Author Archives: The Domains

About The Domains

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 5K domain names . Michael is also a Director of RightoftheDot.com which is a consultant in the new gTLD space and a broker of super premium domains. Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest this year.

Wed 23rd April 2014
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
.GOP To Launch On Jul 7th - The new gTLD .GOP will go live for registrations on July 7th 2014 according to a email we received from the registry The .GOP new gTLD was applied for by The Republican State Leadership Committee, (RSLC)  a group that seeks to elect Republicans to state-level offices not the National Party. According to the email; “.GOP will be major factor in the future of Republican efforts to organize, fund raise and connect voters online. ” “Soon elected officials, candidates, grassroots activists and ... read more ...
 
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Facebook Reports Better Than Expected Earnings, $2.5 Billion in Revenue & Has Over 1 Billion Mobile Users - Facebook reported first quarter earnings after the close today.  Earnings beat expectations coming in at $0.34 cents a share.  The company now has 802 million daily users with 609 million of those being mobile. The company was trading down on Wednesday but is up in after hours. After Hours: 63.69 +2.33 (3.80%) Apr 23, 6:46PM EDT Tech Crunch covered the release here Facebook’s is getting more and more mobile, now with 1.01 billion users on small screens. It’s Q1 2014 earnings show it beat ... read more ...
 
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Apple Reports Second Quarter Earnings – Stock adult in After Hours Trading - Apple just reported second quarter earnings and the stock is up in after hours trading. The stock closed down 1.31 % to $524.75 on the trading day but is up $43 in after hours trading. NASDAQ: AAPL – Apr 23 5:25 PM ET From 9 to 5 Mac Apple just announced its second quarter results for 2014 with revenue for the quarter coming in at $45.6 billion. That’s compared to the guidance it previously provided of $42 – $44 billion and estimates by analysts averaging approximately $43.5B. Apple’s ... read more ...
 
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UPDATED: The Rise and Fall Of Oversee.net - With the news that Oversee.net sold DomainSponsor.com as well as their owned and operated domain portfolio which reportedly numbered between 700K and 1M domains, to Rook Media, it marks the end of to a 14 year run of one of the biggest companies to ever exist in the domain space. It’s important to point out that the current management of Oversee.net including Debra Domeyer who was just appointed CEO back on March 2, 2012 were not involved in much of what happened to this company over the years. It’s ... read more ...
 
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Dot Chinese Online & Dot Chinese Website’s Landrush Period Closes during 3:55AM UTC - The land rush period for Dot Chinese Online (.在线) Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) TLDs  Closes at 3:55AM UTC According to an email we just received  Dot Chinese Online (.在线) Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) TLDs have “been amonsgt the most successful in the history of ICANN’s New gTLD Program.” Landrush for Dot Chinese Online (.在线) Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) ends at the following times: UTC – Thursday April 24 at 03:55 China – Thursday April 24 at 11:55 New York ... read more ...
 
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It looks like a Apple Smartwatch will be called a iWatch - It looks like Apple is going to name their smart watch the “iWatch” In an article written by Chris Smith for BGR.com, it seems that a trademark registration filed by Brightflash USA LLC  has the same address that Apple has used in the past when trademarking iSlate. The same address was used to register the Car Play trademark by a company called, Carplay Enterprises. From the article Now that Apple has been seen further extending its company trademark to cover Class 14 devices including watches, ... read more ...
 
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Godaddy Partners With SiteLock - According to a press release out today, GoDaddy, has partnered with SiteLock to bring complete protection to websites. SiteLock proactively protects websites using the latest scanning techniques, giving customer peace-of-mind their website is safe. SiteLock scans websites for the latest malware, viruses, suspicious code, back doors and many other vulnerabilities commonly exploited by attackers. A report is emailed summarizing what was detected. In addition to finding issues, SiteLock automatically ... read more ...
 
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Meet The 1st New gTLD Serial Cybersquatter, As Farris Nawas of Austin Loses His 3rd URS - The National Arbitration  Forum has suspended the domain name registration for SPANX.clothing after an examiner in a Uniform Rapid Suspension proceeding  (URS) found the registrant,  Farris Nawas of Austin Texas infringed on the trademark of Spandex. Since the only business line Spandex is involved in is clothing, it is the no-brainer type of registration that the URS was designed for. This marks the 3rd time that Farris Nawas has lost a URS on a new gTLD domain name in just 5 weeks. Mr. Nawas ... read more ...
 
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ICANN Seeks Provider To Conduct A Review of The Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”) is seeking a provider to conduct an independent review of the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), as mandated by ICANN’s Bylaws. The GNSO is the policy-making body responsible for generic top-level domains, such as .COM, .NET, and .ORG. Its members include representatives from generic Top Level Domains (gTLD) registries, gTLD registrars, intellectual property interest, Internet service providers, businesses and non-commercial ... read more ...
 
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Go Daddy/Afternic Sells $1.9 million in domains for a week - Go Daddy/Afternic reportable weekly domain sales for the week of 4/14/14 – 4/20/14 The top sale for the week was Trade360.com at $42,500, registered in 2004. Rad360.com also sold for $3,500. Cod.co was the top country code sale at $8,250 Resell.net sold for $7,000. I thought scripter.com for $2,000 was a great buy and a shout out to my good friend Bob Brookes who does this part time but had another mooc sale,with Cmooc.com for $2,250. Total sales for the week $1,982,736   ... read more ...
Tue 22nd April 2014
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Sedo Transactions Total $1 Million And 10% Are .Club Domains - Over the past week, 513 transactions took place on Sedo’s marketplace and via SedoMLS, totaling $1 million of which  .Club domains sales totaled  $98,750. Certainly by far the biggest week of sales by any new gTLD. Disclaimer Highlights of public sales are: · Top .coms: fun8.com at 25,000 USD · Top ccTLD: gewerbeflächen.de at 16,500 EUR (= „industrial real estate“ in German) · Top “other” TLD: chinese.club at 13,750 USD 49% of total sales were the result of Buy Now listings. As a ... read more ...
 
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Neustar is Holding A Live Event In NYC To Discuss Rights Protections in .NYC Tomorrow - Neustar the company operating the .NYC domain name extension on behalf of the city of New York is holding a Breakfast seminar in New York Tomorrow April 23rd at 8:30 Am to discuss ICANN’s rights protection mechanisms, the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH), general brand protection strategies and the .NYC launch program The event is free and breakfast will be served “”Join experts and colleagues for a breakfast gathering to discuss ICANN’s rights protection mechanisms, the Trademark Clearinghouse ... read more ...
 
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Mi.com Bought By Xiaomi of China For $3.6 Million - According to TechCrunch Chinese Android devices startup, Xiaomi has acquired the two letter domain name Mi.com to rebrand its company outside China from Xiaomi.com to Mi.com. Xiaomi translates literally as ‘little rice’. “The ‘Mi’ in Xiaomi also functions as an acronym for ‘mobile Internet” The domain name was owned by “Aunis LLC” According to thenextweb.com, Li Wanqiang, co-founder and VP of Xiaomi, revealed on Weibo that Xiaomi spent CNY3.6 million ($577,000) to purchase the domain ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
MyArt.com Lost in UDRP On 2nd Try - The On-line ADR Center of the Czech Arbitration Court (CAC) UDRP provider, has just handed over the domain name MyArt.com to the My-Art Company which was just formed on September 10th, 2010 The domain was subject to a previous UDRP which the complainant lost back in 2011, you can read that decision here. In the first case the panel ruled in favor of the then domain name holder based on the fact the domain was registered in 1996 however this case was filed against a new domain owner after the domain ... read more ...
 
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HowStuffWorks.com To Be Sold for 18 % of the 2007 Purchase Price - The Wall Street Journal reported that Discover Communications is selling the popular website, HowStuffWorks.com.  They will be taking a loss on the sale as they are only realizing 18% of their 2007 purchase price. From the article: For Discovery Communications Inc., DISCA -0.49% the website HowStuffWorks.com proved to be one investment in digital media that didn’t work. Discovery said Monday it would sell the site, which offers explanations on topics such as “How magnets work” and “How ... read more ...
Mon 21st April 2014
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Matt Cutts Answers How To Research A Domain Before Buying -

Matt Cutts got a doubt now from someone who purchased a domain name and afterwards found out a domain had been in difficulty with Google. The domain is not now indexed and a new owners has to do a reconsideration request.

Matt points out stairs to check to see if a domain had problems in a past, like if used for spam.

Via: thedomains.com

 
Written by The Domains in EN
Rook Media Acquires DomainSponsor.com - Oversee.net, announced today that Rook Media, has acquired DomainSponsor.com, Oversee.net’s monetization business along with its parked domain portfolio. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Oversee.net which once owned the domain name registrar, Moniker.com which was the 7th domain name registrar in the world at the time of acquisition , the auction platform SnapNames.com, was the largest dropping domain name aftermarket with exclusive deals with registrars like and Enom.com and NetworkSolutions.com ... read more ...
 
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Launched – Grown – Sold The Miami Herald Discusses What’s Next for .CO Founders - The Miami Herald did a piece today on the .CO Registry acquisition by Neustar. They spoke with Juan Diego Calle to find out what’s next for everyone now that the company is sold. Calle mentioned a better job and better benefits for employees. The article also mentions that Neustar did not get Pop.co in the deal.   Calle said Neustar’s plan is to keep the offices — and the jobs — in Miami and Colombia. There are 20 full-time employees going to Neustar, plus a few consultants. “All of our ... read more ...
 
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Facebook to Launch Mobile Ad Network - Mike Isaac wrote on Recode that Facebook will be launching their own mobile ad network. Lots of people have wanted Facebook to build an ad network for a long time. Here it comes. Facebook will take the wraps off its plans for a mobile ad network at its “F8″ developer conference in San Francisco at the end of the month, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. Facebook will pitch the ads to publishers and developers as a way to leverage the social network’s vast database of user ... read more ...
 
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Should Business Fear Google ? - Olivia Solon wrote on Ars Technica that a major European media company has concerns about the growing power of Google. From the article: The chief executive of Axel Springer, one of Europe’s largest media publishers, has said that his company is afraid of the power that Google has accumulated and worries that the search giant is becoming a “superstate,” immune from regulation. Mathias Döpfner published an open letter to Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, in the German newspaper Frankfurter ... read more ...
Sun 20th April 2014
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Has a time come for imperative dual cause authentication ? - I was already thinking about the topic of  mandatory two factor authentication before Heartbleed. It was actually the story about Naoki Hiroshima and his post on Medium detailing the account hack at Go Daddy and Paypal, in order to gain access to the Twitter handle @N. Minda Zetlin of Inc Magazine recently published an article, ” Heartbleed Proves the Password Is Dead. This Is What You Need Now”. In the article Zetlin goes into the fact that no matter how good you think your password is, with ... read more ...
 
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How Many Letters On To The Right of a Dot is Too Many To Be A Hack? - A domain name hack has traditionally used ccTLD’s to form words and made it a brandable domain. Some of the more famous hacks are bit.ly, and del.icio.us instagram.com started out as instagr.am But now with the new gTLD’s people are using them to form words with longer extensions to the right of the dot. So .Land with 4 characters to the right of the dot, has become a popular hack in terms of registrations with domains like statenis.land, virginis.land, fireis.land as well as lake.land just tot ... read more ...
Sat 19th April 2014
Written by The Domains in EN
Looks Like A New Domain Publication Coming in July - It looks like there will be a new domain publication coming on the scene in July. On Facebook.com today we spotted an ad for DomainWorldMagazine.com As a magazine type publication rather than a blog its seems the new magazine seems to be taking on DnJournal.com which always has considered itself more of a newspaper/magazine than a blog Ryan Colby of Outcome Brokerage looks to be the registrant of the domain. From the Facebook page With over 175,000,000 iPads sold, we figured it was time to publish ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Turkey May Leave a World Wide Web - I can say I have thought for a long time we will eventually see the balkanization of the Internet. The net has become to vital in so many aspects of life that we continue to have global agreement. We do not see universal agreement in the offline world so its not a surprise if the online world mimics the offline. Not let me say I have not been championing the balkanization, just that I think there is a good chance its comes about somewhere down the road. Trend.Az reported: Lutfi Elvan, Minister of ... read more ...
 
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KeyBiscayne Gets Creative with .Email - The people behind KeyBiscayne.org are offering residents the opportunity to get their own KeyBiscayne.email address. Posted on their website: KeyBiscayne.org was selected to manage the email address of the Island Paradise.  Key Biscayne residents and businesses have the exclusive right to use the address @keybiscayne.email and have the option to receive VIP offers sent only to @keybiscayne.email address (optional, you can opt-out of this benefit). Thanks to its exclusivity, you can have your perfect ... read more ...