Author Archives: DomainNameWire

About DomainNameWire

Domain Name Wire is a blog that deals with the domain name sector. The blog covers a range of domain related topics ranging from issues concerning expiring domains, monetization, domain registries and registrars, ICANN, policy, law etc. The blog began in March, 2005, after Mr. Allemann had dropped out of meetings to become involved in domain portfolio company, iREIT. The project began as a hobby to keep him involved in the domaining business, and then became his full-time business.

Thu 20th September 2012
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Salesforce finally puts Work.com to work - Salesforce is now using work.com, a domain name it bought earlier this year. Earlier this year I discovered that Salesforce had purchased Work.com. It has now put the domain name to work. The company is using the domain name for Rypple, a “social performance” platform it acquired last year. Salesforce has a habit of buying companies and then relaunching them on great domain names. For example Jigsaw.com, which was already a good domain name, is now Data.com. It ... read more ...
Wed 19th September 2012
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Afternic auction on SnapNames ends tomorrow - Auction features 176 domain names. Afternic’s first auction on SnapNames earlier this year was a big success. It focused light on some good domain names such as Hipsters.com. That domain sold for $28,500 (which I suspect is a lot more than the original fixed asking price!). The two companies have teamed up again for an 176 domain auction ending Thursday. At the time of writing nine domains have bids and five have hit their reserves. The current top domain is PoolandPatio.com, ... read more ...
 
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Moniker usurpation auction submissions for DOMAINfest 2013 - Moniker and SnapNames will run an auction in conjunction with DOMAINfest next year. It looks like Moniker and SnapNames will hold an auction in conjunction with Oversee.net’s DOMAINfest Global 2013 conference next year. SnapNames.com has a submission form for the auction. It’s currently listed as an online auction. Both Moniker and SnapNames were owned by Oversee.net until their sale earlier this year to KeyDrive. They provided the auction platform at DOMAINfest ... read more ...
 
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What domains a Kickstarter success, Christie’s and University of Oklahoma bought this week - Company that raised $70k on Kickstart buys its company domain name. This week’s end user domain name sales report includes some big names. Auction house Christie’s bought an Andy Warhol domain name, University of Oklahoma bought a four letter acronym, and a Kickstart success story bought its company domain name. Afternic Auction house Christie’s bought WarholArt.com for $6,457. It is selling some of Warhol’s works. MasterGuides.com was purchased by someone ... read more ...
 
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DOMAINfest set for Feb 5-8, 2013 - Dates finally set for big domain industry conference. Oversee.net has set the dates for its annual DOMAINfest Global conference. Next year’s shindig will take place February 5-8. The show will return to the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica. The entire hotel will be reserved for DOMAINfest guests. Moniker will be holding an auction in conjunction with the event. DOMAINfest is typically the domain investing community’s largest event in terms of attendance. ... read more ...
Tue 18th September 2012
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Two some-more .com permit plates - X13.com from Colorado and ATU2COM from Washington state. I’ve previously written about two .com license plates in Texas, one of which is mine. A couple readers sent in their own license plates from different states. First is X13.com from Scott Galvin in Colorado. Colorado, like Texas, allows you to get a dot on your license plate. But Galvin has a funny story about that. He says he was pulled over in Boulder and given grief for altering his license plate, but ... read more ...
 
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YouGov research: many UK businesses wakeful of new tip turn domains? - Really? .uk registry Nominet recently worked with YouGov to poll businesses in the UK about new top level domain names. The press release headline read “British businesses largely unprepared for new gTLDs”. The headline number: 41% of British businesses surveyed are currently unaware of the new domains. Wait a minute. That means close to 60% of businesses surveyed are aware of new top level domain names coming online. That’s a staggeringly high number to me. ... read more ...
 
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Go Daddy gets obvious for SEO and hunt engine submission - Patent covers method and systems for SEO suggestions and search engine submission. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued a patent (pdf) to Go Daddy for “method for improving a web site’s ranking with search engines”. U.S. patent number 8,271,488 describes a system for helping web site owners edit their web pages for better search results and then automatically submitting the sites to multiple search engines. If some of this seems outdated, ... read more ...
Mon 17th September 2012
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Details of $528,000 sale of Accommodation.com and Accommodation.co.uk - Pixel Capital buys domain names to enter online travel market. Australian company Pixel Capital Pty Ltd announced last week that it had acquired Accommodation.com and Accommodation.co.uk for a combined $528,000 USD. Both domain names were owned by a British company and were developed at one point. Although the transaction is finalized, Pixel founder Roland Bleyer told Domain Name Wire that the deal is owner financed over multiple years. In other words, Pixel is still ... read more ...
 
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Warner Bros registers domains for Magic Mike 2 sequel - Studio registers domain names after writer and star start talking. A sequel to the male stripper movie Magic Mike is rumored to be in the works. Here’s some fuel to add to the fire: Warner Brothers has registered a few domain names related to a possible sequel. MagicMike2Movie.com MagicMikeMovie2.com MagicMikePart2.com It could be that Warner Bros is just defensively registering these domain names after the movie’s writer and star starting talking about what they’d ... read more ...
 
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City of Paris systematic to compensate $100k for retreat domain name hijacking - Paris guilty of reverse domain name hijacking, ordered to pay over $100,000. A U.S. federal district court has ordered Ville de Paris (City of Paris) to pay $100,000 for reverse domain name hijacking and tortious interference. Judge Melinda Harmon also ordered the city to pay $26,830 in attorney’s fees and costs. The judgment stems from a UDRP the city of Paris filed against the owner of Parvi.org in 2009. In that case, panelist Andrew Christie decided to give ... read more ...
 
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WallStreet.com: row manners retreat domain name hijacking - Wall-Street.com blasted for its attempt to hijack WallStreet.com domain name. A three person World Intellectual Property Organization panel has found Wall-Street.com, LLC guilty of reverse domain name hijacking over the domain name WallStreet.com. Wall-Street.com based much of its UDRP case against WallStreet.com on some relatively recent transfers of the domain name, which it said were new registrations. However, it turns out the domain name has essentially been ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Patrick Carleton and Josh Metnick devise discussion for geo TLD applicants - Conference aims to help .city and .country operators hit the ground running. Two familiar faces in the geodomaining world have teamed up to create a new conference catering to GeoTLD and Geodomain owners. Patrick Carleton and Josh Metnick just announced the GEO.FUTR conference, which will occur sometime in Fall 2013. Carleton was previously executive director of Associated Cities, LLC, a trade group representing geo domain owners (i.e. cityname.com). While with Associated ... read more ...
Fri 14th September 2012
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Did “Netbank” lie, or was it only unhandy in this UDRP? - A quick look at archives disproves a UDRP complainant’s statement. UDRP complainants and their lawyers make all sorts of claims when filing UDRPs. Sometimes they make assertions that are false, and sometimes these are honest mistakes. But at what point does it become deliberate? And at what point does not using freely available tools to verify complaints become problematic? Take the decision just handed down by WIPO against NetBank for the domain name bancanet.com. (I ... read more ...
Thu 13th September 2012
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UDRP row gets LivingSocal.com preference correct - Socal may be a typo of social.com, but it also means something. I frequently write about when UDRP panels make the wrong decision, and sometimes that’s the case even when they find for the respondent. Some domainers give me grief for it, but I call it how I see it. Last night Michael Berkens wrote about the decision for LivingSocal.com, which LivingSocial.com said was a typo, and how he thought the decision in favor of the respondent would get trademark holders ... read more ...
 
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Amazon’s Quidsi to launch Afterschool.com charity apparatus for after propagandize activities. - Latest niche store to offer equipment for afterschool activities. In June I scooped that Amazon.com subsidiary Quidsi was working on a new site call Afterschool.com. This is the second Quidsi site I’ve scooped thanks to domain registrations. Afterschool.com now resolves to a coming soon launch page, Quidsi started social media outreach yesterday, and it recently started sending notices to merchandising partners. So what will the store be about? Equipment for kids ... read more ...
Wed 12th September 2012
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Some large names make domain purchases - Fortune 500 Yum! Brands among this week’s domain buyers. This week’s end user sales list is a little shorter than usual, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there were fewer end user buys last week. I generate this list by looking through bulk whois records, and some weeks more sales pop out as end user buys than others. Here’s an interesting one. CeeJay Software Limited says it offers data backup service called CrashPlan PROe. So it bought CrashPlan.co.uk for ... read more ...
 
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On day of iPhone 5 announcement, iPhone5.com sits dark - Apple owns the domain name but does nothing with it. Back in May Apple did something smart: it went after the iPhone5.com domain name well in advance of the launch of the new device. A week after Apple filed a complaint with World Intellectual Property Organization, the owner of the domain name relinquished control. The domain name is now owned by Apple and pointing to the apple.com nameservers. Thanks to Apple’s advance work it was primed and ready for today’s ... read more ...
 
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Why Sale.com has all to do with “Right of a Dot” - It’s left of the dot, but it’s going to benefit from the right of the dot. When I first saw the press release today about Right of the Dot brokering Sale.com, I had a chuckle. What is a company named “right of the dot” doing selling a domain name that has everything to do with what’s left of the dot? But really the press release buries the lead: five companies have applied for the .sale top level domain, and you can bet a lot of traffic will go to sale.com ... read more ...
Tue 11th September 2012
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Two things that new TLDs really won’t “solve” - They won’t put a noticeable dent in phishing, nor will they alleviate the scarcity of good (.com) domain names. There are a lot of benefits that new top level domain supporters say the web will realize when new TLDs are released. Let me start by saying that I’m not really opposed to new TLDs at this point. They’re coming. It’s time to embrace it and the opportunities they will create. But I get very frustrated when I see people espousing so-called benefits ... read more ...
 
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Why we won’t leave GoDaddy over yesterday’s outage - Go Daddy web hosting still makes sense for me. Yesterday Go Daddy suffered a major outage that appears to have involved its DNS services. The outage lasted about four hours. Back in May I switched from a small web host to Go Daddy, which means that Domain Name Wire was offline yesterday as a result of the outage. Let me start by saying that downtime for your web site sucks, and yesterday was a frustrating day. But does it make sense for someone like me to change hosting ... read more ...
 
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Have ccTLD questions? Just ask Alex - Get answers to your toughest country code domain questions. Some country code domain names are fairly easy to register. Most of them aren’t. Frankly, figuring out how to register some of the more obscure ccTLDs could take a Ph.D. But now there’s a free resource for all of your ccTLD questions: Ask Alex. It’s a new section on Tucows’ OpenSRS web site where company employee Alex Schwertner answers all of your questions about ccTLDs. Residency requirements? ... read more ...
 
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Like we was saying… Go Daddy wasn’t hacked or attacked - Guy on twitter says he took Go Daddy down. Press bites. Yesterday dozens (hundreds?) of “respectable” publications reported that Go Daddy was hacked, and that it was done by a hacker who was part of anonymous. This morning I tweeted: “incredible how major news outlets take as fact what a single twitter user said about yesterday’s #GoDaddy attack.” I followed up a few minutes later noting that “attack” wasn’t the right word: “I should clarify re: ... read more ...
Mon 10th September 2012
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Adrian Peterson needs a new lawyer - Mistake ridden domain name complaints cost the player his online identity. Minnesota Vikings player Adrian Peterson needs to get a new lawyer — and not for his criminal issues. He needs new intellectual property lawyers. If your lawyers make a mistake once, perhaps you overlook it. But twice? Back in April Adrian Peterson won a UDRP for the domain name AdrianPetersonOnline.com. But his attorneys at Gant Hicks asked for the domain name registration to be canceled ... read more ...
 
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GEICO wins GEIC.com domain name dispute - Insurance company wins control of domain name that leaves off the ‘o’. A World Intellectual Property Organization panel has awarded the four letter domain name GEIC.com to insurance giant GEICO. The owner of the domain name did not respond to the complaint. Although GEIC.com could certainly be used for a number of legitimate purposes, the recent history of the domain name shows that it generally has been used to take advantage of its similarity to the insurance ... read more ...