Monthly Archives: January 2012

Thu 5th January 2012
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Ray Ozzie is $33,000 Cocomo.com buyer - Mystery domain buyer is creator of Lotus Notes. I’ve been trying to figure out who bought Cocomo.com ever since Sedo brokered it back in October for $33,000. It appears we now have the answer. Lotus Notes creator and former Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie is working on a new startup called…Cocomo. And he’s finally put a little something up on Cocomo.com. It’s been hard to track down who was behind the domain name because of an originally false ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Go Daddy Sells 39k aftermarket domains final month including Honest.com - Honest.com highlights strong month for GoDaddy’s aftermarket platform. GoDaddy’s monthly “Domain Market Report” is out, and the company reports selling 38,659 domain names last month through its domain aftermarket platform. The top sale was for Honest.com at over $100,000. The seller was Anything.com. Other notable sales include: FirstAvenue.com $25,000 CoolTool.com $18,500 Spacesuits.com $18,000 IndianJewelry.com $16,005 Bizable.com $15,600 (this was on the ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
United Domains gets Punk’d - Members of ICANN community and competing domain registrars find themselves as new United Domains account holders. Someone is having a laugh at United Domains’ expense. Over the past few days an unknown perpetrator has set up roughly 500 empty accounts at domain name registrar United Domains using email addresses of people active in ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee and at various competing domain name registrars. Each of these people received a welcome email ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Social network buys Dudu.com domain name for $1 million - Dudu.com sells for an incredible $1 million. Wow. Social network DUDU has paid a whopping $1 million for the domain name Dudu.com, upgrading its domain name from GoDudu.com. The site “uses unique translation technology to allow its users from around the world to communicate with each other in their native languages”, according to a press release. The deal was brokered by domain name marketplace Sedo and took three months of negotiations. A press release from Sedo ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Google Chrome might have been demoted, though still has a initial ad - Chrome still a top ad and Google.com itself hasn’t been demoted. So Google demoted Google.com/chrome in its web rankings after the pay-to-post fiasco. Or did it? If you search for “browser” in Google right now you probably won’t find Google.com/chrome anywhere on the first page. Except for an ad. The first ad, as a matter of fact. Sure, Google’s Chrome unit probably has to pay out of its budget for the Adwords it buys, but isn’t that playing with house ... read more ...
Wed 4th January 2012
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Moniker.com Falls To Number 11, As FastDomain.com Passes Them - According to RegistrarStats.com,  Moniker.com just fell to the 11th largest domain name registrar being passed by FastDomain.com During 2011 FastDomain.com picked up around 800,000 registrations while Moniker which was the 7th largest registrar at the beginning of 2011. During 2011 Moniker.com lost about 8o0,000 domains under management and sits right over 2 Million domain names. I don’t know much of anything about FastDomain.com, other than they seem to be headquartered in Provo Utah. Moniker.com ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
.CO Internet Recognized as “World Finance 100″ Business Leader - According to a Press Release tonight, .CO Internet S.A.S. the company that operates the .Co Registry was “recognized in the World Finance 100 listing, alongside industry heavyweights 3M, Apple, Facebook, IBM, Google, Microsoft, and others. ” “The World Finance 100 recognizes “the very finest businesses and business leaders over the past year,” focusing on companies and individuals who have outperformed the competition, made great strides in innovative techniques, and helped to redefine ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Overstock Launches O.co Travel & Picks Priceline To Run It - While many domainers have written off O.co, it appears Overstock.com has not. According to a press release issued yesterday, Overstock has just selected the Priceline Partner Network, a unit of priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN), to power Overstock’s new travel website, called O.co Travel. “”O.co Travel customers will have access to a robust collection of travel services from the Priceline Partner Network, including: Priceline’s Name Your Own Price® travel services that can deliver savings of ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Yahoo Names PayPal President Scott Thompson As Its New CEO - Today Yahoo announced that PayPal President Scott Thompson is its new CEO and will start on Monday. In hiring Thompson Yahoo gets someone who has never ran an online media company or an online advertising company or really anything that Yahoo does (see below for his work history) “Scott brings to Yahoo a proven record of building on a solid foundation of existing assets and resources to reignite innovation and drive growth, precisely the formula we need at Yahoo,” said Chairman Roy Bostock said ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
US Department Of Commerce: We May Look At The New gTLD Program Once Application Period Is Closed - In a letter tonight sent by Larry Strickling of the US Department of Commerce to the ICANN chairman Steve Crocker,  the Commerce Department says its going to examine the new gTLD program after the application period closes and ICANN discloses the list of applicants on May 1st. Speaking about the new gTLD program Mr. Strickling writes: “We have learned that there is tremendous concern about the specifics of the program that may lead to a number of unintended and unforeseen consequences that might ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Braden Pollock joins ScienceFiction.com as trade explodes - ScienceFiction.com tops 1 million monthly pageviews and reshuffles its ownership. Domain name investor Braden Pollock is now part owner of ScienceFiction.com, LLC, joining Patrick Ruddell in the online site that wants to be the “TechCrunch of science fiction”. I caught up with Ruddell today to understand what this means for his business and how the site is doing. Ruddell said that he and Pollock bought out the previous partners, so now both own and equal share ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Simon & Schuster buys rights to Marc Ostrofsky’s Get Rich Click book - Famous domain investor sells his book to major publishing house. Simon Schuster has purchased the rights to Marc Ostrofsky’s Get Rich Click book, sending him on new PR rounds. This means more evangelizing about the domain name industry. Yesterday Ostrofsky was interviewed by Fox Business in a segment called “How to Make Money From Domain Names” (see below). Ostrofsky is perhaps most famous for selling Business.com for $7.5 million (some in equity) and helping ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
CAX “blogger” domain sales newsletter deadline is tomorrow - Lots of extra publicity for your domain name in next week’s newsletter. Francois Carrillo, the guy behind Domaining.com, has a cool promotion going on for his next domain sales newsletter — and it’s a win-win for you. The idea is that he’s going to share the commission from sales in his January 9 newsletter with domain bloggers. So why should this be interesting to you, the non-blogger? Well, if you have a name to sell then this next newsletter is the one ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
DomainTools gets dual trademarks - Domain and web hosting data company gets trademarks for “DomainTools”. Remember when DomainTools was called (the much less desirable) whois.sc? It was shorter, but running a domain name business on a Seychelles ccTLD is no bueno. It changed its name in 2006 to DomainTools and today was awarded two trademarks on its brand. Trademark registration number 4,079,040 covers “DomainTools” for several uses, including “Downloadable computer software for providing ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Zooz uses 1% of the appropriation to buy Zooz.com - A start-up spends 1% of its recent funding round on a domain name and other interesting domain name purchases. It’s time for the weekly roundup of end user domain name purchases. Let’s start with in-app mobile payments startup Zooz. The company snagged $1.5 million in funding in November. How better to use the money than to buy Zooz.com? Actually, it only had to use 1% of the money to buy the domain for $15,000 at Sedo. The company’s domain name to date has ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
2011 Domain Dunce: Vatican’s domain name misunderstanding - The Vatican says someone else bought Vatican.xxx when it was actually reserved by the registry. Catholics + Porn = headlines. Even if the information is wrong. That’s the lesson from recent misinformation from the Vatican about Vatican.xxx and the ensuing news reports about it. Rev. Federico Lombardi commented on Vatican radio, “This domain is not available because it has been acquired by someone else, but not the Vatican,” according to Reuters. The domain ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Sedo ideally executes trade uncover marketing - Major props to Sedo for a cool promotion at AdTech. I’ve written several “Domain Dunce” posts over the past week. Perhaps a “domain accolades” in in order. In November Sedo attended AdTech in New York City and executed what I believe to be a perfect trade show promotion. At the same time it promoted the value of buying a good domain name to thousands of ad industry professionals. The basis of the promotion was a “guess the value” contest. People who ... read more ...
Tue 3rd January 2012
Written by The Domains in EN
Afternic.com Sells $1.3MM In Domain Led By Bizable.com.com For $15K - Afternic.com reported $1,276,373 in domain sales for the week ending January 1st. The publicly reportable sales included in the total above came to $515,789 led by Bizable.com.com at $15,600 followed by CollegeTextbook.com at $15,000. Below is the entire list of publicly reportable sales: Google+Michael Berkens ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Sedo Sells $930K In Domain Names - Sedo Just reported its sales for the week after Christmas that included the New Years Holiday, traditionally a VERY slow week for business In all Sedo reports selling 498 sales totaling over $930,000. Not bad. 33% of total sales were the result of Buy Now listings. Here is the list of all reportable sales     Google+Michael Berkens ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
PCWorld Names New gTLD’s As One Of “Top 5 Major Changes Facing The Internet” - PCWorld.com just published an article entitled the “Top 5 Major Changes Facing The Internet” in 2012. The article starts off saying: “2012 is poised to go down in Internet history as one of the most significant 12-month periods from both a technical and policy perspective since the late 1990′s” Number 3 on the list is the new gTLD program that is opening up shortly on January 12th for applications. As for the new gTLD program PCWorld writes: “”3. Up to 1,000 new top-level domains will ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
1st Strange UDRP Decision Of The Year Holds Against TM Holder On The Domain IntercontinentalKabul.com - It didn’t take long into the new year for a strange UDRP decision to be published and this time its the Trademark Holder that can complain. Inter-Continental Hotels lost a  UDRP on the domain name intercontinentalkabul.com. Even more interesting is the domain name holder didn’t even respond to the UDRP The decision doesn’t make much sense to me but I did find the following comment by the one member panelist to be most interesting: “”Whatever else the Respondent may be it is not a typosquatter; ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
.XXX LandRush/Sunrise Auctions Start Today - The auctions for Sunrise/Land Rush .XXX domain names started today. An auction was scheduled if more than 1 application was submitted either during the Sunrise or Land Rush period for the same .XXX domain. I do not believe ICM, the company that runs the .XXX Registry, has ever released a statement as to how many of domain names are in such auctions. At Worldwide Media, Inc. we are in 96 of these auctions so we should have a pretty good idea of how they are going. The auctions are all handled by Pool.com ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
CADNA Publishes Its Wish List For The New gTLD Program & Its A Long One - The Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA), issued a press release today of its “recommendations” for ICANN, the US Congress and the NTIA for the new gTLD program,  and its a pretty long wish list. Here it is in full: “”””For ICANN: The ICANN Board should determine and announce when the next round of new gTLD applications will occur. A major source of anxiety that businesses feel around the New gTLD Program stems from fear that if they do not acquire their own new gTLD in this first ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
WebSiteMagazine.com Thinks The New gTLD Program Started Last Year, As the Places It on the List of Biggest Web Blunders - WebSiteMagazine.com apparently thinks the new gTLD program launched in 2011, as it put it on its list of the “Biggest Web Blunders of 2011. Website writes: “”Vanity Domains“ “The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) used 2011 to try to push customized and expensive top-level domains (i.e. Volkswagen buying .vw or Wells Fargo buying .bank). “ “This wasn’t a wildly popular idea, partially because they cost companies around $185,000 apiece and partially because ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan can keep the domain - Local hotel can keep its domain name — which may seem trivial given the day-to-day challenges of operating a business in Kabul. Looking for a weekend getaway to Kabul, Afghanistan? Perhaps you’d like to stay at the Intercontinental Kabul, given Intercontinental’s international reputation. But the hotel in Kabul hasn’t been licensed by Intercontinental since Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979. That made for a rather interesting domain name dispute brought ... read more ...