Monthly Archives: September 2011

Tue 20th September 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Amazon.com Company Quidsi Launches YoYo.com - Quidsi follows up Wag.com with YoYo.com. Today Quidsi, which is owned by Amazon.com, launched its latest store: online toy store YoYo.com. The choice of domain name follows Quidsi’s pattern of launching vertical stores on great domain names. It all started with Diapers.com, then moved to Soap.com (toiletries) and Wag.com (pets). YoYo.com launches with over 20,000 toys, video games, books, and collectibles. Similar to its other stores, YoYo offers free 1-2 day delivery ... read more ...
Mon 19th September 2011
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
The New GuideBook Is Out, The New GuideBook Is Out: ICANN Publishes “Final” gTLD Guidebook - Like in the Steve Martin’s Movie the Jerk, where he proclaims the new Phonebook are out, the new Phone book are out;  The new gTLD Guide Book is finally out. Yes ICANN has finally published the “final” gTLD Guidebook. You can download the English version here (pdf) ICANN has made it clear that the Guide Book will be an ongoing process which will be amended on the go, will be a work in progress and may never be “final” “The Applicant Guidebook is intended to be an inclusive guide and ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
So What Happens To Type In Traffic When Your PC Looks Like Your Smart Phone: Windows 8 Is Coming - Windows 8 is scheduled for launch sometime in late 2012 but last week a bunch of developers got their hands on a beta version and from most accounts its going to be a game changer, not only for Microsoft but in the way people use PC to navigate the Internet. Your PC (for those 90% of the people not using a Mac) is going to operate a lot more like your smart phone than your current machine. Touch Screens and Apps will be at the forefront and according to USA Today, “the mouse and keyboard, at least ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
ICANN Releases New TLD Guidebook - ICANN releases yet another — but not necessarily final — applicant guidebook for new gTLDs. As I promised in a post yesterday, ICANN has released another version of the new top level domain name guidebook today. Although many will look at this is the final guidelines, there’s still room for changes. ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom writes: ICANN will provide further refinements to the Guidebook as warranted. In addition, information will be given on the process for providing ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Breaking: NBC Transfers Women.com to Done! Ventures in Lawsuit Settlement - Busted seven figure domain name deal comes to resolution. It looks like the end result of a legal battle over Women.com has ended with the transfer of the domain name to Done! Ventures. Done! Ventures thought it had a deal to purchase Women.com and Women.net from NBC Universal for $1 million last year. But then NBC allegedly backed out when its then President CEO Jeff Zucker apparently vetoed the deal. Done sued NBC to get it to go through with the sale. It later ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Domain Name Drives 78% of FreeConferenceCall.com Signups - Descriptive domain name drives 78% of business for FreeConferenceCall.com. Most Domain Name Wire readers understand the power of a descriptive domain name. Here’s more proof: the founder of FreeConferenceCall.com says his domain name drives 78% of his signups. David Erickson explained this to the L.A. times: With not much cash to start his business, let alone buy publicity, Erickson knew the service’s name had to be perfect. At 3 a.m. Oct. 26, 2001, after hours ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Lots of Bids With One Day to Go in Moniker Auction - Moniker auction attracting lots of bids with one more day left. 28 domain names in Moniker’s DOMAINfest Meet-Up NYC auction have received bids with still one day to go, although only 14 domain names have met their reserves. The auction is taking place on SnapNames. The top domain to meet its reserve so far is Teeb.com at $5,250 with 4 bidders. Hardcore.com has a bid of $125,000 but it has a reserve of up to $250,000. Some of the domains that have met their reserves ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Panelist Calls Clause in Name.com Registration Agreement “Extraordinary” - Panelist finds it odd that Name.com makes domain registrant responsible for its own “coming soon” pages. UDRP panelist Warwick A. Rothnie has called a clause in Name.com’s registration agreement related to parked pages an “extraordinary arrangement”. The clause basically says that Name.com will put up ads on your recently registered domain name but that the registrant is responsible for making sure the ads don’t violate third party intellectual property ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Oversee.net Discusses Layoffs and Its Future - Company co-president explains Oversee.net’s business shift. News of Oversee.net’s layoffs didn’t come as a huge surprise last week. This sort of shuffling the deck is common when there’s turnover at the top. I caught up with Scott Morrow, co-President of Oversee.net, to find out what’s going on at the company. Morrow told me that Oversee.net now has three strategic focus areas. First, it will leverage its core assets of DomainSponsor and DOMAINfest Global. ... read more ...
Sun 18th September 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
ICANN To Release New TLD Applicant Guidebook and Site on Monday - Monday is a big day for new top level domain names as latest applicant guidebook is released. ICANN will release the next (final?) applicant guidebook for new top level domain names as well as a new micro site dedicated to the new top level domain name program tomorrow. The site will be hosted at newgtlds.icann.org. At first the site will include information for people and entities interested in applying for new top level domain names, including links to the guidebook ... read more ...
Sat 17th September 2011
Written by The Domains in EN
MikeVick.com & MichaelVick.com Expires & Is Dropping Sunday, The Same Day Vick Returns To Atlanta - The domain names MichaelVick.com and MikeVick.com are both dropping tomorrow,  Sunday September 18th, the same day Michael Vick is returning to Atlanta as the starting quarterback of the Eagles. Both domain names were registered on the same day in 1999. In 1999 Michael Vick finished 3rd in the Heisman Trophy voting and also won the Archie Griffin Award. MichaelVick.com was most recently registered to a Marcus Vick, the name of Michael Vick’s brother. The administrative contact of MichaelVick.com ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Google Names Its News Reader To Compete With Flipboard & AOL “Propeller”: Problem is AOL Owns Propeller.com & Has the Own NewsReader Called Editions.com - According to various reports yesterday here and here, Google is working on launching a social and news reader app to compete with the very popular Flipboard App as well as Facebook, and is going to call it Propeller. AOL is the owner of Propeller.com AOL also has its own similar App already that competes with the leader Flipboard. The name of AOL apps is Editions by AOL Editions.com is owned by AOL, which unlike Google seems to understand that when you name an App it’s pretty important to own the ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Soci.al Domain Hack Sells for $50,000 - Soci.al sells to Mark Monitor client. The domain name hack Soci.al has sold for $50,000 according to host.al, which provided a screenshot of the Escrow.com transaction to Domain Name Wire as proof. The Albania country code domain name now sits on brand protection company Mark Monitor’s name servers, although it does not resolve. Moniker sold Social.com for $2.6 million in June to an undisclosed buyer. The domain name may now belong to Salesforce.com, although a ... read more ...
Fri 16th September 2011
Written by The Domains in EN
SnapNames.com Changes Backorder Dead Line From Noon to 1:45EST For Dropping Domains - I just noticed that SnapNames.com, which always had a deadline of noon EST to backorder any domain names dropping that day, has now moved it to 1:45 EST. I think the changes occurred within the last couple of days and I haven’t seen any announcement from the company on it. So for anyone chasing drop domain names, you now have a little more time to get you domains placed for that day. The deadline for NameJet.com still seems to be noon EST for domain names dropping that day. As you probably know ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
IP Property Of Borders, Including Borders.com Sells for $15.8 Million & Barnes & Noble Among Purchasers -  A couple of weeks ago we told you that the IP assets of Borders would be shortly sold off at a Bankruptcy Court auction. According to Detroit News.com, Barnes Noble were among the bidders that bought the intellectual property Borders Group Inc. bookstore chain for $15.8 million in a bankruptcy auction including the domain name Borders.com held yesterday. The company handling the auction, “Hilco Streambank did not identify which parts of Borders that Barnes Noble purchased, but the liquidators ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Bloomberg/BusinessWeek.com: TeaParty.com Maybe The Next Million Dollar Domain Sale - Bloomberg/BusinessWeek ran an interesting  about the domain name TeaParty.com. As you probably know there has been a much  hotter topic in the last couple of years tin American politics than the Tea Party. Yet the domain belongs to a band out of Canada which registered it in 1993, and now after fielding offers for well over a year on the domain is considering cashing out of one of the hottest topics in America, the Tea Party. The domain according to compete is gets around 4,000 visitors a month ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Domain Registrars and Web Hosts Sued Over Email Patent - Big registrars find themselves defendants in patent lawsuit. GoDaddy, Network Solutions, and Rackspace are among the defendants names in a new patent lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division. The suit (pdf) was filed by MXGO Technologies Inc, a company who’s only hits on Google involve patents and lawsuits. The Marshall court is a popular court for filing patent lawsuits. MXGO is the assignee of United States Patent ... read more ...
Thu 15th September 2011
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Where In The World Has Berkens Been? Playing a $10 Million Dollar + Hand of Poker On The New gTLD’s - You may have notice a couple of days of light postings from theDomains.com, which may lead you to ask where did Berkens go? Although due to a ton of NDA’s I can’t reveal the extension, or the parties I have been involved in negotiations over the last two day, but it looks like the new gTLD race, is going to  be on some levels, just a high stakes poker game. No more. No less. Instead of playing for $100 a hand or a pot of thousands of dollars, the stakes are in the tens of millions for highly ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
For Years We Have Been Telling You Every Word Is Trademarked & Now Even The ‘F” Word Is - If you have been a frequent reader of thedomains.com, you know we have been looking at the trademark system warning that every word, two letter, three letter and every saying your grandma taught you is trademarked somewhere in the world. So we were not surprised to learn the even the “f” word has now been granted trademark protection. In this case the trademark was granted in Germany for the word  ” Ficken”  which translated into F**K or F**king in English. Spiegel.de is reporting that ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Did Michael Arrington Register UnpaidBlogger.com 2 Days Before Wearing His Infamous Shirt? - Domain name registered on September 10, just two days before Arrington’s TechCrunch Disrupt appearance. When TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Monday he sported a now much-talked about t-shirt. Arrington, who just left TechCrunch because of potential conflicts of interest with his CrunchFund, wore a shirt that read “unpaid blogger”. These days anything that grabs news attention like Arrington’s shirt will be registered ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Go Daddy Responds Over Compromised Hosting Accounts - Redirects inserted into .htaccess files of 445 hosting accounts. Internet security company Securi wrote a blog post yesterday noting that a number of web sites hosted with Go Daddy’s had been compromised. According to Securi, the .htaccess file on these sites had compromised and a conditional redirect was inserted. Site visitors coming from a set of pre-determined search engines were automatically forwarded to a malware site. I reached out to Go Daddy to find out ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Oversee.net Lays Off 13% of Staff - Company lays off staff after executive transitions Los Angeles, CA domain name company Oversee.net has fired 13% of its workforce. The company just announced the layoffs with the following statement: As part of its plan to address new growth opportunities, Oversee.net has realigned its work force resulting in a staff reduction of 13 percent. These moves, along with pending new hires, will allow the company to leverage core assets to innovate more effectively, improve ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
PIR Survey Says .Org Trusted, But Let’s Look during a Numbers - .Org is more trusted by the public. Public Interest Registry released the results of a 1,000 person survey today about trust and top level domain names. Not surprisingly, .org was named the “most “trusted” site for information” more often than other top level domain names. If a company or organization were to publish identical information across .org, .com, .info, and .net, 41% named .org as most trusted and 22% .com. 25% said they trust all domains equally. That ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
58 Tickets Remain for Next Month’s TRAFFIC Conference - Domainers to converge in Florida next month. Rick Schwartz sent out an email this morning announcing that only 58 tickets remain for the TRAFFIC conference in Fort Lauderdale next month. The conference takes place October 16-19 at the Ritz-Carlton. Single tickets are currently available for $1,795. The hotel is sold out on Tuesday night and limited rooms are available for the other nights of the conference. I’m not surprised by the demand for tickets given that ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Verizon Gets CitiBank Trademark Domain? - Cut and past error shows Verizon Trademark Services winning CityCard.com UDRP. We’ve seen a number of UDRP decisions that fall victim to cut-and-paste mistakes. The latest comes courtesy of a National Arbitration Forum panelist who copied the header from his previous UDRP case into the new one. The new case is Citigroup Inc. v. Yongki over CityCard.com. Citigroup won the case, but you would know it from the header. The header says the case was Verizon Trademark ... read more ...