Company is spreading a lot of incorrect information about domain names.
I was rather amused when Infibeam, the Indian ecommerce company behind .ooo, announced its bold ambitions for the domain name last month. I figured it was just a publicity stunt.
Kevin Murphy called the company’s sales targets including millions of first year registrations “batshit crazy”.
I filed Infinbeam in the “PR stunt” file, or perhaps the “delusional” file.
Then yesterday I read a The Economic Times article that says Infibeam’s CEO told it “all 34,000 global brands registered with the Trademark Clearing House from over 100 countries have purchased the dotooo domain name from Infibeam”.
This is simply not true. For the record, I count just 222 domain names in .ooo’s zone file.
Perhaps Infibeam was misunderstood by the reporter? Perhaps. It happens all the time.
But then I went to Infibeam’s twitter feed today to learn more about the company. It seems they assigned someone to go look up domain name facts, and hasn’t fact-checked a single one of them.
Among today’s misinformation on twitter:
- First, it says “fund.com priced at over $9 million.”, then it says Fund.com sold for £10m. Even if you believe it sold for $10 million, that’s not £10m.
- “Highest priced domain name is http://sex.com which was of 14 Million Dollars”. It was $13 million, but then the twitter feed later says that other domains sold for more.
- It says privatejet.com sold for $30.2 million. Yes, that was reported via a press release, but it was a mostly equity transaction that no one believes.
- It says icloud.com sold for $35 M. Based on other tweets, I think they meant to say this was in Hong Kong Currency.
Infibeam also apparently can’t check dates on numbers that are constantly changing. Here’s one tweet from today:
Umm, that was so last June.
Another tweet:
Yikes! Verisign shareholders will be surprised to see this number so low. Perhaps Infibeam should check the 2009 date on the article they read before spreading misinformation. Infibeam also reported 2009 numbers for .org, .info, .biz and .us.
So now I’ve changed my opinion on Infibeam. I don’t they just have delusional aspirations. I now think they’re clueless, incompetent and, by spreading incorrect information, dangerous.
Acro says
#GuessWhat – Manti Te’o would be proud.
Robbie says
This is nothing new with the GTLD’s, many companies have come out and said we will have millions by Year 1 etc.. From the looks of it, I am getting many the emails from registers now stating they are having a sale on .WHATEVER etc..
So the GTLD’s are stalling out, heading into renewals, .com volume sales for me personally have almost doubled year over year, and inquiries have tripled easily.
Joseph Peterson says
.OOO and .XYZ, I now pronounce you man and wife
TommyBoy says
Joseph, literally, the CEOs of those tlds should really get married, and even if they are both male, it’s okay, because Tim Cook just opened up the platform for them.
TommyBoy says
The .ooo & .xyz are both .coocoo tlds. I really cannot see them flow properly for my tongue or my eyes. It’s just plain .wasteful