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.

Thu 19th February 2015
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European Start Up Accelerator Reveals Latest Startups and a lot of them use a .io extension - Tech Crunch did a story on Entrepreneur First which is a European accelerator for start-ups along the lines of the popular Y Combinator. Entrepreneur First is the best place for Europe’s top technical individuals to meet and build world-changing startups in London. We select purely on the basis of technical talent, so you can apply before you have a team or an idea. Our intensive 7-month programme is designed to give you the best possible support in the first 100 days of your startup’s life. ... read more ...
 
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Rightside Reports 4Q Revenue Up 13.5%: Makes Almost $8 Million on Losing New gTLD Apps - Rightside reported its earnings for the 4th Quarter today and full year ended December 31, 2014 after the market closed. Domain Name Services Revenue Increases 16% Year-over-Year 4Q Total Revenue Increases 13.5% Year-over-Year Domain name services revenue for the three months ended December 31, 2014 increased 16% to $43.2 million compared to $37.2 million for the same period in 2013. Organic growth of 15%, which excludes the acquisition related benefit from Name.com, was primarily due to an increase ... read more ...
 
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L’Oréal Wins New gTLD .BEAUTY Beating Donuts & Minds + Machines/Adding To Its Huge Vertical - L’Oréal has won the new gTLD .Beauty beating Donuts and Minds + Machines. We reported earlier today that L’Oréal also won the rights to operate .Hair L’Oréal was also the sole applicant for .skin and .makeup so L’Oréal has basically cornered the new gTLD market for that vertical. Interestingly the company withdrew its .Brand application for .LOREAL but who needs that when you own all the keywords in the vertical. If your wonder no one applied for .Cosmetics         ... read more ...
 
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Quick Poll: How Much Will .APP Sell For Next Week? - The new gTLD .App,  which was the most applied for new gTLD,  seems to be heading to an ICANN Last Resort Auction next week. All of the other new gTLD’s that were scheduled for private auction on February 25th have been settled privately. However .App which received 13 applications,  (1 application was withdrawn months ago)  still has 12 applicants and all you need is one applicant not to agree to settle privately to go to an ICANN auction. As we are less than a week out before the Auction ... read more ...
 
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2 More New gTLD's Settled; Amazon Loses .Box; L'Oréal Wins .Hair - Two more new gTLD’s that were scheduled to go to the ICANN Last Resort Auction next week have been settled by privately. Amazon has withdrawn its application for .Box leaving NS1 Limited of Hong Kong who is run by the same principal of .Asia, Edmon Chung as the winner. It seems .Box see’s itself as a competitor to .Cloud. Here is how .Box explains its vision for the extension in its ICANN application “.box is about the making the Internet (the cloud) personal.Personal computers (PC) fundamentally ... read more ...
 
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Under Armour Looking to Kick A Little Ass - The Baltimore Sun’s Lorraine Mirabella published an article on local athletic apparel maker Under Armour. It seems that Under Armour has not taken kindly to a company started in 2013 called Ass Armor. The company also apparently did a play on the Under Armour tagline “Protect This House” with one of their own “Protect Your Assets”. From the article: Snowboarder Casey Scherr started a company called Ass Armor in 2013 to sell shock-absorbing athletic shorts designed to protect the tailbone. ... read more ...
Wed 18th February 2015
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.College To Offer Trademark Holders & Universities Free Registrations - XYZ.COM LLC, the company behind the .xyz domain extension, announced the global launch of the .College domain extension today offering for the first time free Sunrise registrations for trademark holders and a special early access program for universities in which they can also get their .college domain registered for free. .College also announced a four stage roll out of the extension that will be live for general availability on September 29th, 2015 Here is the press release: “”XYZ has announced ... read more ...
 
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Tech.Co "What's In A Domain Name ?" - Ann Diab wrote a piece on Tech.co that featured Howard Lefkowitz who keynoted NamesCon 2015. The article delves into the deeper meaning of a brand, that it is not just the advertising or how catchy it sounds. The article also includes a video of the NamesCon keynote speech. In a very interesting analysis, Lefkowitz points out that books .com, shoes .com, and even search .com are rarely used and barely known. It’s the brand that dominates these spaces that matters. “Brand is not just advertising. ... read more ...
 
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SnapDeal Acquires Exclusively.com - Exclusively.com Acquired Medianama.com published an article on Exclusively.com getting acquired by SnapDeal, the company was originally Exclusively.in before getting the .com. From the article: Exclusively.in started as a flash sales site  but pivoted to a standard e-commerce model offering designer apparel and accessories in 2011. The company used to ship products only to the US and UK catering to but now ships to destinations in India and other global destinations too. Under the partnership ... read more ...
 
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Jered Kenna The Man Who Lost The Rights To Bitcoin.com And How He Bounced Back - Coin Desk/ ZapChain  Interview with Jered Kenna Jered Kenna is someone who got into Bitcoin early and not only did he get into Bitcoin, but his company according to the interview says his company Trade Hill owned the mother of all domain names, Bitcoin.com. The confusing part in the video he uses the words we owned Bitcoin.com, but had an agreement with the owner that if the exchange closed down he would get the domain back. So it may be fair to say they were leasing the domain but he used the word ... read more ...
 
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1st Day New gTLD Totals: .Yoga 1,546; .Sydney 1,508; .Party 1,105; .Vote 264: .Cricket 167; .Voto 124 - Six new gTLD’s had its first day of general availability (GA)  yesterday where domain names could be registered on a first come, first served basis and from the 6 new gTLD’s we have around just 4,500 registrations. Including any Sunrise registrations by trademark holders or any pre-registration period here are the totals after the first day: .Yoga 1,546 .Sydney 1,508 .Party 1,105 .Vote 264 .Cricket 167 .Voto 124 .Sydney maybe effected by time zone changes, so we may see a big second day tally. .Cricket ... read more ...
 
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Scottish Government Jumps on a new gtld train - Scottish Government switches to a .Scot domain Herald Scotland published an article that the Scottish government is switching to a .Scot domain with the older scotland.gov.uk continuing to function. It makes sense not to do away with the old address which I would imagine will eventually become a redirect. From the article: THE Scottish Government has switched its website to a new “dot Scot” internet domain address. The site will be accessed via www.gov.scot, though the old www.scotland.gov.uk ... read more ...
 
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Canada's Largest Bitcoin Exchange Shutting Down After Security Breach - The hits just keep coming in the exciting world of cryptocurrency, The Next Web is reporting thatCavirtex, the largest Canadian Bitcoin exchange is shutting down after a security breach. This adds on to $1.75 million worth of BTC stolen from Chinese exchange BTER last week. Bitstamp lost $5million in January. Cavirtex said it did not lose any customer funds and will be returning them. Canadian Bitcoin exchange Cavirtex has announced that it may have suffered a security breach and is shutting down ... read more ...
 
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Channel 4 U.K. "roughly one in each thousand tweets is a racy image" - AVN.com published an article that dealt with Twitter and porn. The article focused on a recent investigation into Twitter and pornography conducted by Channel 4 in the U.K. Twitter is one of the few social networks that allows porn pics and videos, Vine which is owned by Twitter does not allow it, Facebook and Instagram do not permit it either. Tumblr would be the other prominent social networking platform where you can view porn. The investigation delves into how to protect under age viewers who ... read more ...
Tue 17th February 2015
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Sedo Sells $1.2million in domains for a week led by Shein.com during $95,000 - Over the past week, 538 transactions took place on Sedo’s marketplace and via SedoMLS, totaling $1.2m. 53% of total sales were the result of Buy Now listings.   Highlights of public sales are: Top .com: shein.com at 95,000 USD Top ccTLD: whitstable.co.uk at 12,000 GBP Top “other” TLD: augenlidstraffung.net at 3,850 EUR I emailed Sedo if the price was correct on ZFE.com that seems cheap.     ... read more ...
 
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How Committed Is Google To The New gTLD Program? Applied For 101; Now Lost 29 Out of 34 Auctions - Google was the 2nd largest applicants of New gTLD’s applying for 101 of them and spending $18.6 Million dollars in application fees catching the eye of many publications outside of the domain space Here, Here, and Here Non-domainer publications wrote about how Google would basically get everything they applied for basically because they could afford to. Wired.com called  Google’s support of the New gTLD program was a PR dream for ICANN and the new gTLD program. However Google’s participation ... read more ...
Mon 16th February 2015
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After Dropping In Oct 2013 & Sold On Namejet, StormGuard.com Hit With UDRP - The domain name StormGuard.com has been hit with a UDRP filing by Storm Guard Franchise Systems, LLC. The domain name went into pending delete in October 2013 after hainv been owned by Homeshield Stormguard L.L.C. of Hialeah, FL, which seemed to acquire the domain name in october 2008 all according to domaintools.com In November 2013 the domain name sold on Namejet.com after dropping, for $1,117 according to Dnpric.es The domain name twas originally registered in 1999. Its not clear if the company ... read more ...
 
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Google Wins a .Moto New gTLD Beating Rightside.co (NAME) For Its Motorola Division - Google has won the rights to operate the .Moto new gTLD beating United TLD Holdings which is now Rightside.co (NAME) in what we can only assume was a private contention auction. The new domain extension .Moto was scheduled to go to a ICANN Last Resort Auction later this month. Google of course owns Motorola and applied for .Moto to use as a closed extension as a .Brand application more than a generic. Here is what Google had to say about .Moto in its application to ICANN: “Charleston Road Registry ... read more ...
 
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.XYZ Passes .Mobi in Domain Registrations As It Closes In On 800K - According to ntldstats.com,  the new gTLD .XYZ has passed .Mobi in the number of registered domain names. The .Mobi registry which went live on September 26, 2006  according to RegistrarStats.com has 791,396 domains under registration having lost over 1/3 of the registrations it had at its peak in 2014. According to ntldstats.com (which does not track legacy TLD’s), .XYZ has almost 795,000 registrations. Registrarstats.com shows that .Mobi had around 1.2 million domain name registrations as of ... read more ...
 
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DirtySpokes.com Returned To Co. That Let It Drop 1 Week Earlier W/O Registered Trademark - A one member UDRP panel has ordered the domain name dirtyspokes.com returned to the company that allowed the doamin to drop drop in late December 2014, although they did not have a federally registered trademark It should be noted that the domain dropped on December 27, 2014 and the UDRP complaint was filed on January 5th. I think the quick reaction of the Complainant really helped it get the domain returned via a UDRP. The one member panelist Hector Ariel Manoff found that the company which had ... read more ...
 
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Memex Provides Law Enforcement A Better Way To Surf a Dark Web - Mark Stockley wrote an interesting article that took a look at Memex. Memex is brought to you by the people that built the original ARPANET. It seems to be very well received by law enforcement as a way to surf the “Dark Web”, it has even proved vital in one major conviction against a sexual predator according to the article. Whereas Google and Bing are designed to be good-enough systems that work for everyone, Memex will end up powering domain-specific searches that are the very best solution ... read more ...
Sun 15th February 2015
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Donuts Beats Google, Uniregistry and Afilias to Operate The New Domain Extension .Team - Donuts has won another private auction beating Uniregistry and Afilias to operate the new gTLD extension .Team. Unlike many other new gTLD’s I’m not sure there is much vertical competition to .team, arguably .club or one of the sports verticals like .Baseball or .Football; .Soccer etc As of now there are still 5 new gTLD’s set for ICANN Last Resort auction in 10 days; .App which was the most applied for new gTLD that still has 12 applicants; .beauty which has three applicants and then 3 gTLD ... read more ...
 
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Radix Wins Rights To New Domain Extension .Store Beating Amazon & Google + 4 More - Radix has won the rights to operate the new gTLD .Store, beating 6 other applicants including Amazon and Google. The other 4 applications for .Store have now withdrawn their application as well, Donuts, Uniregistry, Minds + Machines, and a company out of Delaware thedotstore.com. The new gTLD .Store was set to go to the ICANN Last Resort Auction later this month. There is vertical competition in the new gTLD space for the shopping vertical including several still in contention including .shop, and/or ... read more ...
 
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The .Show Goes On As Donuts Wins Rights to New gTLD Beating Google & Amazon - The old saying is the .show must go on and Donuts has won the rights to operate the new gTLD .Show beating out Google and Amazon. The fourth applicant, Zodiac Aries Limited of Hong Kong also withdrew their applications for .Show. There will some other new gTLD’s in the vertical .Broadway, .Tickets and .Seat, not owned by Donuts, along with .Movie and .Events which are owned by Donuts. Donuts has an application in contention with the broadwayacrossamerica.com for .Theater. .Show was scheduled to ... read more ...
 
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Facebook Reveals Relevance Scores To Improve Ad Quality - Facebook is now going to reveal relevance scores to marketers in the hopes it will improve ad quality. Google has been using a quality score for years. They explain it like this: The 1-10 Quality Score reported for each keyword in your account is an estimate of the quality of your ads and landing pages triggered by that keyword. Having a high Quality Score means that our systems think your ad and landing page are relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad. You can find out your Quality Score ... read more ...