Monthly Archives: March 2011

Wed 16th March 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Bill Clinton Addresses ICANN Conference - Clinton gets standing ovation after address to ICANN community. I just finished watching Bill Clinton give a keynote address at the ICANN meeting in San Francisco. I’ve never seen him speak in person before, and it was cool to be only 20 feet away. I get the distinct feeling that he could talk gibberish up there and we’d still all be wowed. But a (one of his) messages about the differences between the haves and the have-nots really resonated. It’s something ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Overheard during ICANN Meeting in San Francisco - Latest rumors and thoughts from ICANN meeting. The third “official” day of the ICANN meeting in San Francisco has hit its midway point. The big show is later this evening as President Bill Clinton takes the stage. Unfortunately the venue won’t accommodate everyone to view the speech, so attendees will need to get there early to see it in person. Here is a bit of what I’m hearing and observing at the conference: 1. I’m hearing whispers that the board may ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
For New TLDs, a Last 10% is a Hardest - The home stretch is always a long stretch. It’s been a while since I’ve moved, but in the late 90s/early 00s I moved from dorm to dorm to several apartments. There’s one thing (other than a sore back) that I remember from all of these moves: the last 10% is the hardest. Just when I thought I was 90% done moving my stuff, I’d find that the last 10% remaining in my apartment was actually a lot more than I thought. Maybe I left some of the difficult stuff for ... read more ...
Tue 15th March 2011
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Afternic Sells Over $700K In Domains Led By Telomere.org For $25K, AN LLL.ORG & A LLLL.com - Afternic.com just released its reportable sales for the week ending March 13th, 2011. In all Afternic.com rang up over $700,000 in domain name sales. The highest selling domain was Telomere.org for  $24,900.00. Making this purchase even stranger is that telomere.com appears to be a parked page with no traffic So no I have no idea what is up with that sale. Next was a 3 letter .org; Sch.org which sold for $25,000 followed closely by another in a long string of LLLL.com that Afternic seems to sell ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
XXXbook.com Sells For $100K On Sedo.com - Sedo.com is showing the domain name XXXbook.com just sold for $100,000. It looks like the domain has minimal traffic according to Alexa and Compete and is being redirected to XXXmatch.com Currently the site calls itself the “Facebook of Sex”. That’s an issue with Facebook already taking legal action against other sites that start in the word “Face” or end in the word “Book”. Its a very nice price for the domain and hopefully the buyer will be careful not to do anything to jeopardize ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
RIGHT OF THE DOT.com, My Take On The New gTLD’s: The Next 25 Years & How You Can Profit - As many as you have heard, Monte Cahn the founder of Moniker.com and most recently an Exec with Oversee.net,  has joining myself,  in a new venture called RIGHT OF THE DOT. RIGHT OF THE DOT can be broadly defined as a consulting company which advises registries on how best to roll out their extensions, including marketing and selling of domains; increase the number of registration of domains; identifying and positioning their premium inventory into the market through various channels, getting ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Would You Pay $100K For 1 Million Visitors? Internships.com Did It On Twitter - According to TechCrunch.com one company just parlayed $100K on Twitter into 1 Million Visitors in one week. “Internships.com who paid at least 100K for the Ad.ly campaign… saw 1,035,021 unique visitors (almost two uniques per link click) as a result of the tweets and the subsequent shares and media attention.” “Between the campaign’s run of 1:03pm PST on Monday March 7th and midnight on Friday March 11th, the original bit.ly link received over 475,375 clicks and over 82,148 people applied ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Verizon Sues Above.com and Serves it During DOMAINfest - Company sued over trademark domain names; served during DOMAINfest. Verizon has filed a federal lawsuit against Above.com, parent company Trellian, and some of the company’s key employees (pdf). Trellian offers a number of keyword and SEO tools. Above.com is best known to the domain name industry for split testing parked domain traffic. It also has an ICANN-accredited domain registrar. The suit alleges that the defendants use a number of false identities to traffic ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
All.biz Sells for $61,750 - .Biz domain name appears to have sold for big bucks. Yes, I’m scratching my head too. Sedo’s recent domain sales thread shows all.biz selling for a whopping $61,750. I checked the whois history and it appears the domain name just changed ownership, although it’s now protected by a whois proxy service. The buyer appears to be all-biz.info, a directory of “Enterprises, goods and service from whole the world”. I think this might be the highest reported .biz ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
I’m Baffled By These Google Domain Registrations - I track domain name registration by Google, and sometimes I catch on to things before they happen. But some recent registrations by Google have me baffled. Take a look and let me know if you have any insight. GoogleAntarctica.com – I suppose if you’re going to be global you have to cater to all seven continents. GoogleEscrow.com – Google to compete with Escrow.com? Doubt it. It was registered by someone else previously so this may have been a trademark grab. ... read more ...
Mon 14th March 2011
Written by The Domains in EN
Twitter By The Numbers An Inside Look: 1 Billion Tweets a Week - Twitter in celebration of its 3rd anniversary just released some extremely interesting internal numbers on its blog today. 3 years, 2 months and 1 day. The time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet. 1 week. The time it now takes for users to send a billion Tweets. 50 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, one year ago. 140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, in the last month. 177 million. Tweets sent on March 11, 2011. 456. Tweets per second ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
From ICANN Welcome Meeting: Dept Of Commerce Rips ICANN Again, This Time In Person - The welcome or opening session from the ICANN session just closed with the only notable highlight being the speech by Larry Strickling, who is the Assistant for Communication responsible for Internet Governance and other Internet policy matters at the Department of Commerce. Mr. Strickling has ripped ICANN in open letters sent to it in the past in his capacity of representing the US Department of Commerce. But today Mr. Strickling while backing the concept of ICANN made it clear that the Obama administration ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Beckstrom On When New gTLD Will Get Approved: “Your Guess Is As Good As Mine” - In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle tonight, the CEO of ICANN Rod Beckstrom when asked when the new gTLD program will be approved by ICANN answered: “The earliest time this program could be approved is sometime following the March meeting, and the latest it’s approved, “is your guess is as good as mine” I can’t speak for all involved in the ICANN process but when the head of the organization says the new extensions maybe approved anytime from today until “your guess is ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Reminder: .Org & .Biz Fees To Rise On Apr 1: Save Some Money & Renew Now - This is no April’s fools joke. The wholesale price of .Org and .Biz registrations and renewals will increase in April 1, 2011, so you might want to renew any of your domains now at the lower price. On April 1 the price of a .Org registration or reneal at the wholesale level will go from $6.75 to $7.21. The price of a .Biz registration or renewal will increase from $6.85 to $7.30. Once again these are wholesale prices. What you will pay is determined by your registrar, who may just pass the increase ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Fixed Income Domains Were Too Good to Be True - The old saying applies to domain names as well. There’s an interesting thread developing at DNForum right now about “Fixed Income Domains” that were offered in the Big Ticket Domains email newsletter. Big Ticket Domains is a domain brokerage with a frequent newsletter run by Kevin Leto. In December 2009 the newsletter started touting a new option — “Fixed Income Domains”. The idea was that you would buy a domain name for a fixed price and then Kevin would ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Afternic Adds 12 European Domain Registrars to Premium Promotion - Domain sales listing network expands with European domain name registrars. Afternic has signed a deal with three European companies to join the Afternic’s Premium Listing program. The three companies collectively own 12 domain registrars. The domain name registrars will use Afternic’s instant transfer technology. This enables customers to purchase domain names through the typical domain registration process and get the domain names instantly. The three companies ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
DNCruise Heads to Grand Cayman in 2011 - Second domainer cruise stops off in Grand Cayman for a visit with Frank Schilling. “Chef” Patrick Ruddell just announced details for the second ever DNCruise. The domain conference on a boat will set sail September 5 from Tampa Bay for five days. First stop is Grand Cayman, where attendees will hang out for a day with domain investor Frank Schilling. The group will have a 2-3 hour snorkeling adventure and then enjoy lunch with Schilling. Interior cabins start ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
On Tap This Week: SWSW and ICANN San Francisco - For up-to-date coverage follow DNW on twitter. It’s going to be a busy week for me as I attempt to cover two events. I won’t be able to blog about everything, so to get the best updates please follow me on twitter @DomainNameWire. Monday I’m heading downtown here in Austin for SXSW Interactive. I plan to stop by the Mashable SXSWi House, sponsored in part by VeriSign. During the day I’ll try to track down all of the promotions .co is doing, which I understand ... read more ...
Sun 13th March 2011
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Domainers: So You’re At ICANN, Now What? Here is What You Should Attend - So if you trekked near or far  to San Fransisco for the ICANN meeting, especially if you haven’t attended one before, you may not know what sessions to attend or what to do. Although this is only my 3rd meeting and I’m no expert, I have some suggestions of what sessions you may want to attend this week if your here. If your note in SF for the meeting many of these sessions will have an audio feed and most have a live transcript feed so you can check them out from home. The full schedule for ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Ask Bill Clinton a Question during ICANN San Francisco - (Sort of) ask a question of President Bill Clinton at this week’s ICANN meeting. Heading to ICANN’s meeting in San Francisco this week? You can ask a question of former President Bill Clinton immediately following his keynote speech Wednesday night. …but it will be moderated. ICANN is accepting question submissions until Tuesday morning. It will then choose questions from the submissions that ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom will ask Clinton on stage after his keynote. ... read more ...
Sat 12th March 2011
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Despite Comments From Domain RoundTable, Trademark Infringing Domains Are Not OK - As ICANN gathers this week for its meeting in San Francisco, the major issue will be once again be trademarks. Trademarks are the hot topic of discussion because of the new gTLD’s and the Government Advisory Council (GAC), which at the urging of trademark groups want additional protections for trademark holders, including the Uniform Rapid Suspension which will be a shorter quicker and less expensive method than UDRP to take domains away, and we all know how many horrible UDRP decision there are. With ... read more ...
Fri 11th March 2011
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
ICANN Is Coming To Toronto in 2012 - ICANN just announced that its October meeting for 2012 will be held in Toronto Canada. The meeting will be held October 14-19, 2012 at the Westin Harbour Castle Hotel. The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), which runs the .CA ccTLD will host the event. Hopefully they will still not be debating whether to approve .XXX or the new gTLD program by that meeting. Google+Michael Berkens ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
UnitedDomains.com Starts Taking Free Pre-Reservations For new gTLD Domains - Pool.com has been taking pre-reservations for domain names for anticipated new gTLD extensions for well over a year. Now another registrar, UnitedDomains.com started yesterday to accept the pre-reservations for some of  the anticipated new gTLD extensions including .gay, .hotels, .nyc, .berlin, .eco, .sfo and .film. UnitedDomains.com has received almost 5,000 reservations as of time of publication. There is no charge for the pre-registrations but of course no guarantee that these extensions will ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
UPDATED: Oversee.net Founder Lawrence Ng, Caught Up In Tokyo Earthquake - According to his Facebook page, the co-founder of Oversee.net, Lawrence Ng was in Tokyo when the 8.9 earthquake struck Japan overnight. “wow…I am sitting through a really big earthquake in Tokyo!!!” Ng wrote around 1 AM EST. In another post an hour later after many well wisher comments, Mr. Ng wrote: “Thanks everyone…I’m safe…for now… It felt like a 3-4 minute shake. All the locals here are saying it’s the biggest they’ve every felt. Waiting to see the tsunami aftermath. ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
BREAKING NEWS: A TSUNAMI Is Heading To San Francisco - An 8.8 earthquake hit overnight in Japan causing Tsunami warnings to go up in Hawaii and along the west coast of the United States including San Francisco. According to the New York Times: “Waves were projected to arrive at the Northern California coast at about 7:15 a.m. local time, and hit the San Francisco Bay Area at about 8 a.m., the National Weather Service said. Surges could reach three to seven feet along the California, Oregon and Washington coasts. Southern California is expected to ... read more ...