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.

Mon 7th July 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Salesforce.com sells Do.com domain name to startup - After shutting down service that used Do.com, company sells domain name to startup. It appears Salesforce.com has sold the domain name Do.com to Redo, Inc., parent company of meeting productive application DoMeetings.com. If you go to DoMeetings.com today, it will forward to Do.com where you can sign up for a beta of the service. It appears that the San Francisco startup is just getting off the ground. On July 3 or 4, the domain name’s whois record changed from ... read more ...
Thu 3rd July 2014
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This week’s Expired Domain Name Roundup - Joseph Peterson reports on the past week in expired domain name sales. What’s an UNCH?  And how many of them would Dr. Seuss need to sell in order to recoup the $11.6k spent on UNCHS.org?  Well, actually, some 36 years ago, the United Nations established its Centre for Human Settlements.  Perhaps now they’ve finally secured a matching .ORG domain for their work on urban planning, upgrading slums, and so forth.  Meanwhile, the corresponding .COM remains ... read more ...
 
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2nd turn .UK domain name registrations tip 100,000 - A strong sales month for .UK. Over 100,000 second level domain names under .uk have been registered since they became available for registration last month, .uk registry Nominet announced today. About two-thirds have been registered by people who have matching third level .uk domain names. They are given first rights to the second level domain name for a period of five years. Surprisingly, over one-third have been registered as completely new and unique registrations, ... read more ...
 
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ShoeBuy.com’s UDRP record drops to 3 and 3 - Company loses a UDRP for the third time in just 6 tries. Online shoe retailer ShoeBuy.com might need to re-read the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Policy. It just lost its third UDRP. It has only won three times. This latest loss comes courtesy of typosquatting recovery firm CitizenHawk, which helped ShoeBuy.com go after ShowBuy.com. Yes, w is right next to e on the keyboard. But a UDRP panel determined that ShowBuy.com, made up of two common dictionary words, is not ... read more ...
 
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GoDaddy wants to obvious approach of onboarding new TLDs - GoDaddy files four patents related to adding new TLD options to a registrar. GoDaddy has filed four patent applications describing methods for adding new top level domain names to a registrar’s offerings. Each top level domain name a registrar offers comes with its own restrictions, GoDaddy explains: A large part of the difficulty in adding new TLDs is that each TLD may (and usually does) have unique business requirements. As non-limiting examples, the business ... read more ...
 
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Minds + Machines files obvious for “Domain Name Registration and Resale” - Patent describes system similar to AfternicDLS and SedoMLS but at the registry level. Minds + Machines Chairman Fred Krueger has filed a patent application (pdf) for the resale of domain names, titled “Domain Name Registration and Resale”. Here’s part of the description: Internet registries operate in the primary market for domain names and not in the secondary market. A registry has no record of whether a domain name is available for resale and, if so, at what ... read more ...
Wed 2nd July 2014
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.Club domain tops final week’s finish user domain name sales - Catering company goes clubbing. Sedo’s top sale last week was MM.com at $1.2 million. But it’s not an end user sale. It appears to have been purchased by the owners of Chinese domain marketplace 4.cn. Instead, this week’s top end user sale honors go to a new TLD. .Club sold Eat.Club $20,000 to employee meal catering company Eat Club, which has been using the domain name MyEatClub.com. I have to assume they tried to acquire EatClub.com as well. Was it more than ... read more ...
 
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How English speakers can deposit in Chinese IDNs - TLD Registry releases tool for discovering Chinese terms available for registration. Last week in London I sat down with TLD Registry, the company behind the Dot Chinese Online (.在线) and Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) domain names. These IDNs have been a success so far, with over 50,000 registrations combined. They are easily within the top twenty new TLDs launched to date and are the top two IDN TLDs in terms of registrations. As an English speaker with little ... read more ...
 
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Top 5 Domain Name Wire stories from June - Moniker “wins” three spots on June’s top stories list. Is there no such thing as bad press? That phrase probably went out the window last month for Moniker. It took three of the month’s top five spots on Domain Name Wire for highest-trafficked stories. The stories also combined for over 350 comments. It was not good news. Here’s the complete top five. 1. The new Moniker: Love it or Hate it? – It’s definitely the latter. 2. Moniker CEO Bonnie Wittenburg ... read more ...
 
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New TLD Luxury.Estate sells for $50k - A new high water mark for a domain sale in a new TLD? Hot of the heels of news that eat.club sold for $20,000, DomainHoldings announced today that it brokered the sale of Luxury.Estate for a whopping $50,000. The Luxury.Estate sale is different from the eat.club one because an early domain registrant cashed in big, rather than the registry getting paid for a premium sale. According to DomainHoldings, the seller of Luxury.Estate purchased it on day 5 of Donuts’ ... read more ...
Tue 1st July 2014
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What domain names L’Oreal and others bought - L’Oreal among companies buying domain names at Sedo. I’m behind on end user sales because I was busy at the ICANN conference in London last week. Here are the sales that Sedo sent out last week. View previous end user sales lists here. Want to sell domain names on Sedo? Read this report to learn best practices. MyLifebox.com $27,500 – U Lived It, Inc., which I believe offers a system for recording important moments in your life. Mi.co.id $60,000 – I’m a ... read more ...
 
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Last week’s and this week’s new TLD launches: .Nagoya, .Fish and more - A handful of new TLDs are launching during this holiday week. I try to write a post each week about upcoming new TLD launches, but didn’t get around to it last week. So this week I’m going to rewind and also look at the week ahead. Last week on Monday GMO launched .Nagoya. Nagoya is the largest city in the Chūbu region of Japan. As of today, the domain has 1,876 domains in the zone file. Last week on Tuesday .ink launched. I was at the launch party in London. ... read more ...
 
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North Carolina association guilty of Reverse domain name hijacking - Company claims rights dating to 2010 and domain name was registered in 2002. But… Personal Communication Systems, Inc of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has been found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking. The company filed a UDRP against the owner of HealthWave.com. Healthwave is the name of an automated medical appointment reminder system that Personal Communication Systems sells. It has a trademark for Healthwave, but the earliest claimed use dates to 2010. ... read more ...
Mon 30th June 2014
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About those .io domain names… - Few tech startups understand the origins of their clever domain names. David Meyer of Gigaom published a story this morning titled “The dark side of .io: How the U.K. is making web domain profits from a shady Cold War land deal.” The story explains the country code top level domain name nature of .io and the history of its people. Technically, .io is for British Indian Ocean Territory, and the money flows to the British government. The article is likely to be ... read more ...
 
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.London ads speckled in London final week - Here are some ads for the .London domain name spotted in London during the ICANN conference. I spent last week in London at the ICANN meeting. This was interesting timing because the city is gearing up for the launch of .London, which should prove to be a strong new TLD. The open nature of the domain gives it a wider buying audience than .nyc (assuming .nyc is tough on nexus). As a geo domain, it will get a lot of local press. I think it’s possible that this domain ... read more ...
 
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Spy on recently backordered domain names with new service - SnoopNames monitors last-minute domain name backorders. A new service called SnoopNames claims to enable you to spy on other peoples’ backorders in order to backorder potentially valuable domain names. The site monitors various expired domain sites to spot initial backorders placed on domains in the last 24 hours before the cut off. The idea is to let the “crowd” help you find domain names worth backordering. Of course, anyone who waits until the last day to ... read more ...
 
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Igloo to marketplace 300k+ DomainSponsor domain names - Domain name portfolio acquired by Rook Media will be marketed by Igloo. When Rook Media acquired DomainSponsor earlier this year, it also acquired Oversee.net’s large portfolio of domain names. Domain brokerage Igloo will begin marketing many of these domain names shortly, Igloo and Rook announced today. While not all domain names will be offered for sale, over 300,000 will be offered through Igloo’s brokers and a new online marketplace. Oversee.net once owned ... read more ...
Fri 27th June 2014
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A “High” week for lapsed domain name sales - “High” is perched high on the list of last week’s expired domain auctions — specifically, the French word, “Haut”, which sold at NameJet for nearly $5k.  Another French four-letter — this time a .NET — follows with “Vide”, meaning “empty”, “blank”, “void”. Continuing with the LLLLs, AskE.com went for $3.3k; and at least another 3 sold over $1k.   Of these, OKKK.com is an interesting specimen.  Personally, I wouldn’t be OK ... read more ...
 
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Hmm…UDRP row orders send of Galvanize.com - Panelist orders generic domain be transferred to local startup accelerator. A National Arbitration Forum has ordered the transfer of the domain name Galvanize.com in a highly questionable decision. At every turn in deciding the case, NAF panelist Dr. Reinhard Schanda gave the benefit of the doubt to complainant Galvanize LLC. That said, the respondent could have put up a better case. Respondent Brett Blair / ChristianGlobe Network bought the domain name in an expired ... read more ...
Thu 26th June 2014
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You can’t simply review Rightside and GoDaddy - Two soon-to-be public companies aren’t necessarily good comps for each other. Demand Media is getting ready to spin off its domain name business, Rightside. Competitor GoDaddy recently filed its S-1 for an initial public offering. It might be tempting to compare the two companies. After all, both of them are prominent in the domain name space. But when it comes to comps, Rightside and GoDaddy don’t match up. Here are some key distinctions between the two companies. GoDaddy ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
.XXX interview: Lessons on reward domains, selling and more - Stuart Lawley of .XXX domain registry ICM Registry answers questions relevant to new TLD registries. With dozens of new TLDs coming out every month, I thought it would be interesting to get thoughts from a registry that launched its domain a few years ago: ICM Registry and .XXX. I reached out to Stuart Lawley of ICM Registry to get his thoughts on what is transpiring. Lawley provides some great insight into premium domain names, marketing, and realistic expectations. ... read more ...
Wed 25th June 2014
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Impressive formula from .Global domain name auction - .Global auction sells 35 domain names for a total of $63,780. .Global held a live domain name auction in London yesterday afternoon, and the results were quite impressive. The $63,780 in sales across 35 of 82 domain names far surpassed those I asked in a “straw poll” prior to the auction. It certainly exceeded my expectations. I think a key moment was the 12th lot for flights.global. The preceding nine lots failed to sell, and a $5,000 bid on flights.global was ... read more ...
 
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The Great Courses loses dual UDRPs on a same day - Company that owns TheGreatcourses.com loses two cases in one day. The Teaching Company, LLC, d/b/a The Great Courses, lost two UDRPs on the same day this week. The company lost a case filed against Marchex for GreatCourses.com and against Michael Berkens for GreatCourse.com. Conveniently, John Berryhill represented both parties. In both cases, The Great Courses failed to prove the domain names were registered and used in bad faith. Marchex has owned GreatCourses.com ... read more ...
 
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This elementary cognisance illustrates a existence of code insurance in new TLDs - A visualization of reality for brand protection costs and new top level domain names. One thing that’s clear from talking to various people at ICANN 50 this week is that they are surprised by the low level of defensive trademark registrations in new TLDs. The trademark lobby expected a nightmare. New TLD applicants expected a lot less, but still more than they got. Here’s the reality in a simple chart: No harm done to the trademark lobby for exaggerating the ... read more ...
Tue 24th June 2014
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Pictures from a biggest domain name eventuality ever - Scenes from the first day of ICANN 50 in London. Close to 3,500 people registered for the ICANN 50 meeting in London this week, making it the biggest domain-name related event ever. The surge in attendance has to do with a confluence of events, especially the U.S. government’s recent plans to eventually no longer be involved with the contract related to IANA functionality. ICANN books meeting venues well in advance, so it wasn’t able to switch up venues to accommodate ... read more ...