Monthly Archives: January 2013

Wed 16th January 2013
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Rick Santorum lets his domestic destiny (of domain names) expire - Santorum lets a number of domain names expire. [Update: the domain names were renewed shortly after this article was published. To whomever was in charge of renewing this domain: you’re welcome.] Is one time presidential hopeful Rick Santorum letting his political ambitions expire? Santorum is letting a number of future-oriented political domain names expire. The domains appear to have been managed by New Media Communications, Inc., a political marketing company. ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Facebook registers some Graph Search domains, though a accurate domain doesn’t matter - Company gets FacebookGraphSearch.com; GraphSearch.com is for sale. Yesterday Facebook registered domain names for its new Graph Search. Specifically, it picked up FacebookGraphSearch.com and other extensions of the same domain. It did not, however, buy GraphSearch.com. That domain was registered in 2001 and belongs to Visicom Media Inc. It’s listed for sale on Sedo. And people are definitely paying attention. As of right now, the domain shows 32 offers, 132 visitors ... read more ...
Tue 15th January 2013
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Afternic.com Sales Total $970K - Afternic.com just reported its sales for the week of 1/7/12 – 1/13/13. Total domain sales for the week, including confidential sales and sales under $1000, summed to $ 967,502. My favorite of the week is TuitionPaymentPlan.com which sold for $5k Here are the reportable sales: Google+Michael Berkens ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Sedo Transactions Total $1.8 Million Led By Wolfgangs.com during $50K - Sedo.com just issued its weekly report and in all 1,055 transactions took place on Sedo’s marketplace and via SedoMLS, totaling over $1.78m. The domain name Wolfgangs.com led the way selling at $50,00o No it wasn’t Wolfgang Puck who bought the domain nor was it Wolfgangs Steakhouse (who really could have used the domain as well since they don’t even have a .com) The domain is now forwarding to its new owners, wolfgangsvault.com Over 46% of total sales were the result of Buy Now listings. Highlights ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Godaddy.com Girl Danica Patrick Is Back On a Market As She Files For Divorce - According ESPN.com, the public face of Godaddy.com, the worlds largest domain name registrar and Sprint Cup Series driver Danica Patrick filed for divorce on Jan. 3 in the Superior Court of Arizona in Maricopa County  citing “irretrievably broken” from Paul Hospenthal. “My marriage is irretrievably broken and there is no reasonable prospect of reconciliation,” Patrick said in the filing that she signed on Dec. 31. According to the documents, Patrick and Hospenthal entered into a prenuptial ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Shares Of Tucows Are Up Over 20% In Five Days - Shares of Tucows, Inc. (TCX) are on a tear. Shares are currently trading at $1.82 up from $1.55 of just Friday.  So shares are up $.27 in the last three days of trading . Tucows.com concluded it dutch tender offer at $1.5o on January 10, 2012 just 5 days ago and so shares are up over 20% from the close of that tender offer. Tucows.com has been buying back its own shares for the past couple of years and now with less shares in float (approximately 40,000,000) prices have been on the rise. Tucows.com ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
UDRP: Texaco Gets Control Of Texaco.net; Google Gets GoogleMap.com - Quite a few UDRP rulings out this morning in favor of large public companies and some huge brands. The better question to ask is how did these domain not get registered by the companies in the first place and how secondly what took the companies so long to go after them Texaco won its UDRP on the bang on domain Texaco.net. Texaco.net has a most recent original registration date of 2008 but according to domaintools.com has an original registration date of 1997 Google won its UDRP for GoogleMap.com ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Forbes: Spend a Few Thousand Dollars On A Domain, Not A Fortune - Forbes.com just published a piece entitled “Get A Domain Name Without Bankrupting Your Startup” which basically tells its readers its Ok to spend a few thousand of dollars on a domain but there isn’t a need to spend a fortune buying one from Kevin Ham or Frank Schilling: “I’m sure you have all been frustrated at least once by not being able to get the Internet domain name you want for your company. Who owns all of these names, and should you ever buy one for a premium? The simple answer ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
DotGreen Suggests How ICANN Should Use Funds From Contention Auctions - In a letter sent to ICANN by Annalisa Roger the Founder and CEO of DotGreen Community which has applied for  the .GREEN TLD, suggested that  ICANN use the proceeds of an auction of a contention string to go back to the “communities of users” for that particular string. As a backdrop, according to the ICANN Guidebook for new gTLD’s , if applicants for a particular TLD or one found by ICANN to be similarly confusing and placed by ICANN into a contention set, cannot resolve the dispute ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Frito-Lay forwards Doritos.com to the Facebook page - Is forwarding your brand’s .com domain to Facebook a good idea? A reader just notified me that Doritos.com is no longer a standalone web site. Frito-Lay has simply forwarded it to its Facebook page. This appears to have happened a few months ago, so it’s not “news”. But it’s the first I’ve heard of it. I’m not a fan of companies turning over their web presences to Facebook. Or even advertising their Facebook page in a commercial instead of their own ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Verisign gets another obvious for ccTLD registration - Patent covers bulk checking and registration of country code top level domains. Verisign has been granted U.S. patent number 8,356,081 for “Automated Domain Name Registration”. This patent, applied for in 2005, is a divisional patent of 7,000,028, which was filed back in 2000. Which will take you down memory lane… The genesis of this patent is actually idNames, a company founded by Pinky Brand and Marc Ostrofsky. Network Solutions bought the company in 1998. ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Using live discuss to sell domain names - Live support chat can help sell domain names if executed well. Have you ever been on an e-commerce site when a window pops up asking you if you need help? Live chat on e-commerce sites is a critical component of pushing sales and reducing cart abandonment. So I was delighted this morning to see Sedo doing this on their domain listing pages. I had a domain listing on Sedo.com open in my browser for a while. Next thing I know I see a friendly young lady asking if I ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Tracy Morgan goes after TracyMorgan.com domain name - Comedian Tracy Morgan wants control of his domain name. Comedian and 30 Rock star Tracy Morgan has filed a complaint to get the domain name TracyMorgan.com. The UDRP complaint was filed with World Intellectual Property Forum. The case notice was published today. Although the parked page at TracyMorgan.com changes, I’m currently seeing sponsored links for “Tracy Morgan Comedian”, “Alex Baldwin Actor” (Baldwin starred with Morgan on 30 Rock), and “Saturday ... read more ...
Mon 14th January 2013
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Thanks To The TM Lobby Even The Tiny Island Of Vanuatu (.Vu) Is Worried About Cybersquatters - I just read a story about the tiny pacific island nation of Vanuatu which is discussing what shall become of its Top Level Domain name (ccTLD) .vu It was pretty shocking to me how the trademark lobby message of “cybersqautting” has reached to the point where the issue of a .Vu domain name being used to abused trademarks of brands and famous people. Anyone who reads thedomains.com with any regularity knows that we stand against true wholesale cybersquatting, and have advised domainers not to go ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
CIRA: Launches .IDN’s For .CA Domains & Holding Networking Event Tuesday In Montreal - The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA.), the organization that manages the .CA Internet domain, now supports the use of all French characters in .CA domain names, allowing Canadians to register their .CAs correctly in both official languages for the first time”. “Previously, the only characters that could be used in a .CA domain name were the letters a-z, the numbers 0-9 and hyphens.” “When a domain name works with any characters beyond these, it’s called an Internationalized ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
InteLend.com Hits The Market With $20 Million To Lend On Domain Names - Intelend.com is a relatively new company in the domain space and considers itself a digital pawn shop that makes loans just holding domain names as collateral again the loan. Loan are made to either give cash to domain owner or to help domainers with financing in the acquisition of new domain names. I had a chance to speak with Matt Collins last week a principal in InteLend.com about its services. IntelLend.com is  “a digital pawn shop, you bring a domain to us and we look at the domain name and ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Architelos Marks Successful 2nd Year, Hits $2 Million in Sales & Launches NameSentry™ - “Architelos also expanded its footprint internationally by opening up a Canadian office in Toronto, which houses its software development efforts. “Our financial performance and revenue growth is significant, given the fact that the company is self-funded, carries no debt, and was still able to make substantial investments in software development” “In August of 2012, Architelos launched the patent-pending NameSentry domain abuse detection and mitigation service. Within two months, deals ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
6 engaging domain news stories from a weekend - Breach notices, expiring domains, Groupons, and more. I’ll admit it. I don’t like to blog over the weekend. Thankfully, others are here to keep on top of things. Here are six interesting stories from the weekend that you should check out. ICANN Compliance Sends Breach Notices To 10 Registrars – ICANN sends nastygrams to ten registrars that are ignoring ICANN’s audit program. Real Estate Agents Discuss Why They Own RealEstate.com Domain Names – an interesting ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Why we substantially don’t need to worry about cybersquatting on new tip turn domains - The amount of cybersquatting won’t increase much with new top level domains coming to market. One of the biggest worries trademark owners have about new top level domain names is that they’ll have to fight more cybersquatting battles as a result. But this one simple graph from WIPO shows that history tells us not to worry so much about it: This graph shows the breakdown of gTLD UDRP filings at WIPO last year. As you can see, almost all the action is in .com. Now, ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
The best time (and way) to get press for your domain business - I get a lot of pitches to write about domain name companies and their launch, latest products, new features, etc. I have six tips on the best and worst times to get press, and the best way to pitch. 1. Friday is the worst day to put out news about your company (unless you want to bury it). Friday is the slowest weekday for traffic to Domain Name Wire. Once the afternoon comes around it seems that every domain investor is already out relaxing on the beach. 2. Monday ... read more ...
Sun 13th January 2013
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Miamiherald.com Covers.Co Registry: “CO Sets Sights On Changing The Fabric of The Internet” - Miamiherald.com, just covered the .Co registry in a story entitled:  “.CO sets sights on changing ‘the Fabric of the Internet” The 4 page story starts out “For the millions of people who equate the Web with .com, . CO Internet is out to change that mindset.” “The Miami company that manages and markets .co domain names is already making impressive gains — more than 1.4 million in 200 countries have hung their businesses, blogs, personal projects or dreams on a .co virtual shingle. Still, ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Twitter.org; Roomtogo.com Hit With UDRP: GM Wins MyGm.com After Losing MyCadillac.com - A busy sunday morning in the UDRP world with complainants filed by Twitter.org by Twitter.com Rooms to Go over the domain name RoomtoGo.com and a decision handed down this time in favor of General Motors over another “My” domain. Twitter filed its UDRP against the domain name Twitter.org which was registered back in 2005 and according to Screenshot was a parking page as far back as 2006. The page now goes to a “you’re a winner take a short survey page” which maybe more offensive to trademark ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
The New HuntingMoon.com Is Live: What’s New & What’s Not - The new HuntingMoon.com site is now live and running. We reached out to the owners of HuntingMoon.com which is best known for the brokerage, sale and auction of high profile and dollar adult domains to see what’s up with the new version. For one the commission rate has dropped from 15% to 10% in addition there is a lot of social interrogation in the new version. Huntingmoon.com is also holding an adult name auction as part of Internext which ends on February 7th. Here is the full scoop What’s ... read more ...
Fri 11th January 2013
Written by The Domains in EN
Pro Gun Adocate Goes On Buying Spree Of Sentor Domains Starting W/ SenatorFeinstein.com - TheDailyCaller.com published a story on how a Dimitrios Karras, the owner of a firearm parts store in California has registered the domain names of certain Democratic Senators who are supporters of gun control laws starting with  Senator Dianne Feinstein. Yes Mr. Karras registered SenatorFeinstein.com just a week ago on January 4th 2013. “COMING SOON! Senator Feinstein’s Biggest Fan Page,” reads the title of the new pro-gun site senatorfeinstein.com. “It’s funny,” Karras told the Daily ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
UDRP Panel Denied Complaint on Grief.net Citing Pending Litigation - A three member panel UDRP panel denied the UDRP by The Grief Recovery Institute, LLC and The Grief Recovery Institute Educational Foundation, Inc. (“Complainant”), and Grief Recovery Institute on the domain names grief.net and grief-recovery.com This panel citing pending litigation punted on the decision but pointed out that different UDRP panels have decided the issue differently. I do think that is the proper decision and wish it was a universally accepted rule amongst UDRP panelists. Here ... read more ...