Yeah... I'd expect most people who need such service to own their own domains already.
Although if they added the "fill in my ip" button as someone else suggested, it might be useful for connecting to customer machines for debugging. Instead of "go to control panel, look for network connections, ...." etc. it would be just - go to ipq, click ok, give me the result. (also, short name might be easier to say over the phone than ip)
I've had the need on dynamically assigned IP addresses to share files with people when the file too large for email, and I didn't want to take the time to upload it to a server on a slower uplink and then have the recipient download it, taking twice as much time.
Being able to open up an Apache or Nginx server without using a confusingly long hostname (eg 127-0-0-1-dhcp.node01.someispdomain.net) which would be easy to misspell over the phone, to let someone grab whatever they needed directly from me makes this a very optimal service for such a small use.
I can see a group of people working on a webapp building a list of subdomains using this service so that a project lead can instantly see how each developer is working on a problem on their local machines.
This looks similar to Dynamic DNS service from DynDNS.com. This is useful if you would like to have a domain name for your home network, for example, but don't want to purchase a domain name and have to update the IP address whenever the ISP changes it.
The downside I see here is that some (many?) home routers support DynDNS service to automatically update your IP address with DynDNS whenever it changes. I don't know whether home routers can be configured to do the same with IPQuick service.
John works for a hosting company (the awesome Brightbox) so I suspect it's just making public one of the tools they use to assign DNS records to newly provisioned boxes.
I just used it to give an easy-to-remember name to a rackspace cloud server I spun up yesterday. This is a throw-away server I'll likely nuke within a month, but for now I will remember how to get back without needing to memorize the IP address.
