we made a spreadsheet in Excel and a couple of Word documents. The closest thing to programming was a picture of traffic lights we had to "programmatically" operate. For a single hour lesson. And that is it. We were lucky if our computers even turned on.
I find it very anti-intellectual when people call others snobs for appreciating art. There's nothing snobbish about learning about or appreciating conceptual art. People who don't care enough to learn about something find that they do not undertand it, conclude that it must be phoney or fake or for snobs.
Although I no longer use it, I learned to program with ActionScript. I studied art and had no background in programming, but I found it fun to play with Flash and AS. For example, getting a webcam involved is a couple of lines of code. Now you can do basic motion detection and all kinds of cool stuff. It is a good way to learn programming as everything is included in one package. You can use the Flash GUI to make a simple interface for your application.
Wouldn't that just be a straight up design/branding firm?
It is far easier to pick a random name and match it with some random generic branding, than to be given MySpecificProduct.com and build a brand around that. Branding companies charge a lot of money because it (generally) takes a lot of time, effort and expertise to build good brands.
There is also the fact that it would become a designer-client relationship than a merchant-customer one. Clients get to dictate what they want (to a certain extent), customers see what they are getting before they buy. What if they built a brand around MySpecificProduct.com and you didn't like it?
Your past work is the only tangible evidence of your current ability. A good design with bad copy looks like a template, which may be OK if you design templates, but if you design websites, copy is extremely important.
$100 million is nothing. People regularly win that much on the lottery. It's enough to do amazing things, but not enough to competitively do amazing things.
Unfortunately design is best when it is totalitarian. Good design comes from a core visionary entity, not a committee. This way of working seems incompatible with open source, because developers volunteering their time don't want to be told what to do.