WhatAreDomains.com - What are domains?

Aftermarket.com to be in the Paris DomainerMeeting auction

2008-06-11T08:18:00.003-06:00

Aftermarket.com, probably one of the best domain names in the domain name aftermarket will be sold at the Paris Auction at DomainerMeeting. The reserve is set very low and we expect the domain name to sell to the highest bidder. The domain currently receives AT LEAST 3-5,000 uniques per month and is listed on the first page of Google for the term "aftermarket."

Aftermarket.com has sparked interest from large private domain holders to large parking companies and aftermarkets.

To sign up for the auction or to place an absentee bid for Aftermarket.com, please email Don Lyons at dlyons{@}corp.moniker.com

2008-03-06T07:35:00.001-07:00

Petition powered by ThePetitionSite.com

Snowe bill threatens to derail domain industry

2008-03-04T16:48:00.001-07:00

Sign the petition to stop the "Snowe Bill" at www.SnoweBill.com

US Senator Olympia Snowe introduced S. 2661, the %u201CAnti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act of 2008%u201D (APCPA). The bill was also cosponsored by Senators Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Ted Stevens (R-AK).

According to a press release by the Internet Commerce Association (ICA), the bill has been referred to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. No hearings have yet been scheduled on this proposal.

ICA strongly supports efforts to thwart trademark infringement, criminal phishing schemes, and the furnishing of inaccurate WHOIS database information.

S. 2661, however, contains provisions that are largely unrelated to these objectives and that radically and unnecessarily expand the rights of trademark owners to essentially provide them with monopoly rights on registered trademarks to the detriment of millions of individuals and businesses engaged in lawful and legitimate Internet commerce.

Moreover, the proposal goes far beyond protecting trademarks to covering brand names and business names that might otherwise not be entitled to trademark protection. Such an expansion flies in the face of established trademark law, poses significant risks to Internet commerce, and would be burdensome on our justice system.

ICA believes that the legislation can be perfected to eliminate these risks without hindering its ability to achieve the goal of preventing phishing and other fraudulent schemes that plague Internet commerce.

ICA is firmly opposed to the criminal activity of financial data phishing and will carefully review the portions of this legislation relevant to eradicating that activity with a view toward supporting those provisions that fill essential gaps in existing law.

However, ICA is also firmly opposed to the establishment of a parallel domain name infringement enforcement scheme that is more expansive and more onerous than the existing, highly effective remedies available to trademark owners through ICANN%u2019s UDRP process and US trademark law.

Trademark owners already prevail in 85% of all UDRP complaints and nearly 100% of all ACPA cases. Yet some apparently now wish to establish a new regime for contesting allegedly %u201Cinfringing%u201D domains that is tilted even more in their favor by denying basic due process and substantive protections to domain name registrants %u2013 and that provides the possibility that they can use their power and influence to sway public officials to expend taxpayer dollars in defense of private Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs).

The overbroad and unnecessary trademark-like provisions of this bill are a recipe for massive reverse domain name hijacking by large corporations and are therefore a direct threat to the more than $10 billion in asset value created by the entrepreneurial ranks of professional domain name investors and developers, and to the beneficial goods, services, and information provided to consumers through their websites.

ICA will work with the bill%u2019s sponsors and other members of the Senate Commerce Committee with an eye toward eliminating or narrowing these unnecessary and duplicative provisions and assuring that any final legislation is focused solely on the criminal financial fraud of true phishing schemes.

Relevant provisions of ICA%u2019s member Code of Conduct include:

%u2022 Protection of IPRs: A registrant shall follow accepted trademark law and respect the brands and trademarks of others. Members will not intentionally and in bad faith register and use a domain name that is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark.

%u2022 Strict Adherence to Internet Fraud Laws: Members of ICA are committed to adhering to all applicable laws that seek to curb and control Internet fraud and abuse.

%u2022 Access to Accurate WHOIS Data: A registrant will provide accurate domain name ownership and contact information to the WHOIS database in a timely manner so that domain name ownership is transparent.

While ICA is clearly committed to best practices and lawful conduct by domain name registrants, we are very concerned that this proposal would establish a separate and parallel system of trademark-related enforcement vis-à-vis domain names that is less balanced, broader and more punitive than existing ICANN arbitration procedures and relevant provisions of US trademark law.

Further, the proposal unfairly targets domain name registrants for a widespread Internet practice %u2013 if its aim is to halt the advertising monetization of brand names and typographical variations thereof when consumers engage in direct Internet navigation or in web searches it utterly fails in that endeavor, as this activity is also engaged in systematically by search engines, web browsers and ISPs.

Network Solutions Stands by Name Policy

2008-01-10T08:14:00.000-07:00

Network Solutions is standing by its controversial policy of automatically registering some domain names that are the subject of searches on the company's Web site.

After testing the concept in December, the domain name registration company quietly began doing this over the past weekend. Potential customers who used the company's "Find a domain" search engine would suddenly find the domain names they had been searching for were registered to Network Solutions itself, making them temporarily unable to purchase the domain from another provider.

Industry watchers were quick to blast the new policy, saying that it either forced searchers to become Network Solutions customers, or exposed their ideas to scammers, who would be able to snatch up the domains the second they were released. "It is a deplorable action that Network Solutions would announce potential domain names to the entire world," wrote Jay Westerdal, on the DomainTools blog.

If cutting down on domain name scamming was the goal, "someone should be fired over the implementation," wrote Andrew Allemann, a blogger with Domain Name Wire.

On Wednesday, Network Solutions CEO Champ Mitchell said that his company planned to change the site's design to ensure that users are notified of this policy. The company is also looking into adding a feature that would make give users the option of keeping their searches un-registered, although that would require cooperation from domain name registries, he said.

Ironically, Mitchell said that Network Solutions came up with the search registration process in an effort to cut down on the scamming that has plagued the industry over the past two years. "We are not trying to make a bunch of money off of this," he said.

By registering the domains immediately, Network Solutions is keeping them out of the hands of scammers who take advantage of a loophole in the way names are registered. It has become increasingly common for scammers to register large number of domains for a short period of time and then to keep the ones that generate Web traffic, a practice called domain tasting. Because a domain can be held without charge for up to five days, this practice costs the scammer almost nothing, but it can be lucrative.

In another practice, called front running, scammers have found ways -- some of them illegal -- to keep track of domain name searches and then hold onto those domains themselves, hoping to sell them to the people doing the searching.

Some critics have said that Network Solutions' new practice amounts to front running, but Mitchell disagrees, saying the point of the system is to protect customers from the front-runners.

His company has developed an algorithm, designed to identify legitimate domain name searches and then automatically register the domain names being searched for on behalf of Network Solutions. These domains are held with a Web-page notice saying that they are available for sale for a four-day period. This gives the Network Solutions customer a window of opportunity to purchase the domain before it snatched up by a scammer, Mitchell aid.

Mitchell added that if ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the organization that oversees the domain name system, would move to cut down on these type of scams, then his company wouldn't have to engage in this kind of automatic search registration. "We would be perfectly happy to end this process if ICANN or the registries would do something to protect small businesses or other small users," he said.

A US$0.25 non-refundable domain name registration fee would probably be enough to make domain tasting or front running unprofitable, he added.

Source

Free dot info

2007-11-19T19:59:00.000-07:00

Free dot info is now for sale.

All inquiries can be directed to Sedo.com or email whois@dr.com

ICANN needs to set rules for change of ownerships!

2007-11-19T08:12:00.000-07:00

Why is it that some registrars can offer an automated change of ownership at no cost and then you have some registrars that are still living in the 90s. My recent run in with a deadbeat registrar is with Domainz.net.nz. Their standard change of ownership requires a 2 page form to be filled out by both the buyer and seller, then faxed back to them, a fee of $35 is assessed then it will take 2-5 days for the domain name to get into your account. I paid for the express option which warrants a $75 charge and up to 24 hours (business hours) for the domain to be in my account.

So I printed, scanned, emailed the docs to the seller on Friday (NZ time), they filled them out and faxed them to Domainz right at the close of business on Friday, so then comes Mon (NZ time), I call and they say it will get done today (Mon their time), and would you know it, at 1pm here it will be 8 am tuesday there and still no word. This is ludacris!

With todays technology there should be no reason that internal pushes arent automatic and free of charge. Are there or will there ever be guidelines/rules stating how long it should take and how much they should charge?

ALL INPUT IS APPRECIATED!

Domain names in Indian languages soon

2007-10-30T08:23:00.002-06:00

NEW DELHI: India is all set to join the global bandwagon of local language domain names. Soon you will be able to own domain names in Hindi, Tamil, Sanskrit, Bengali, Punjabi and some other Indian languages.

For trademark owners, the initial registration (called the sunrise period) is expected to open in January 2008. Registration for individual owners, that is, land rush, will begin around March, 2008.

Called IDNs (Internationalised Domain Names), these are popular in Europe (Russia, Germany) and Asia (Singapore, China, Japan, Korea). In some of these countries, IDNs registrations per month surpass those in English.

“It will be one of the most complex roll outs of IDNs in the world. Other countries have only one or two languages but we have about 22 languages in 11 scripts. We plan to offer IDNs in five to six languages in the first phase which will begin next year,” said National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) additional CEO Rajesh Aggarwal. NIXI had earlier launched the .in domain which crossed 3 lakh registrations on Friday.

The IDNs, on the other hand, are in the test phase right now. The guidelines for roll out are being framed by the NIXI along with IT ministry, C-DAC and Internet Service Providers Association of India.

“The same letter may exist both in Tamil and Hindi. Also, within a language it can be represented visually through different set of Unicode characters. We are trying to make the IDNs phishing and spoofing proof,” Aggarwal added.

Currently, any letter in a Devanagiri, Gurmukhi or any other regional script font can be created visually using different codes.

Simply put, if Ram.com is created using one script, the same can be created visually by using a different set of codes. It may lead to a rise in phishing or spoofing of identities.

But NIXI is drafting a counter policy on the same. “To counter this, we will block alternate identities of the same name, which can be created by different codes, except the original identity for every user. We will have a scientific formula on how the visual representation of each character in the domain name will be made. Also, we will have a simple dispute resolution policy,” he adds.

Source

Someone might be stealing your domain name searches, says ICANN

2007-10-30T08:23:00.001-06:00

The Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) of ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has launched a probe into the practice of what it calls domain name front running.

This is where a person checks if a desired domain name is available to register, then finds that it has been taken when they return shortly afterwards to register the name.

ICANN said that there are widespread suspicions that checks for availability are being monitored and the information used to register desired addresses in order to sell them back to the user at a profit.

"When the domain name of interest for which an availability check is made is registered shortly after such a check, the individuals making the availability check may reasonably assume that the organization operating the web site or service they used to determine the availability of the name pre-emptively registered the name," said the report by the SSAC.

It said that through there was not yet firm evidence of how or even if the practice was widespread, it had received complaints.

"Registrants have filed complaints with ICANN, registrars, and with intellectual property attorneys that suggest domain name front running incidents may have occurred," it said. "SSAC does not yet have any hard data to draw conclusions regarding the frequency (if any) of the occurrence of domain name front running."

The name 'front running' comes from the world of finance and refers to stock brokers buying or selling stock in a company after being instructed to take action by a client that will affect the price of shares. That name originally came from the wild west and referred to the purchase of soon-to-be-valuable land when acting on insider information.

People who want to buy a domain name usually check its availability first on websites such as whois.net, or through registrar companies. It is at that point that unscrupulous operators may be registering names in order to profit from the demand for them.

The security committee has listed a number of plausible methods that could be in operation stealing domain ideas. It said that there could be software installed on users' computers which relays domain queries secretly back to an operator, who then exploits that information.

Alternatively, it said that any website could host a whois application and abuse the information gathered.

The SACC report also said that companies operating DNS systems or even registrars and registries themselves could be abusing the query information they receive, or could have staff who do so.

The report said that it is unclear which, if any, of these methods are being used. It said that there could be other explanations for users' finding that checked domains were suddenly registered.

"Alternative explanations have also been suggested. Apparent instances of domain name front running may be mere coincidence or a consequence of domain name tasting," said the report. "In any given month, over a million domain names can be tested for their potential to be profitable for monetization, and there is a reasonable chance that some of these names may coincide with names that have been subject to some form of a domain name availability check during that month."

The report calls for information about and evidence of domain front running from users and companies, and suggests that the internet community formulate a policy of acceptable practices in relation to domain registration to avoid tarnishing the internet and domain industry's reputations.

Source

Internet domain name "insider trading" investigated

2007-10-30T08:21:00.000-06:00

The Internet's main oversight agency is looking into allegations that insider information is being used to purchase the domain names before they're registered by an individual or business.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers says they will be investigating suspicions that someone who has access to domain name search requests has been using the query information to gauge interest in those addresses and profit from it.

ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee, "observes that there does not appear to be a strong set of standards and practices to conclude whether monitoring availability checks is an acceptable or unacceptable practice"

So far, no one has been accused or charged with "domain name front running" but the agency said it wants to prevent "perception from evolving to accepted wisdom."

Source

Dot.Asia domain names!

2007-10-30T08:20:00.000-06:00

"Asia has developed into a global force on the international commercial, political and cultural network. The .Asia domain aspires to embrace this dynamism in the Asia Century to become a nucleus, intersection and breeding ground for Internet activity and development in the region." (The DotAsia Organization)

In December of 2006, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approved the creation of a new Top Level Generic Domain, ".Asia". DotAsia organization (www.dotasia.org) is responsible for .Asia domains.

On October 9, 2007, Sunrise Registration of the ".Asia" domain began and Sunrise 2 will start on November 13. .Asia domains will come alive and be a functional domain in March 2008.

Although the introduction of .Asia domains highlights the commercial, political and cultural features of Asia region, .Asia domain, according to ICANN's definition of the Asia/Asia-Pacific region, has no political or geographical meaning.

Also, all Middle East countries that are similar and could have a specific IDN (multilingual) domain name have been included in .Asia, too.

.Asia comes after the surge in IDN registrations in Asia, and I expected an IDN domain registry. Unfortunately, .Asia domain names are pure ASCII and an IDN domain registry for .Asia is a second thought and planned for the future.

It is not clear what companies will think of .Asia domain names. There are already lots of country code-generic domains in Asia and most companies and business units active in the region prefer to use the country code than the .Asia domain.

There are different languages and cultures in Asia and IDN domain names like .jp or .cn are stronger as people know what language and script they can expect to end up in. The potential customers of .Asia domains are Governments, trademark/servicemark holders, and some companies which have a branch for the Asia region.

The success of .Asia domains in their current form is not predictable, but if it's going to be anything like .EU or .Travel or .Jobs, then its future is not so bright! Landrush (scheduled for February 2008) is when registration of the .Asia domain is open to the public and I am sure there will be a landrush of people registering .Asia domains.

A pioneer domain program will allow people with genuinely good business plans and ideas to avoid the stress of a landrush when attempting to register a premium .Asia domain such as "book.asia", "music.asia" and similar quality names. The program allows people to submit their ideas, business plan, executive plan and marketing strategy for a specific .Asia domain. The best proposal wins the right to operate the best .Asia domains. You can read more about this program at pioneers.domains.asia!

Source

How Domain Names Play a Role in SEO & SEM

2007-10-30T08:17:00.000-06:00

How Domain Names Play a Role in SEO & SEM

By: Aaron Wall
2007-10-29

Many marketing and advertising costs are recurring. Re-registering domain names is a minimal cost, but many domains (especially .com names) get type in traffic...
worth thousands of dollars a year. Many marketing and advertising costs are recurring. Re-registering domain names is a minimal cost, but many domains (especially .com names) get type in traffic worth thousands of dollars a year. Some get type in traffic worth thousands per day. And this traffic stream is defensible from search engine algorithmic swings.

In addition to the defensibility issue, there is a large synergy between great domain names and SEO. Domain names containing your keywords as part of the name make it easier to get your keywords in the anchor text when people reference your company by its official name. This is true even if the domain has hyphens and/or additional words. But domains with hyphens in them are harder to market than domains without hyphens.

Exact match domains make people more likely to give you targeted anchor text when they mention your website. In some cases a strong domain name also makes a site appear more trustworthy and linkworthy.

Exact match domains are given an algorithmic relevancy boost in Google, even if a domain name shows little other criteria that prove it trustworthy.

Exact match domains make it easier to get Google Sitelinks to expand your listing and block out competing sites.

Exact match domains are easier to profit from search engine arbitrage.

Source

INTERNET LAW - DOMAIN NAME REGISTRATION IN GERMANY

2007-10-30T08:15:00.000-06:00

The registry for the .de domain is administered by DENIC in Germany. The Domain Name Contract with DENIC can be concluded once the registration guidelines and general terms and condition laid down by DENIC are fulfilled. The contents of these provisions describe the rights and obligations of the Registry and the Registrant with respect to registration and all issues in relation to Domain Name. There is no restriction on the number of domain names that a single entity or person can register. This article answers the following questions: What characters are permitted for domain name registration under .de in Germany? What duties lie on the Domain Holder at the time of registration? What conditions lead to termination of the domain Contract by the DENIC? What is a DISPUTE entry? What material must be stipulated in an application to dispute entry?
DENIC was established in December 1996 and founded by German Internet Providers. Both German and non-German residents or institutions may register a site using the .de domain name. However, if the registrant is not located in Germany, an administrative contact person must be appointed who is a resident in Germany and must serve as the registrant’s representative for receiving the service of official documents pertaining to the domain name. Parties may register for a domain name either through a Registrar or directly through DENIC.

Before applying for domain name a search by WHOIS Database can be carried out for the availability. The .de domain names are registered for a period of 1 to 10 years subject to renewal and the payment of term fees. German domain name registration is available on a first come first served principle. Also, a registrant may divide its domain name into sub domains. However, such sub-domains are not registered by DENIC, but have to be set up by domain holder or his/her provider.

DENIC registries do not use The Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) established by ICANN for settling disputes about domain names.

What characters are permitted for domain name registration under .de in Germany?

The character permitted for .de domain name registration are character 0-9, the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, hyphens, and other letters listed in the Annex of the DENIC Domain Guidelines. However, such non-numeric or non-letter characters cannot appear as first or last characters of the domain name, nor is it possible for both third and fourth places to be hyphens at the same time. No distinction is made between capital and small letters. The minimum length of a .de domain is three characters and the maximum length is 63 characters. If the domain includes letters from the Annex, the maximum length is determined by its ACE version in accordance with RFC3490 (Request for Comments).

What duties lie on the Domain Holder at the time of registration?

According to the DENIC terms and conditions, the domain name holder must have the following obligations at the time of registering:

• The Domain Holder must give an assurance that the data or information pertaining to holder contained in application for registering the domain is accurate and that the registrant is entitled to register and/or use the domain.

• The registration and use of the domain name does not infringe any person rights nor break any law.

• If the domain name holder is not resident of Germany, in such case the Administrative Contact shall be appointed by Domain holder which is authorized representative for receiving the service of official or court documents.

The Domain holder must ensure that all the necessary technical conditions for the domain’s connectivity are fulfilled. These duties include but are not limited to carrying out a WHOIS query immediately after registration, checking the data published in Survey and informing DENIC immediately of any required corrections to the data as published as well as any subsequent modifications of such data.

What conditions lead to termination of the domain Contract by the DENIC?

Under DENIC terms and conditions, the DENIC has the right to terminate the Domain Contract on substantial grounds without giving any notice beforehand to the holder if,
1. Data communicated by DENIC or the Administrative Contact submitted to the domain holder is incorrect or irrelevant;

2. A Domain Holder, that has abandoned its domicile in Germany or is a non-German resident fails to appoint an Administrative Contract domiciled in Germany even after receiving a formal warning with deadline for compliance;

3. The domain itself includes a manifest illegal statement;

4. The Domain holder has persistently breached substantial duties after receiving a formal warning for compliance;

5. When the registration is confirmed and the Domain holder does not create the necessary technical conditions for the domain's connectivity with a period of four weeks, the Domain Contract is automatically terminated;

6. In a final judgment on the case, it has been determined that the registration of the domain for the Domain holder has infringed the rights of others.

What is a DISPUTE entry?

According to DENIC guidelines, DENIC may place a Dispute Entry on the domain if a third party presents a case to show their right to the domain and taken steps to enforce this right against the Domain Holder. The Dispute Entry remains in effect for one year, but can be extended by DENIC, provided that the holder submits evidence that dispute has not been resolved.

What material must be stipulated in an application to dispute entry?

The application must be placed on a signed application form which confirms that the applicant has already started the process of resolving the dispute with the domain holder or that he intend to do so in the near future. The application must enclose documentary evidence showing the reasonable grounds for claim.

Source

10,000 .eu names suspended amid cybersquatter allegation

2007-09-10T08:39:00.000-06:00

The organisation behind the .eu domain has suspended 10,000 domain names registered by a Chinese woman whom it accuses of being a cybersquatter. The woman, in retaliation, has filed a lawsuit in Belgium.

EURid, the Belgium-based registry for .eu domain names, has blocked the names and has the right to strip the woman, Zheng Qingyin, of the names. EURid legal manager, Herman Sobrie, told OUT-LAW, though, that the organisation wanted to have a court strip Qingyin of the addresses. He said that case would take about a year.

Qingyin has filed a separate suit objecting to the blocking of the domains in the Court of First Instance in Brussels. This is a fast-track case whose result should be known in a month, Sobrie said.

"This Chinese woman has registered over 10,000 names, she is without doubt cybersquatting," said Sobrie. "We know she sells these names to people for serious prices. This is a phenomenon we don't like at all, but there is nothing illegal about this."

EURid cannot take action against someone for cybersquatting; that can only be done by someone else who claims rights to a domain name. But Sobrie said that EURid had received complaints about the woman and had investigated further.

"We as register can just stand there and look at it except in one situation, which is that maybe this registrant is not eligible to have a .eu domain," said Sobrie. Only people or organisations that are based in the European Union are entitled to hold .eu addresses.

"We started asking for more information about her domicile. She said she was domiciled in London. At first we took that for granted, but we had indications that that was probably not true," he said. "We have serious doubts about the eligibility of that lady and at a certain point we thought we had enough reason to say that she wasn't eligible. Under the circumstances we preferred to sue in a Belgian court and have the names revoked by the court rather than do it ourselves and be sued."

Sobrie would not detail the basis of EURid's suspicions ahead of the court case. He did say that he was sure that the woman was cybersquatting.

"When we screen our data bank we see that some people have an amazing amount of names. Nobody needs 10,000 names," he said. "We had a lot of complaints from people complaining to us that they were contacted or they contacted the holder, who said 'make an offer and we'll sell it'. We know the prices were between €500 and €1500."

Last year EURid suspended more than 74,000 domain names and sued 400 registrars for registering the names with a view to re-selling them, in breach of the contract between registrars and the registry.

Source

Fraudster Who Impersonated a Lawyer to Steal Domain Names Pleads Guilty to Wire Fraud

2007-09-07T07:28:00.000-06:00

A Nevada man pleaded guilty Thursday to his plotting to steal URLs from their legitimate owners by impersonating a California intellectual property lawyer and send threatening letters to domain name owners in hopes of convincing them to turn over the domains to him.

Las Vegas resident David Scali registered the email address trademarkinfringement@netzero.net in 2006 and then, pretending to be a real Califonia lawyer (whose intials are K.Y.C.), threatened domain name owners with $100,000 trademark infringement suits, unless they transferred the domains within 48 hours.

Scali pleaded guilty to a single wire fraud charge in a Los Angeles federal court in regards to one case where a victim turned over a domain name similar to citysearch.com. Scali intended to use the domains to make money, most likely by putting ads on the sites to show to visitors who got to the site by mistyping a domain name (domain squatting).

While wire fraud charges carry a maximum of 20 years in the pokey, Scali's plea bargain calls for the government to ask for a sentence of probation to six months. Scali will also face fines and will have his computer usage monitored during probation.

Moral of the story: On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog (or lolcat)-- but they might suspect you're not the IP lawyer you say you are. I mean what high powered intellectual property lawyer would use a Netzero account?

Source

Free NDA / Domain name sales agreement

2007-09-05T13:48:00.000-06:00

Please click on the link to my shared folder for a free NDA and domain name sales agreement!

http://www.box.net/shared/chx3v0usm1

Enjoy!

The Perfect Domain Name

2007-09-05T13:29:00.001-06:00

We all know the Internet is an endless spring of community, entertainment, commerce and information. Unlike traditional mediums (print, TV, radio, brick and mortar businesses), the web promotes interaction by enabling everyone with a computer and a connection to cautiously dip their toes or cannonball full force into the world's biggest pool party. Encouraging that do-it-yourself spirit in each of us are an endless line of designers, programmers and hosts who are anxious to assist even the most technically timid to sprout wings with their own site. However, you'll never make it out of the nest if you don't have the perfect domain name for your site. And thus, the search begins.

Before wasting time by throwing darts at names on a wall, it's best to maintain focus and recognize a few naming parameters. First off, it's paramount that the domain name doesn't confuse potential visitors. Strive for a site name that sounds exactly like it's spelled so you don't need a search engine to find it. A quick trip to Alexa's Top 100 U.S. sites shows there are few exceptions to this rule. With most basic words already spoken for, be prepared to get creative, mixing words together or coming up with an appropriate onomatopoeia.

While it's a good idea for a domain name to describe the site, it's equally important to come up with an original name that is catchy enough to be passed along at the water cooler. Look no further than domain names Yahoo or Google. While these names really don't reveal much about two of the web's most visited sites, they're easy to recall and short on syllables, making it simple for first-timers to find.

If you're after serious traffic, commit to securing a “.com” name. It only takes a quick trip to Alexa to discourage any thoughts of settling for less popular “.org,” “.net” or “.info.” Of the Top 100 traffic-ranked sites in the United States, only 10 ended with something other than “.com.” At the end of the day, why argue with 90% of the country's most-visited sites.

Now that you're armed with these factors, head over to your favorite domain name registrar. Don't get too discouraged when you discover the fabulous names you've painstakingly researched are already spoken for. This is your opportunity to recruit family and friends to get involved by emailing them your naming guidelines. Don't be surprised if someone who isn't invested in the project suggests the perfect, available name.

The company I work for recently survived the re-naming process and we still have the bruises to show for it. Originally named RadioFire.net, we're a site that allows people to discover unsigned music artists in their own communities and across the country. With a complete redesign underway to amplify a more community-oriented experience, our design firm said the “.net” name had to go. The “.com” version of our domain name wasn't available, so we followed the steps above. After much brainstorming and research, we feel we've hit a home run that will elevate our site's experience. Curious? You'll have to stay tuned for the re-launch.

In the meantime, dive into your own website with a great domain name.

Source

He sells employer's domain name (Sofa.com), takes off with stripper

2007-09-05T13:26:00.000-06:00

SHEBOYGAN -- A 41-year-old Sheboygan man was charged today with selling his employer’s domain name for $200,000 and using corporate credit cards to finance international trips with a stripper girlfriend, according to a complaint filed in Milwaukee County Circuit Court.

Stephen M. Galstad, of 429 St. Clair Ave., is accused of selling the sofa.com domain name owned by Dinesen’s Leather Only to a London-based firm without the company’s permission, the complaint said.

He faces up to five years in prison and $25,000 in fines on a felony charge of theft in a business setting. Galstad is in custody awaiting his initial court appearance Tuesday afternoon, officials said.

According to the complaint filed by Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf:

Galstad worked out an agreement in October 2005 with London company Deliverance Pension Scheme to sell the Web address for $200,000. Records subpoenaed by investigators show the domain was transferred to the new owners in November 2005, and $200,000 was wired to Galstad’s personal account about two weeks later.

Galstad, who had worked for Dinesen’s for 16 years and managed the company’s stores, then transferred considerably more than $10,000 to two women, one from New York and one from Brazil. Neither woman was Galstad’s wife, whose divorce from him was finalized in June 2006.

The theft came to owner Lynn Dinesen’s attention when a friend told her the sofa.com address was no longer sending people to the company’s site. The address is operated by a London-based online furniture retailer, which according to its Web site launched in September 2006.

Meanwhile, investigators found Galstad has been using a corporate credit card to travel to Brazil, Canada, Las Vegas and New Jersey with a woman identified by his employer as a stripper from Las Vegas.

Landgraf said the use of corporate credit cards is being investigated, so the total amount stolen is unknown, but in one case his employer said he drained a credit card with a $15,000 limit.

Galstad was confronted by Dinesen and her lawyer in May 2006 and admitted to the thefts, saying he was like “a kid in a candy store” and that he “got greedy.” However, the incident was not reported to police until April 2007.

Landgraf said Galstad immediately repaid Dinesen $66,723 and claimed he gave some of the money to the business in spring of 2006. The claim is being investigated, though it wouldn’t change the criminal act of transferring the money to a personal account, Landgraf said.

Landgraf said the reason for the delay between Dinesen’s discovery and report to police may be related to ongoing business troubles, which have since led to the company declaring bankruptcy.

Harold Stein, an attorney representing Dinesen’s owner Lynn Dinesen, declined to comment without first conferring with Dinesen. No lawyer is listed for Galstad in online court records.

Galstad will be in Milwaukee County Circuit Court at 1 p.m. Tuesday.

Though Milwaukee Police Department detectives are investigating the credit card activity, Landgraf said additional charges are unlikely. Multiple thefts from a single victim are typically grouped into one charge, which in this case is the one already filed.

Source

World's Biggest Domain Name and Internet Traffic Conference Announces T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East 2007, October 9-13

2007-09-05T11:01:00.000-06:00

PEMBROKE PINES, Fla., Sept. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- T.R.A.F.F.I.C., the domain industry's premier conference, today announced T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East 2007, October 9-13, 2007 at the Westin Diplomat hotel in Hollywood, Florida. Presented by the World Association of Domain Name Developers, Inc. (WADND), the conferences, held at three different locations annually, bring together domain owners, search engine companies, leading registrars, pay-per-click aggregators, sponsors, Wall Street investors, the financial and advertising communities as well as analysts and experts on targeted Internet traffic for stimulating discussions of strategies, best practices, trends and networking.

Undeniably, the domain channel has become a major marketing industry. According to Fabulous Research, $400 million in advertising dollars were spent via the domain channel in 2006. Major search engines rely on domain traffic for over 10% of their traffic volume. Moreover, ten million .com marketing websites are controlled by domain portfolio owners. Nearly 800 businesspeople attended the recent, highly successful T.R.A.F.F.I.C. New York City show in June, during which over $12 million in domain names changed hands in only 3.5 hours!

In addition to informative presentations from domain channel and financial experts on Internet traffic, brand value, domain acquisition, portfolio management, revenue options, development, analytics, risk mitigation, security valuation, sales and more, the primary focus of T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East 2007 will be verticals. These key verticals, for which domain owners host substantial traffic, include, travel, real estate, gaming, financial -- any business from Main St. to Wall Street. A full list of events, topics and key speakers is available at http://www.targetedtraffic.com/miami_show.html.

"The domain industry continues to evolve rapidly," says Rick Schwartz, cofounder of T.R.A.F.F.I.C. and WADND. "The serious businesspeople who have invested hundreds of millions in the backbone of the Internet, which includes domainers, know that today's strategies and investment opportunities may not be as important in a few months. We've all learned so much about different types of website traffic, what surfers look for and what translates into sales. Anyone who owns domains, buys and sells Internet traffic, has Pay-Per- Click (PPC) or search-related companies should come to learn and share at T.R.A.F.F.I.C., including investors, major advertisers, IP attorneys and those at the store level on Main Street."

The climax of every T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference is the largest live domain auction in the world, hosted by Moniker.com and its CEO, Monte Cahn. The auction at the recent T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East show included one domain that went for $3 million and another for $1.8 million. In all, more than half of all the domains offered were sold.

For the third straight show TrafficZ.com is our overall Diamond Sponsor. Other major sponsors include Fabulous.com, Klickers, Moniker.com, Sedo, NameMedia, Casale Media, LeaseThis.com, EuroDNS and many others.

Every year at the fall conference T.R.A.F.F.I.C. recognizes the company deemed to have best demonstrated an understanding of the use of domains and the Internet. Dubbed the "We Get It" award, the 2006 winner was News Corp. The nomination process is currently in progress and is open to any organization in any industry among the 1,800 invited to the conference. The criteria for consideration is informal, with the awards open to companies that have proven their grasp of the power of Internet by attracting visitors, increasing sales and beating competitors in terms of Internet marketing. Five finalists will be named September 24, with the winner announced at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East in Miami. Additionally, awards are presented to the Domainer of the Year, Sponsor of the Year, and Best Domain Solution. New members are elected to the Domain Hall of Fame, and the WADND Seal of Approval is bestowed upon registrars who have met certain criteria that prove their commitment to protecting the interests of domain investors.

To request an invitation to T.R.A.F.F.I.C., or to inquire about speaking or sponsorship opportunities, please send email to admin@targetedtraffic.com or fill out our form available at http://www.targetedtraffic.com/contact_us.html.

About T.R.A.F.F.I.C.

Presented by the World Association of Domain Name Developers, Inc. (WADND), T.R.A.F.F.I.C. is the domain industry's premier conference. Three times per year T.R.A.F.F.I.C. brings together domain owners, search engine companies, leading registrars, pay-per-click aggregators, sponsors, Wall Street investors, the banking, financial and advertising communities as well as analysts, developers and experts on targeted traffic. An invitation-only event, conference attendees collectively control over 10 million domain names and host tens of millions of unique visitors to their websites every day. The Internet's biggest companies support and participate in T.R.A.F.F.I.C., including Google, Yahoo!, Sedo.com, Marchex, TrafficZ, Fabulous.com, DomainSponsor.com and many others. Legendary "domain king" Rick Schwartz and Howard Neu, a prominent Intellectual Property attorney and former three-term mayor of North Miami, Florida co-founded and manage the event through their company, the World Association of Domain Name Developers, Inc. (WADND). Corporate headquarters are located at 1152 N. University Drive, Suite 201, Pembroke Pines, Florida, 33024. For more information, send email to admin@targetedtraffic.com or visit us at www.targetedtraffic.com.

Media Contact:
Kent Streeb
Kaya Communications
kent@kayacommunications.com
P: 530.908.9225

Website: http://www.targetedtraffic.com/
Website: http://www.targetedtraffic.com/miami_show.html/

Source

San Bernardino County supervisor sues over domain name

2007-09-05T10:59:00.000-06:00

San Bernardino County Supervisor Dennis Hansberger is suing a local critic to get back his name.

Hansberger won a temporary restraining order Tuesday against William Fanning, a Muscoy resident who has registered several domain names using the supervisor's name, including www.dennishansberger.com, and has used the Web sites to rail against Hansberger.

The order restrains Fanning from profiting, promoting or selling the name, said Tim Prince, an attorney for Hansberger.

A preliminary injunction, in which Hansberger seeks to have the Web site turned over to him, is set for a Sept. 26 hearing.

Hansberger will seek a minimum $1,000 in statutory damages plus attorney fees and court costs if Fanning doesn't voluntary relinquish the Web site, Prince said.

When Hansberger's campaign committee inquired about buying the domain name, Fanning told them it wouldn't be cheap, Prince said.

Fanning did not attend Tuesday morning's hearing and said he had not received a subpoena or court order.

"Until then, I'm not stopping," he said.

On his Web site, Fanning accuses Hansberger of using his position to benefit friends and relatives. He also includes articles from other publications that are critical of the supervisor.

Fanning said he's not trying to make money off the Web site but started it three years ago to shine a light on what he believes are corrupt actions. He said Hansberger's suit would not silence him and predicted it would draw more traffic to his Web site.

"This will end up exploding and backfiring on him big time," Fanning said.

Hansberger could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Prince said Hansberger does not dispute Fanning's right to criticize.

"It's just the use of that name to divert the public from finding the official Web site and finding the Web site that Dennis Hansberger seeks to set up to communicate with the public," he said.

Jennifer Granick, the civil liberties director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that champions the rights of people using the Internet, said the law regarding the fair use of domain names still is hazy.

Web sites were set up to be created on a first-come, first-serve basis, but a federal anti-cybersquatting law was passed in 1999 to offer some protection to trademark owners, she said. It's not clear whether that same protection is available to politicians, Granick said.

"This is definitely an area where there is very little if any precedent," said Granick, who until recently headed Stanford University Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic.

Fanning, who owns a market in Muscoy and is a maintenance worker for the county, estimated that he has registered a few thousand names, including those of about 80 local officials.

San Bernardino City Attorney James Penman, Supervisor Josie Gonzales and County Administrative Officer Mark Uffer are among the local officials whose names he has snapped up on the Internet.

Fanning said the costs to him are minimal -- between $1and $5.

Not all the sites have content, but he said he likes to have them for possible future use.

"I want to get rid of the really bad politicians first, and then I'll go onto the other ones," he said.

Source

Australian Business to Welcome Crack Down on 'Domain Tasting'

2007-09-04T16:36:00.000-06:00

LAWFUEL - The Legal Newswire - Sydney, 4 September 2007: An intellectual property expert with national law firm Hunt & Hunt says the investigation by the leading global regulating body for the Internet, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), into the
practice of ‘domain tasting’ will be welcomed by Australian businesses.

Domain tasting is the controversial process by which users register domain names to test their effectiveness in collecting additional traffic and then cancel registration before fees become due.

The call for the investigation follows the discovery that less than one per cent of .org domain names end up being registered.

“For business owners, this is a much-needed initiative,” said Catherine Logan, who is a partner with Hunt & Hunt.

“People who want to use the Internet to promote their business will welcome the increase in available names. Domain tasting has been unnecessarily tying up millions of available domain names and adversely impacting the average domain name registrant,” she said.

Ms Logan said VeriSign, the company which controls the .com and .net generic top level domains, was set to increase registry fees for these domains next month, to accommodate the upgrade to registration systems required to cope with the flood of automated applications by speculators.

“Clearly the operational load on the registry systems caused by domain tasting is reason for concern,” she said, citing VeriSign’s own figures suggesting that in the last
seven years, domain name inquiries have risen from 1 billion to 30 billion per day.

Ms Logan said that while the lack of domain name choice has become increasingly frustrating for business, criminal practices such as phishing and pharming – activities commonly linked to domain tasting – have posed an even greater concern for businesses operating in an online environment.

According to Ms Logan, anonymous parties frequently register domains as replica sites in an effort to obtain confidential information from unaware customers. Through this practice, users are able to temporarily set up web pages that look similar to authentic sites, and extract private data without risk of identification as they are yet to
register the domain name.

“This loophole obviously presents an unacceptable risk to both businesses and their clients. There are also other unwanted commercial side effects of domain tasting, such as consumer confusion and increased costs to regular businesses that have to register names defensively and allocate resources to monitoring the situation,” Ms Logan said.
She said the ICANN investigation will look for ways to counteract such unnecessary
costs for businesses as a result of this process.

“This investigation is welcomed, particularly at a time when ICANN is proposing to allow the introduction of new generic top level domains,” she said.

Source

Domainers

2007-09-03T10:00:00.000-06:00

Domainers are individuals whose profession is the accumulation and dealing of generic internet domain names. Although controversially compared to cybersquatters and ticket scalpers, Domainers claim to differentiate and legitimize themselves by avoiding trademarked names and potentially contentious domain names, and refraining from typosquatting. They consider their conduct in buying, selling, and developing domain names to be in the same spirit as real estate investing. Domainers generate revenue via domain parking, through the resale of domain names and by developing domain names into fully functioning websites. Domainers are also sometimes referred to as domain investors and commercial registrants.

As of December 2006 there are an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 individuals globally who make buying and selling domain names a part of their business. USA Today reported that many Domainers prefer to remain anonymous due to the competitive and controversial nature of their business.

A report in USA Today states that known sales of 5,851 domain names generated $29 million in 2005, compared with known sales of 3,813 names for $15 million in 2004.Like the tip of an iceberg, the number of reported sales is estimated to be 5-10% of the broader secondary domain resale market.

Source: Wikipedia

Planning for the future

2007-09-03T06:57:00.000-06:00

Before he is even born, some parents are lining up their child’s life.

Trust fund? Check.

Enrollment in that posh pre-school? Done.

Internet domain name? Got it.

Yes, for some parents, getting their child his own domain name is as normal and expected a parental duty as sending him to college.

In fact, some parents wait to name their child until they know the matching domain name is available.

Sounds a bit backward to us, but there you go.

“One of the criteria was, if we liked the name, the domain had to be available,” said Mark Pankow, who wished to name his fifth child “Bennett.” He got his wish.

How important is having an Internet identity?

“It is the starting point for your on-line identity,” Warren Adelman, president of GoDaddy.com Inc., told the Associated Press. “We do believe the domain name is the foundation upon which all the other Internet services are based.”

Of course, Mr. Adelman is in the business of selling domain names.

Not so fast, said researcher Peter Gruenwald, whose company specializes in kids and technology. “Given the pace of change on the Internet, it strikes me as a pretty impressive leap of faith that we’re going to use exactly the same system and the same tools ... 15 to 20 years from today.”

Some parents use the addresses themselves to send out baby updates to friends and family. By the time Junior is old enough to join in, he’ll have a huge network of contacts.

Other parents just lie low, merely paying the annual fee necessary to keep the name. That may be particularly true for parents of daughters - at least if they are wise. If a name is trafficked over the Internet, predators have an easier chance of locating a child as a potential target.

And the easier a name is to remember, the more directly it links to its holder, the simpler it is for a predator to make contact. Finding a child’s picture in a yearbook and typing in her name can quickly call up her Web address.

Joanie Smith is a lot easier to locate at Joaniesmith.com than, say, at jsmith848.com.

What’s fascinating about all this is the assumption by techno-savvy parents that an online identity is so vital - a must-have accoutrement to modern life.

Privacy was once a much stronger value in America. Laconic idols such as Gary Cooper and John Wayne symbolized (among other things) the wisdom of reticence.

Now we share intimate details with Internet strangers whom we style as “friends” - and parents consider it wise to ensure that, one day, their children will be able to do the same.

Source

Bodog.com shut down after judgment

2007-09-02T22:38:00.000-06:00

Bodog.com shut down after judgment

LAS VEGAS, Nevada -- Online gambling Web site Bodog.com has been down since Monday because of a $46.6 million default judgment obtained by Las Vegas-based 1st Technology in a patent infringement case.

The judgment issued June 13 in Nevada federal court was against Bodog Entertainment Group, S.A., Bodog.net and Bodog.com.

According to court filings, software downloaded by the Web site's customers to enable some of the gaming activities infringed on patents held by 1st Technology.

1st Technology is controlled by Los Gatos, Calif.-based Scott Lewis, who has a doctorate in adaptive digital signal processing from Oxford University.

Bodog.com entertainment, headquartered in the Caribbean nation of Antigua, is running off a new Web site, newbodog.com, launched Tuesday.

Lewis and his attorneys could not be reached for comment.

Source

Latest VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief Underscores Growth of Internet Internationally

2007-09-02T22:37:00.000-06:00

Latest VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief Underscores Growth of Internet Internationally

The number of domain names registered globally now totals more than 138 million, according to the second quarter 2007 Domain Name Industry Brief published by VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), the leading provider of digital infrastructure for the networked world.

The largest top-level domains (TLD) in terms of total base of registrations are .com, .de (Germany), .net, .uk (United Kingdom), .cn (China) and .org. A factor in the expansion of domain name registrations in the second quarter was strong growth in country code TLD (ccTLD) registrations, such as China (.cn), Russia (.ru) and South Korea (.kr). ccTLDs grew to about 51.5 million by the end of the second quarter, approximately 13 percent more than the first quarter of 2007, and 36 percent more than the same quarter of last year. Other gTLDs saw growth as well, including .com and .net, which grew to 73 million domain name registrations.

Not surprisingly, as domain name registrations increased, so have the demands on the registry infrastructures that enable users to register domain names, access Web sites, send emails or conduct commerce and communications. VeriSign's registry infrastructure continued to experience heavy demand, processing a peak of 30 billion Domain Name System (DNS) queries per day in the second quarter. The VeriSign DNS continued to maintain operational accuracy and stability for 100 percent of the time as it has for the past nine years. As part of its commitment to continually strengthen its infrastructure, VeriSign in February announced Project Titan, a major initiative to expand and diversify the capacity of its global Internet infrastructure by ten times by the year 2010.

"As the Internet grows and becomes more global, so does the challenge to ensure that businesses and Internet users throughout the world can rely upon it," said Raynor Dahlquist, vice president of Naming Services at VeriSign. "VeriSign is focused on ensuring that as the Internet develops, it remains accessible and operational around the world."

The latest VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief also underscores the growing importance of international business for the more than 840 .com and .net domain name registrars throughout the world. These registrars and their resellers comprise the channel through which domain names are registered. A recent survey conducted by VeriSign found that 80 percent of all registrars draw business from countries outside their home country. Overall, registrars say they view expansion to other countries as an attractive way to build their businesses, with a third of those surveyed planning to expand geographically in the next 12 months.

VeriSign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide Internet users throughout the world with significant statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry and the Internet as a whole. Copies of the 2007 second quarter Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained at www.verisign.com/domainbrief.

About VeriSign

VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN) operates digital infrastructure services that enable and protect billions of interactions every day across the world's voice and data networks. Additional news and information about the company is available at www.verisign.com.

Statements in this announcement other than historical data and information constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause VeriSign's actual results to differ materially from those stated or implied by such forward-looking statements. The potential risks and uncertainties include, among others, the uncertainty of future revenue and profitability and potential fluctuations in quarterly operating results due to such factors as increasing competition and pricing pressure from competing services offered at prices below its prices and market acceptance of its existing services, the inability of VeriSign to successfully develop and market new services and the uncertainty of whether new services as provided by VeriSign will achieve market acceptance or result in any revenues and the risk acquired businesses will not be integrated successfully and unanticipated costs of such integration. More information about potential factors that could affect the company's business and financial results is included in VeriSign's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including in the company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2006 and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and Current Reports on Form 8-K. VeriSign undertakes no obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements after the date of this presentation.

Source

Why PPC Works so Wel

2007-09-02T22:34:00.000-06:00

Why PPC Works so Well..

by Frank Schilling

If I had a dollar for every time somebody offered to "take one of my inactive domains of my hands", I'd have a big, fat, rapper-size brick of cash.

People just don't understand that a parked domain that looks entirely inactive can quietly be making it's owner hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of dollars each month! The user experience is so passive and benign, the ad so inert, "there is just no way you're making more off ads than I'm going to offer you" .. At least that's what I'm told in in a flurry of daily unsolicited sales inquiries. It's not the case of course. Usually unsolicited sales offers have us falling out of our chair they are so laughably out of wack with the revenues (existing or potential) of generic names.

But why is it that people seem to be drawn to ads which so obviously look like ads?.. How are they able to draw clicks and convert into sales so amazingly well?

On the flight home from California today, I read this story in Businessweek. Apparently TIVO has uncovered a parallel phenomenon to domain name PPC ads on TV. Who knew that providing relevant info to the subject matter of the domain name people choose to type, could act as a catalyst to close a sale? Well okay.. it looks obvious now that I write it but in the ad business it is anything but obvious.

Quote: "IF THERE'S ONE LESSON from TiVo Stop||Watch, it's that relevancy outweighs creativity in TV commercials--by a lot. The ads on the "least-fast-forwarded" list aren't funny, they aren't touching, and they aren't clever. And they don't have big budgets."

People pay agencies billions each year to make cool and funny commercials to sell us stuff. Only those commercials don't usually work. The stuff people want, the stuff that sells is much more simple. Give us information so we can make an informed decision.. People want reality in television and reality in advertising... Apparently that's what sells.

Thank-you TIVO.

Source

Paris chosen for next ICANN public meeting

2007-09-02T22:33:00.000-06:00

MARINA DEL REY, Calif.: Paris, France will host the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ 32nd International Public Meeting from 22-27 June 2008.

At its 14 August 2007 meeting, the ICANN Board accepted the proposal put forward by Association pour la Gouvernance de l’Internet en France, en Europe, et dans le monde (AGIFEM).

“ICANN is looking forward to working with AGIFEM and welcoming the global Internet community to Paris,” said Paul Levins, ICANN’s Executive Officer and Vice President - Corporate Affairs. “We had two highly competitive proposals to host the meeting slated for ICANN’s European region – a testament to the great local Internet communities in France and Serbia.”

Each year ICANN holds three meetings in different regions around the world. These meetings constitute an essential part of ICANN's global consensus-building and outreach efforts. The ICANN Meetings Committee sets the regions in which ICANN will hold its meetings. Proposals are then solicited from organizations interested in hosting the ICANN Meeting.

ICANN has received a number of competitive bids to host the 31st Public Meeting, slated to be held 10-15 February 2008 in the Asia-Pacific region. They are being closely evaluated and a decision will be made shortly.

About ICANN:

ICANN is responsible for the global coordination of the Internet's system of unique identifiers like domain names (like .org, .museum and country codes like .uk) and the addresses used in a variety of Internet protocols that help computers reach each other over the Internet. Careful management of these resources is vital to the Internet's operation, so ICANN's global stakeholders meet regularly to develop policies that ensure the Internet's ongoing security and stability. ICANN is an internationally organized, public benefit non-profit company. For more information please visit: www.icann.org.

Media Contacts:

Jason Keenan
Media Adviser, ICANN (USA)
Ph: +1 310 382 4004
E: jason.keenan@icann.org

International: Andrew Robertson
Edelman (London)
Ph: +44 7921 588 770
E: andrew.robertson@edelman.com

Source

PSU’s old website hosts dating, porn links

2007-09-02T22:31:00.000-06:00

NEW DELHI, SEPTEMBER 2 : If hacked e-mail addresses of officials from DRDO, NDA and Indian missions across the world were not enough to expose the holes in India’s cyber security, there is more. The old web address of the Central Inland Waterways Transport Corporation Ltd (CIWTC) — a Kolkata-based PSU under the Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport & Highways — has been hosting a Russian site with elaborate pornographic links for over a month now.

Although the domain name expired in June last year, the CIWTC only launched its new website, www.ciwtcltd.com, recently after it found out about the pornographic links. The old site, www.ciwtc.com, is still there and still has those links.

The PSU has now filed complaints with the police and cautioned National Informatics Centre (NIC). “The website (www.ciwtc.com) was not really hacked but taken over by a Russian company as our domain name had expired. We learnt of some pornographic links displayed on the website and told National Informatics Centre, which blocked the links. So no damage has been done,” said Praful Tayal, CMD of CIWTC.

The Russian www.ciwtc.com lists several pornographic links with the catchline “What you need, when you need it”. On its home page, the site has links under the heads “Hot” and “Popular”. While “Christian Singles” and “Russian Girl” are listed as hot links, “Training in Shalimar Shipyard” and “Old Ladies” are among popular search words.

CIWTC says it has informed the international Internet protocol body — Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — the agency responsible for the global coordination of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers. “We lodged a police complaint a week back and informed the cyber crime cell. We also recently put out advertisements, informing the public of the change in our web address,” Tayal said.

So why did the CIWTC react so late after its URL expired in June 2006? The only IT personnel there took voluntary retirement last year. After he left, no one bothered to check when and how the domain name was taken over by the Russian dating site.

Source

Bodog loses control of domain names in lawsuit.

2007-08-28T22:32:00.000-06:00

At the time of that story, there were few reports regarding the cause for the loss of control, and Bodog’s statement alluded only vaguely to legal issues.

Now reports are surfacing that the domain was awarded to a US citizen as part of a judgment stemming from a patent suit against Bodog that the company failed to respond to. As reported on ShoeMoney.com:

“Earlier today the Bodog website (bodog.com) went down. Many people thought it was just technical issues. A good friend inside Bodog pinged me and told me that the site was actually yanked out from under Bodog’s hands earlier today.

Apparently, some guy in the US who was awarded a patent for something to do with taking bets online filed a lawsuit against Bodog awhile back. Bodog didn’t respond because they are not a US company. So a judge awarded a default judgment of 50 million.

Yesterday, the guy with the judgment used it to seize control of Bodog’s domain names from Enom. Almost all of their sites are now offline, and now they are going to loose all of their SERPS.”

Source

Top 30 Most WASTED Domains!

2007-08-13T17:38:00.000-06:00

Top 30 Most WASTED Domains!

Domains are very precious assets. So precious and so profitable that some players out there are pouring millions for just one domain name in order to make even more money out of it. These kinds of people understand the true value of online assets. They also understand that just having the domain is not enough and they have to invest and put work on it to make it profitable.

However there are other people who already possess these domains that can turn them very rich and don’t even know it. They either don’t understand the internet or think the most money they can make out of their 7 figure domains is parking them to make some dollars everyday.

What is considered a prime domain? A single word domain that is no longer than 7 or 8 characters and that represents something valuable in the world today or something commonly used, and that can easily be profitable with just enough imagination.

Here are the top 30 domains that are wasted to the purest form imaginable. PageRank and Alexa are also used in the analysis. It is true that neither of them really represent real traffic levels, but when the domains have both a PageRank of 0 and an Alexa of 5 million, we can safely say that their servers won’t crash anytime soon.

I’m sure a lot of these parked domains are making a lot of money just standing there, and their value will grow over the years as well, but the money they could possibly make if developed is incomparable. Here is the list in no specific order.

1) Cool.com
PageRank: Unranked
Alexa: Over 350,000
This domain is simply parked.

2) Hot.com
A single page with nothing on it except a lame colored logo. The sky is the limit for a domain like this.

3) Porn.com
PageRank: Unranked
Alexa: Unranked
This one is parked too but has a cool design. I’m guessing it’s making decent money, but no where near what a domain of this weight can bring in. Any regular developed porn site attached to this domain could make the profits hit the roof.

4) Sexy.com
After being presented with a warning page of enter or exit, the only thing you see next is a parked page.

5) Alien.com / 6) Ufo.com
These two can be put in the same category. With all the talk about aliens and ufo’s, these domains can be instant success.
Instead, Alien.com is a 404 page!!
And Ufo.com just a parked page.

7) Toy.com
PageRank: 0
Alexa: Over 3 million
An amazing 3 letter domain! Yet just another parked page.

8 ) Pal.com
Some sort of weird and unpopular search engine. Another great 3 letter domain put to waste.

9) Queen.com
Parked

10) Oral.com
Parked

11) Crazy.com
Parked. Could easily be used to feature all sorts of crazy videos or stories.

12) Pro.com
Wow! What can I say. A 403 forbidden! Some people would do anything just to have the word pro in front of another word in their domains, like proplayer or propoker…This person has the 3 letter by itself, and doing nothing!

13) Cash.com
PageRank: Unranked
Alexa: Over 2 million
Just parked.

14) Card.com
Parked for some credit cards. Could be used for a gambling site or a developed credit card site.

15) Super.com
Parked

16) Store.com
This thing could be something similar to eBay or Amazon, but it is just parked.

17) Cloth.com / 18) Clothing.com
Each of them could be the central location for anything related to clothing, but just parked.

19) Personal.com
A great domain for a dating site or personal resource information site, but parked.

20) Join.com
Parked

21) Fight.com
PageRank:1
Alexa: Over 1 million
Anything about boxing and UFC and mixed martial arts can be discussed here and it would easily be the #1 reference on the subject.

22) Gamble.com
PageRank: 3
Alexa: Over 8 million
Parked

23) Home.com / 24) House.com
One of them parked, the other one slightly developed. In the mortgage world, these domains can make more profit than anything else.

25) Dance.com
Parked.

26) Pay.com
Parked

27) Host.com
Parked. Can you find a better domain name for a hosting company?

28) Men.com
PageRank:3
Alexa: Over 250,000
Acquired for 1.3 million dollar and seems fully developed. However, a domain like this carries so much power that it is ridiculous it is not more popular.

29) Plan.com
PageRank:0
Alexa: Over 5 million
Parked

30) My.com
A 2 letter domain! Seems like an unsuccessful hosting company. This is the only 2 letter domain in this list, and man this is wasted.

Source

Internet domain names the new 21st century real estate

2007-07-31T14:41:00.000-06:00

Inside a midtown hotel, Larry Fischer is on his cell phone with a financial backer as his partner Ari Goldberger does quick research on a laptop computer.

They are bidding furiously at this auction of Internet domain names, with hopes of snagging megayachts.com. The duo won't be deterred. They want this name.

"$110,000 (€79,693), yes or no? Quick," Fischer barks at Eli, the investor at the end of the phone.

Someone else makes a bid for $120,000 (€86,938). Fischer and Goldberger up the ante, and then again.

Going once, going twice ... sold to Fischer and Goldberger for $150,000 (€108,672).

These are boom times in an estimated $2 billion (€1.45 billion) industry that involves the buying and selling of domain names. When people type the generic names into their Web browser's address field, sites that generate pay-per-click advertising revenue appear. Such "direct navigation" bypasses search engines.

"This industry is like the wild, wild West right now and people have no idea how fast it's growing," said Jerry Nolte, managing partner of Domainer's Magazine, a new trade publication devoted to this little-known world.

Some believe the industry's market value could reach $4 billion (€2.9 billion) by 2010 as people continue to purchase approximately 90,000 names a day and the number of domain registrars swells.

At the end of first quarter 2007, at least 128 million domain names had been registered worldwide, a 31 percent increase over the previous year, according to VeriSign Inc., which runs some of the core domain name directories for the Internet.

"It's not about words," said Monte Cahn, founder and CEO of Moniker.com, a company that specializes in domain asset management and held the Manhattan auction. "It's like real estate. This industry is only about a decade old. People looked at domain names as a commodity. It's a piece of real estate on the Web that can't be replaced. It's your stake in the ground, your stake in the Internet."

At the Manhattan auction, Fischer and Goldberger snatched up four names for more than $1.2 million (€870,000) and a fifth for a client, representing only a handful of the names sold for a total of $12.4 million (€9 million) during both the live and silent auction.

The auctions were held during a domain conference in June that attracts some of the biggest players in this niche business.

One name — creditcheck.com — went for $3 million (€2.2 million) but paled in comparison to the sale of sex.com, which sold for $12 million (€8.7 million) last year, according to Cahn, who knew the site's buyer and seller.

Fischer, 44, and Goldberger, 46, figured there was money to be made early.

Goldberger's entry into the business was unorthodox to say the least. In 1996, the Hearst Corp. sued him, alleging trademark infringement after Goldberger registered esqwire.com, which resembles one of the company's magazines.

The two sides eventually settled and Goldberger, a lawyer, was allowed to keep the name. Word got out that Goldberger knew something about the thorny legal issues involving Internet domain names and people began approaching him for advice.

Goldberger's fascination with the burgeoning industry was sealed.

"I was an entrepreneur strapped into this suit-and-tie job," Goldberger said. "Kind of a square peg in a round whole and this lawsuit just kind of changed everything for me."

He eventually left the respected Philadelphia law firm where he worked in 1997 and joined a small startup in Manhattan called mail.com, which was buying up domain names.

Goldberger began collaborating with Fischer in 2001, building their portfolio of domain names. Together, they became a formidable yet quirky team.

Two years later, they created a company called smartname.com, which they sold earlier this year. The company took names and provided content and links for owners, getting a cut of the advertising revenue. At one point, smartname.com represented 150 owners with about 150,000 domain names, generating 50 million unique visitors a month.

Most of the sites are lucrative for their advertising dollars. For example, megayachts.com isn't an actual yachting site, but it contains numerous ads and links for real yacht companies, boats and cruises. The owners of the site get paid each time a viewer clicks on one of those links.

Goldberger and Fischer declined to say how much money they make from pay-per-click advertising.

Bob Parsons, CEO and founder of domain registration company GoDaddy.com, says this type of business is fairly straightforward.

"They make their money in two ways," Parsons said. "One way is through the traffic they get and the other is the appreciation of the name."

Parson didn't think there was anything wrong with the practice as long as those involved weren't using names trademarked by others.

"Domain names are becoming 21st century real estate," Parsons said. "Just owning a domain name as an investment, I don't see a problem with that."

Anthony Malutta, a lawyer who specializes in trademark law at a San Francisco law firm, sees fewer trademark infringement cases thanks to improved laws.

"Trademark law involving domain laws is much clearer and much easier to understand," he said. "It's pretty clear that registering a domain name that corresponds to somebody's trademark is actionable. As to generics, they're just hoping to capture traffic. You're just counting on people typing in generic names instead of using a search engine like Google."

Malutta said domainers like Goldberger and Fischer are not "gaming the system" which in his opinion would mean registering domain names and then cybersquatting — driving revenue off somebody else's trademarked name like Coca-Cola.

Over the years, Goldberger and Fischer have sharpened their formula for acquiring domain names and developing the sites using a fairly simple template, relying on research, savvy and plenty of instinct.

"You either know it or don't by hearing the name," Fischer says.

They look for names that hit the "sweet spot" — short words that describe a high-value product or services related to it. Words that allow them to own a category such as bald.com and cardiology.com, two of the domain names they bought at the auction.

To help figure out a word's potential value, they see how many hits it will produce using Google. They also troll lists of names with domain registrations set to expire, enabling them to get a jump on buying it.

They don't bother with dot-nets or the others.

"Dot-com is king," Goldberger said. "Dot-net is worthless."

But there's a big divide between thinking of a good name and getting it. There's usually a chase, with Fischer trying to persuade owners to sell the names after he locates the owners unless it's up for auction.

"He's kind of like a rhinoceros," Goldberger says about Fischer. "He chases them up a tree and waits them out. He has patience and determination. You got to be aggressive. It's a tough game now. It's like the gold rush. The first guys did really well then it became more difficult."

And expensive. Five years ago, the duo could get a good name for $10,000 (€7,245). Now the minimum is more like $100,000 (€72,448) — as the auction proved. The cheapest name they bought at the auction was blogging.com for $135,000 (€97,805). Other names sold for considerably less like irishwhiskey.com ($8,000, €5,796) and Jewishdeli.com ($9,000, €6,520).

At the moment, Fischer, Goldberger and Eli are sitting on their names. They've recently turned down million-dollar offers for stocks.com and home.com.

But as white-hot as this business has been, it might not continue to mint millionaires.

"How long will this model last?" Malutta asked. "It's definitely a temporal piece of real estate. As technology evolves, maybe direct navigation will fall off the charts and there goes your property."

Source

Online domain name game yields real profits for virtual brokers

2007-07-31T14:38:00.000-06:00

The Web addresses that businesses and people online call home have spawned the equivalent of a real estate boom in the real world with speculators, appraisers, developers, investors, and brokers turning the names typed on navigation bars into hefty profits.

"It is a global, multibillion-dollar industry," said Peter Lamson, senior vice president and general manager of Waltham-based NameMedia Inc.'s domain name marketplace. "Customers need to find your doorstep. A brick-and-mortar business needs an attractive address, and it's no different online."

In the 1990s, speculators registered Internet domain names on the cheap, often hoping to make a lucrative flip selling them to someone else. When the tech bubble burst, many were left with little more than words.

But as money has flooded into Web-based businesses such as MySpace and YouTube and online advertising has grown explosively -- rising by nearly a third each year for the past three years -- domain names have become a hot investment.

Some industry watchers said that the market could prove volatile over time, and there's always the potential that a speculator will be left with nothing more than a string of words.

"There's value there -- a few of these companies think they're worth half a billion because they've got all this waterfront property," said Todd Dagres, general partner and cofounder of Spark Capital, a firm that invests mainly in media, technology, and entertainment businesses. "Right now, the stock's rising because we're in a fairly frothy market."

Backed by venture capital firms Highland Capital and Summit Partners, NameMedia has raised more than $100 million in debt, according to a New York Times story, with the help of Goldman Sachs and owns 750,000 domain names as well as marketplaces where people can buy or sell names. This outfit of "cyber real estate tycoons," as president Jeffrey Bennett calls it, is just one of three local firms that are playing a leading role in the rush for prime virtual space.

Internet Real Estate Group LLC, with offices amid the boutiques of Newbury Street, takes a luxury developer's approach to the domain names game. The company turns a select number of "premium" domains -- site names that are instantly recognizable, such as jeans.com, chocolate.com, or software.com, into full-fledged Internet businesses with content, ads, and products for sale. Taking another tack, Sedo.com LLC, a German company with US headquarters in Kendall Square, handles more than $3 million of transactions every month, acting as a kind of eBay for domain names.

DN Journal, an online publication that follows the industry, has tracked five sales this year that topped $1 million each-- including Porn.com and Seniors.com -- and 50 for $100,000 or more as of July 22.

"We're about three years into a major upturn," said Ron Jackson, editor of DN Journal. "A ton of ad revenue started flowing from traditional media models onto the Web and it's been unbroken upward momentum."

While people frequently navigate the net by punching keywords into search engines, an estimated 10 percent of searches occur when people type keywords directly into their address bar. That means a website with a common name, such as WiFi.com, already generates a certain amount of natural traffic, and people who buy a portfolio of names could earn a dividend on their investment just by putting ads up, according to Jeremiah Johnston, chief operating officer at Sedo.com.

Think of domain names "as analogous to buying spectrum in the wireless world or channels on television or buying real estate," said David Liu, managing director of Jefferies Broadview in Silicon Valley.

Mike "Zappy" Zapolin and Andrew Miller, founders of Internet Real Estate Group, got into the domain business in 1998, buying beer.com for $80,000 from a young man in Colorado, who they said used the website to post photos of inebriated people vomiting. The owner, hoping to buy more beer, posted a banner asking for advertising.

They sold beer.com four months later for $7 million. Now, they believe the businesses they are building will ultimately be worth hundreds of millions.

"In real estate, if you built a building and were offered three times what you paid for it in a week, you'd be thrilled," Zapolin said.

"A piece of virtual real estate, on the other hand, may cost a thousand or a million, but bring in 50 times greater return. "It's like buying Madison Avenue 110 years ago."

Acting as a broker, Sedo takes a different approach from Internet Real Estate Group and NameMedia -- listing, but not owning 8 million domain names, and taking a 10 percent commission on each sale.

The company also provides services to help people put content on their domains, so they can earn some revenue when people stumble on the sites and click on ads. Recently, Sedo managed the sale of Vodka.com for $3 million and Chinese.com for $1.1 million.

"We were being told when the company was founded that it was the worst possible timing," Johnston said. "It turned out to be excellent."

Source

Useful Information on Registering Domain Names

2007-07-31T14:37:00.000-06:00

Registering a domain name has become a very simple, common procedure. People all over the world from all kind of different countries register domain names for different purposes. So if you are also interested in registering a domain name, there are some things you should know before starting the entire procedure.

There are many aspects regarding the procedure of registering a domain name. Some domain names are available from some resources but some others aren’t yet on the market. Consequently, if you want to use a certain domain name you have no other choice but using the services of that domain name’s registrars. If you are wondering what a domain registrar is, you should know that they are being approved by the ICANN or the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The purpose of this organisation is to help people like you in getting a domain name.

The first thing you should know is the fact that nobody can access and change the leading data base of that domain name you are using. This is possible because InterNIC is dealing with the leading data base, together with the domain name registrars. In the end, the domain name registrars are in charge of everything when it comes to registering a domain name. And if you are wondering what the leading data base might be, here is the answer. The leading database is a database which contains the entire necessary documentation on all the domain names registered until the date you register too.

Another thing you should be aware of is the fact that some domain name registrars sometimes happen to be out of the list. It is most likely that these registrars are actually taking hold for registering a domain name and they are in the end reselling the domain name for the accredited domain name registrar.

But these kinds of registrars don’t do this registering thing for free. In most cases they state their fee for registering domain names. The price is actually a fee paid every year which is usually paid by the domain name holders and consumers. These domain name registrars are also offering some discounts for those who will register for longer than a year. The longest period of domain name registration is maximum 10 years.

In conclusion, registering domain names has become a very common thing to do. You just have to pay the fee and there you are: you have registered for a domain name!

For an established site to facilitate the buying and selling of domain names, domain name ownership , domain names trading just visit us.

Source

Moniker.com Brokers Two Multi-Million Dollar Domain Name Sales at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. NYC CreditCheck.com and Seniors.com Both Sold During the Auction

2007-06-23T20:32:00.000-06:00

During intense live bidding, CreditCheck.com and its associated Web site FreeCreditCheck.com sold for U.S. $3 million combined while Seniors.com sold for $1.8 million.

Pompano Beach, FL (PRWEB) June 22, 2007 -- Yesterday, more than 300 individuals packed the ballroom at the Hyatt Grand Central in NYC to bid on some of the world's most premium domain names at the culmination of T.R.A.F.F.I.C NYC, the leading domain name industry conference. The auction was hosted by Moniker.com, the first and only provider of Domain Asset Management™, who also brokered the sales.

During intense live bidding, CreditCheck.com and its associated Web site FreeCreditCheck.com sold for U.S. $3 million combined while Seniors.com sold for $1.8 million.

Moniker's domain name auctions at previous T.R.A.F.F.I.C. events have already placed it as a leader on DN Journal's "Year-To-Date Global Contenders" chart. Moniker's T.R.A.F.F.I.C. auctions, not including yesterday's sales, were responsible for 32 of the top 100 sales worldwide in 2007 alone. The sale of CreditCheck.com and Seniors.com added two additional names to that list, making Moniker the current leader of million dollar domain transactions in 2007 among other registrars followed on the chart.

In total, the event netted over $10 million; final figures are currently being validated.

Monte Cahn,co-founder and CEO of Moniker.com, is available for immediate comment on yesterday's event. He can discuss the value of premium, generic domain names, the impact direct navigation is having on the online advertising and marketing community and the overall demand for domains in the marketplace. Please contact Erin E. Burke at 212.367.6837 or erin.burke @ eurorscg.com for more information.

More Million Dollar Sales?

In conjunction with the Live Auction, Moniker is still conducting a Silent Auction of premium domain names on its Web site, Moniker.com. Names such as Beef.com, 360.com, Opinions.com, Polls.com, TheHamptons.com and Mommy.com are still on the auction block for interested bidders. In addition, domains that received bids well into the million dollar range at the Live Auction but failed to sell will now be available in the Silent Auction. These domains include Scotland.com, Student.com, PressReleases.com, PuertoRico.com, Dermatology.com, Auction.com and Stuff.com.

Source

Tucows Sells 2,500 Domain Names

2007-06-21T08:37:00.000-06:00

TORONTO, June 19 /CNW/ - Tucows Inc. (AMEX:TCX, TSX:TC) today announced
that it has sold approximately 2,500 domain names from its portfolio of domain
names for US$3.0 million in a private transaction. Tucows may earn up to an
additional US$1.2 million if certain performance criteria are met. Any
additional payment will be payable in one year's time.
"This sale indicates some of the latent value of our domain name
portfolio," said Elliot Noss, President and CEO of Tucows Inc. "As I have
stated in the past, we will continue to be opportunistic with our domain name
assets. While, this transaction does contain revenue-generating assets, we
felt that the sale was appropriate. This transaction also provides us with an
opportunity to step back and evaluate some operating possibilities.
Accordingly, while we now believe our cash flow from operations for 2007 will
likely be at the top end of the US$10 million to US$12 million range, we do
not expect to be discussing any possible change in guidance until our next
conference call at the earliest."

This release may contain forward-looking statements, relating to the
Company's operations or to the environment in which it operates, which are
based on Tucows Inc.'s operations, estimates, forecasts and projections. These
statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to
important risks, uncertainties and assumptions concerning future conditions
that may ultimately prove to be inaccurate or differ materially from actual
future events or results. A number of important factors could cause actual
outcomes and results to differ materially from those expressed in these
forward-looking statements. Consequently, investors should not place undue
reliance on these forward-looking statements, which are based on Tucows Inc.'s
current expectations, estimates, projections, beliefs and assumptions. These
forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this presentation and
are based upon the information available to Tucows Inc. at this time. Tucows
Inc. disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any
forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future
events or otherwise.

About Tucows

Tucows Inc. is the largest Internet services provider for hosting
companies and ISPs. Through our network of over 7,000 service providers around
the world we provide millions of email boxes and manage over seven million
domains. Tucows is an accredited registrar with ICANN (the Internet Corporate
for Assigned Names and Numbers). Tucows remains one of the most popular
software download sites on the Internet. For more information please visit:
http://about.tucows.com.

Domain names for sale! Tobacco.info, and more!

2007-06-14T10:29:00.001-06:00

Please contact me at godfrey90sf@aol.com, or call (307) 220-3440 regarding the purchase of these domain names. All payments will be made via Paypal, buyer pays fees.

aids.info - 23,000

Fear.info $4,000

Distance.info $3,000

john.info - 5,000

arabia.info - 7,500

juan.info - 5,000

jim.info - 7,000

robert.info - 3,500

Lee.info - $8,000

exercise.info – 15,000

tobacco.info – 15,000

dave.info – 4,600

NorthKorea.info -15,500

SouthKorea.info – 15,500

Healthy.info – 13,500

Wrestling.info – 12,000

Handguns.info – 4,500

The domain names are also for sale here:
http://www.dnforum.com/showthread.php?t=234001

Chinese domain names used.

2007-06-13T08:54:00.000-06:00

Important Websites run by city government departments have adopted domain names using Chinese characters to make them easier for elderly people and others not fluent in pinyin to use, the city's IT commission said yesterday, Shanghai Daily reported.

Names using Chinese characters have been adopted by the Websites run by the Shanghai Municipal People's Congress Website (www.spcsc.com) and the local government's portal (www.shanghai.gov.cn), which attracted 200 million page-views in 2006, according to Shanghai Municipal Informatization Commission. They can still be reached using their old domain names.

Source
www.whataredomains.com

What's wrong with .biz domains?

2007-06-13T08:53:00.000-06:00

What's Wrong wth .biz Domain Names

Submitted by Aaron Wall on Mon, 06/11/2007 - 08:08.

Question: I have a .biz website that ranks well in some of the major search engines for a few keywords, but does not rank as well as I would like for many other keywords. Should I consider switching to a .com domain name?

Answer: In the long run I think it is worth moving away from .biz if you are creating a real long-term business. The web was created to share information, and businesses are generally viewed less admirably than the individuals that work in them. As long as relevancy algorithms are based largely on links, then a .biz extension could hurt your exposure in most fields.

Most web companies that control large traffic flow have taught their userbase (and those who they trust to vote) that commercial = spam. To put this in perspective, some journalists write entire articles about businesses and then do not link to the businesses because they feel that doing so would be too promotional. In competitive fields sometimes only a few links separate a business that is getting 5% of the traffic or 30% of the traffic a search engine offers.

If you are starting your business on a .biz it doesn't matter if you have the best information in the world...the bias of .biz (and toward business in general) is going to hurt your exposure, making your business less efficient and increasing your business cost. The small businesses that are best sustainable on the web are those that function as businesses yet have the feel of non-commercial sites (and acquire links as though they are non-commercial sites).

Source
www.whataredomains.com

The Apple iPhone

2007-06-05T23:10:00.000-06:00

Capping literally years of speculation on perhaps the most intensely followed unconfirmed product in Apple's history -- and that's saying a lot -- the iPhone has been announced today. Yeah, we said it: "iPhone," the name the entire free world had all but unanimously christened it from the time it'd been nothing more than a twinkle in Stevie J's eye (comments, Cisco?). Sweet, glorious specs of the 11.6 millimeter device (that's frickin' thin, by the way) include a 3.5-inch 480 x 320 touchscreen display with multi-touch support and a proximity sensor to turn off the screen when it's close to your face, 2 megapixel cam, 4GB or 8 GB of storage, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and A2DP, WiFi that automatically engages when in range, and quad-band GSM radio with EDGE. Perhaps most amazingly, though, it somehow runs OS X with support for Widgets, Google Maps, and Safari, and iTunes (of course) with CoverFlow out of the gate. A partnership with Yahoo will allow all iPhone customers to hook up with free push IMAP email. Apple quotes 5 hours of battery life for talk or video, with a full 16 hours in music mode -- no word on standby time yet. In a twisted way, this is one rumor mill we're almost sad to see grind to a halt; after all, when is the next time we're going to have an opportunity to run this picture? The 4GB iPhone will go out the door in the US as a Cingular exclusive for $499 on a two-year contract, 8GB for $599. Ships Stateside in June, Europe in fourth quarter, Asia in 2008.

Source
www.whataredomains.com

Masters of their domains

2007-06-05T12:56:00.000-06:00

The domain-name market is enjoying a great resurgence, writes Dan Skeen.

FOR years, gleeful capitalists have read about moon-shot domain speculation deals, as when Marc Ostrofsky sold the Business.com domain and turned his $US150,000 ($A183,000) investment into a $7.5 million sale. But the domain name market itself has had a phenomenal revival.

Australia is cashing in as well. Last week, jobs.com.au was bought by an obscure internet firm for a reported six-figure sum.

Shaking off some lean years following the dotcom deflation of the late 1990s, it is in the middle of a buying spree that may never be repeated. Like today's crop of web 2.0 success stories, new momentum has come from more sophisticated technology and more profitable opportunities. These same trends have fostered the growth of massive domain name portfolios that some claim have the potential to make Warren Buffet drool.

Dan Warner, chief strategy officer at Brisbane-based Dark Blue Sea Limited, is used to watching multimillion-dollar sales of domains such as Diamond.com and Vodka.com take the headlines. His story of a slow and steady accumulation of domains, bought for less than $7 and sold for thousands, day in and day out for several years, lacks get-rich-quick appeal. Yet this measured approach to domain accumulation has grown a $A5 million initial investment into a company with a market cap of $68 million.

His company holds the world's second-largest portfolio of domain names, with more than 550,000. NameMedia Inc., of Waltham, Massachusetts, has about 725,000. Together, these two companies hold more than 1 per cent of the world's domains.

Mr Warner recalls that just two years ago only 18 or 19 companies had more than 10,000 domains; today he estimates that 50 companies have portfolios of more than that size. "Everyone's been buying like mad," he says.

There certainly has been growth of domain-name portfolios: businesses built entirely around domain names, says Warren Adelman, president and chief executive of the world's largest domain name registrar, GoDaddy.

Last year saw the total number of top-level domain registrations reach 120,000,000, according to VeriSign, an increase of 32 per cent for the year. And the big portfolios are getting bigger. It's a buyers' market in the minds of many who make a living off domain names, which would explain why the pace of buying hasn't yet been matched by sales volume in the domain-name aftermarket.

"People were originally speculating, but over the last few years people are realising that this market is still emerging and is quite undervalued," says Alessandro Sorbello of Brisbane-based Intuitive Domains. "So the tendency is to acquire domain names and not put them on the market but to hold them."

One factor driving this buying spree is the effectiveness of cost-per-click contextual advertising offered by Yahoo! and Google. Before 2003, parked domains relied on generally less-lucrative banner ads. Today's parked pages serve up sponsored links related to the domain name which, when clicked, earn revenue for the domain owner. "There's a whole industry that has arisen from the monetisation of these domain names through the application of content on these pages," Mr Adelman says. According to VeriSign, 23 per cent of all .com and .net domains - almost 15 million sites - consist entirely of a single parked page.

One might think a website with no real content would not attract visitors, but domain speculators are attuned to the notion of direct navigation or "natural search", where an internet user types a URL directly into their browser address bar assuming they will find related content. For example, a fishing enthusiast might go directly to a likely domain name such as Queenslandcharters.com. If the page has nothing but a set of advertiser links to related content, there's a good chance for a click-through. The pay-off is small change for each click but direct navigation added up to $US800 million in 2006 and could reach $1.1 billion this year, says Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets.

Another factor encouraging buyers is improvements in the aftermarket buying and selling process. Popular exchanges such as Fabulousdomains.com, GreatDomains.com and Sedo.com list thousands of domains available for sale. Domain name auctions are also a popular method of selling off inventory.

Finally, the automated tools of the trade have improved dramatically. Five years ago Dark Blue Sea created a market intelligence engine designed to find domain-name opportunities based on factors including the frequency of a search phrase in search engines, and bids by search engine advertisers for those terms. While Mr Warner won't divulge any trade secrets, what he describes is a sophisticated software system founded on language recognition. "What we do is much closer to linguistics than it is to some sort of marketing activity," he says. The capacity to mine and manage millions of domain names has been used in some cases for dubious business practices that, like registered trademark domain squatting of old, have tainted the efforts of an industry that has already seen its share of scandalous practices.

One of these is "domain tasting" or "catch-and-release", a practice where the buyer takes advantage of a five-day grace period designed to allow a domain registrant to get a refund if an error (such as a typo in their submission) has been made. Some domain name buyers have leveraged this loophole to purchase millions of domains, monitor their traffic for five days, and then return all but the best few for a full refund. Some have gone further with a practice known as "kiting". They leverage the same five-day grace period, but perpetually release and renew within the five-day window, essentially owning the domains at no cost. For the most part, registries such as VeriSign have worked with registrars to modify their terms and conditions to put an end to kiting.

New entrants to the domain business are finding many ways to make a profit. Mr Warner suggests that natural language tools have picked clean all the best opportunities, but others are more optimistic about their odds for portfolio building.

Mr Sorbello says: "It's still possible to register interesting domain names, but you just have to be a little more creative. We register five to 10 per month in market sectors that people have just overlooked or that have come back into the market."

Also, Mr Adelman says, . a memorable name may be more important for a budding business than one that draws traffic from direct navigation. "We chose GoDaddy not because it told people what we did, but it was certainly something we wanted people to remember, and we felt that GoDaddy would be remembered," he says with a laugh.

Peter Davis, a Boston-area entrepreneur who makes a living selling websites, has found a nice gap between the sale price of some websites and the domain-name aftermarket. "There are instances where I've bought a website that was sold based on current earnings, and you can strip the files off the site and sell the domain for incrementally more than the website was worth itself," he says. He looks for domains in "bottom-feeder" places where people are selling sites.

Perhaps the most value is being derived from those who put in the effort to develop domains. One popular strategy is to acquire several quality domains within a niche category and then develop a portal based on that topic. Done right, it also enables the developer to then sell that site for a vastly greater sum. Shopping.com is an example. The owners took this excellent domain and added non-proprietary technology, affiliate product, and then used search advertising to drive traffic to the site. eBay bought the business and the domain for $US620 million in 2005.

Some investors forgo research and instead invest directly in companies with large portfolios of domain names. In much the same way that a real-estate trust or a mutual fund attracts investors through the value of the underlying holdings, publicly traded companies such as Marchex and Dark Blue Sea rely on the growth potential of their domain-name portfolios as an incentive for investors.

For a Brisbane-based company with 550,000 domains in its portfolio, one might expect a healthy supply of .com.au domains. But Mr Warner says he has none.Mr Sorbello, also based in Brisbane, has none either. "This market is extremely buoyant in many parts of the world, but because the .com.au domain name system has been so stringently regulated . . . that essentially stifles the Australian marketplace," Mr Sorbello says.

The .com.au suffix is managed by .au Domain Administration Ltd (auDA) and governed by different regulations than most top-level domains. To buy domains you must first pass residence restrictions and prove a "close and substantial connection" to the name being registered. Perhaps most prohibitive is a restriction on selling domains in bad faith for speculative purposes - a domain can only be sold if a business is sold with it. Some speculators have worked around this by adding a business registration and selling the domain as an asset of that business, but the need for such workarounds is enough to discourage many domain name companies.

However that policy is up for review. Derek Whitehead, chairman of auDA's 2007 Names Policy Advisory Panel, isn't too concerned about what the domain-name speculators are buying. "For ordinary businesses it's an open question as to whether they're interested in buying and selling domain names," he says.

Not surprisingly, speculators such as Mr Warner are hopeful for a marketplace more characteristic of other regions.

"If domain names were easier to buy, trade, sell and transfer as assets, it would probably free up a lot of domain stock held by speculators that won't give the domains up - but also have no means to extract their value," he says.

Domain-name companies dislike the extensive paperwork associated with .com.au domains. Mr Warner also cites cost as a factor, comparing his wholesale domain registration rate of $US6.25 for .com domains to the $30 or $40 required for a .com.au domain. Another disincentive is the lack of natural traffic, as those who use direct navigation will rarely visit a .com.au suffix.

But don't expect any gold rush on Australian virtual real estate when the results of the policy review are made available (about July). "If there was a decision to create some kind of an aftermarket, it's highly likely that it would be a regulated aftermarket," Mr Whitehead says.

"Certainly some of the rules that apply in the Australian domain space would be extremely likely to continue to apply."

The top domain sales in 2006 (all $US):

1. Diamond.com, $7.5 million - Online diamond and jewellery retailer Ice.com bought the domain from Odimo Inc.

2. Vodka.com, $3 million -

Bought by Roustam Tariko, the billionaire entrepreneur behind Russia's biggest vodka maker Russian Standard Co.

3. Cameras.com, $1.5 million - Sold in a live domain auction to Sig Solares of Parked.com.

4. NAV.no, $717,978 - The Norwegian government bought this domain for its work and welfare administration website.

5. On.com, $635,000 - Moniker/Domain Systems sold the domain, which redirects to a personals site.

Source
www.whataredomains.com

Multilingual domain name delay a barrier to diversity on the Net

2007-06-05T12:50:00.000-06:00

Michael Geist, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Imagine if each time a Canadian Internet user entered an e-mail or website address, they would be required to include a Chinese or Cyrillic character. For millions of non-English speakers around the world, this is precisely what they experience when they use the Internet as the domain name system is unable to fully accommodate their local language.

Since their inception, domain names have been largely confined to ASCII text, based on a Roman character set used in the English language. While this works well for people familiar with those characters, thousands of other language characters -- from French accents to the Greek alphabet to Japanese kanji -- are not represented. This creates a significant access barrier for non-English speakers, who are forced to use the Roman characters for most aspects of their Internet addressing.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the agency responsible for administering the domain name system, has long pledged to remedy this issue by creating "internationalized domain names" (more appropriately described as multilingual domain names).

Indeed, nearly seven years ago the ICANN board passed a resolution recognizing "that it is important that the Internet evolve to be more accessible to those who do not use the ASCII character set." Notwithstanding its stated commitment to multilingual domains, the issue has languished, a victim of indifference and even occasional hostility from ICANN leadership. Last year, after a group of developing countries emphasized the need for faster progress on the issue, ICANN president and CEO Paul Twomey warned that "if we get this wrong we could very easily and permanently break the Internet." Multilingual domains have also been stymied by opposition from the trademark community, a powerful lobby group within the ICANN system, which fears that the introduction of new language characters will lead to confusion and a proliferation of cybersquatting disputes.

ICANN has repeatedly struck committees, held workshops, and introduced guidelines, yet there has been little to show for the efforts. Governments have become increasingly impatient with the lack of progress. At the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society, they specifically underlined the need to "advance the process for the introduction of multilingualism in a number of areas including domain names, e-mail addresses and keyword look-up" and to "implement programs that allow for the presence of multilingual domain names and content on the Internet ... to ensure the participation of all in the emerging new society." While the international Internet community has struggled with the multilingual domain name issue, many countries have prioritized the implementation of local languages within their country-code domain names. In fact, the strongest indictment of international inaction comes from the experiences elsewhere -- China, Korea, Germany, Sweden, Greece, and Israel are among the dozens of countries that have successfully implemented multilingual domain names within their local domain name system so that Internet users can function in their local language when using country-code domains such as dot-cn (China) or dot-de (Germany) even if the international system is still off-limits.

Canada has disappointingly lagged behind on this issue. The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), which manages the dot-ca domain, should pass one million domain-name registrations by early 2008, yet implementation of French-language characters is only likely to take place in the next few years.

CIRA has faced community pressure to address the issue. Multilingual domains were raised as a concern at a 2003 CIRA public forum in Halifax and again at a 2004 CIRA public forum in Calgary. At each event, CIRA indicated the issue was a priority and promised action by 2006.

By August 2006, the government of Quebec decided it had waited long enough. In a letter to the CIRA board (I was a member of the board at the time), it delivered an official request for multilingual domains to allow for the use of French-language characters.

Most of the world -- including thousands of Canadians -- are literally locked out of the domain-name system by reason of limitations in language. With an ICANN meeting set for later this month in Puerto Rico and the CIRA annual meeting scheduled for early September, the time has come to prioritize linguistic diversity on the Internet by giving multilingual domains the attention they deserve.

Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law. E-mail: mgeist@uottawa.ca

GoDaddy.com Takes Over RegisterFly Domain Names and Customers

2007-06-03T09:17:00.000-06:00

RegisterFly crumbles under relationship problems of its two co-owners

This week marked a big week for two major domain registrars, GoDaddy.com and RegisterFly. With the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' (ICANN) approval, GoDaddy.com this week obtained all 850,000 generic top-level domain (gTLD) names previously held by RegisterFly. Existing RegisterFly customers will be able to access and manage their domain names from GoDaddy's website.

Over the last year, much has occurred at RegisterFly; and the result was unhappy customers, phone calls unanswered and a barrage of mismanagement. In March of this year, ICANN terminated RegisterFly's status as an ICANN-accredited registrar due to allegations of corporate fraud. It was noted in a lawsuit that co-owner Kevin Medina used corporate funds for personal use. In fact, co-owner John Naruszewicz filed a suit claiming that Medina had spent $27,000 on escort services, $6,000 on liposuction and $10,000 per month on a penthouse in Miami. Medina then countersued by claiming that Naruszewicz spent $60,000 on Moroccan furniture and payments on a home.

RegisterFly owners Kevin Medina and John Naruszewicz were in a downfall situation of their own. The two were reportedly boyfriends for several years but the relationship broke down at the time of ICANN's demands. The result was an attempt for a business takeover by Naruszewicz but due to complications, RegisterFly continued to have compounding problems.

Because of top level management issues, RegisterFly's customer service was negatively impacted. This resulted in disgruntled customers and a large number of complaints to ICANN. On March 16 of this year, a class action lawsuit was filed, claiming that RegisterFly knowingly defrauded customers.

According to the press release:

RegisterFly customers have been affected by recent problems and the impending loss of RegisterFly’s accreditation as a domain name registrar. GoDaddy.com will notify RegisterFly customers of the switch and automatically move their domains for them. Those who still go to the RegisterFly Web site will be directed to Go Daddy.com for managing and renewing their domain names. However, some RegisterFly customers had chosen to move their domain names to GoDaddy.com even before this deal.

"The RegisterFly situation has been extremely difficult -- first and foremast for registrants, as well as for the entire registry and registrar community," said GoDaddy.com CEO Bob Parsons.

RegisterFly is currently under legal scrutiny for failure to oblige to several court orders. Medina is the primary blame for the trouble at the company and he failed to show up in court several times in the past.

ICANN pursued a solution to RegisterFly's problems and on May 29 of this year, GoDaddy.com purchased RegisterFly's customer database for an undisclosed amount. ICANN said it will ensure that RegisterFly customers will be well taken care of and indicated that it was excited to see GoDaddy.com willingly lend a hand.

"I want to commend the organizations that have come to the table to ensure people's domain names were protected to the extent possible," ICANN CEO Dr. Paul Twomey said.

Source
www.whataredomains.com

The man who owns the Internet

2007-05-22T06:27:00.000-06:00

Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you've never heard of, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. Here's how the master of Web domains built a $300 million empire.

(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Kevin Ham leans forward, sits up tall, closes his eyes, and begins to type -- into the air. He's seated along the rear wall of a packed ballroom in Las Vegas's Venetian Hotel. Up front, an auctioneer is running through a list of Internet domain names, building excitement the same way he might if vintage cars were on the block.

As names come up that interest Ham, he occasionally air-types. It's the ultimate gut check. Is the name one that people might enter directly into their Web browser, bypassing the search engine box entirely, as Ham wants? Is it better in plural or singular form? If it's a typo, is it a mistake a lot of people would make? Or does the name, like a stunning beachfront property, just feel like a winner?

When Ham wants a domain, he leans over and quietly instructs an associate to bid on his behalf. He likes wedding names, so his guy lifts the white paddle and snags Weddingcatering.com for $10,000. Greeting.com is not nearly as good as the plural Greetings.com, but Ham grabs it anyway, for $350,000.

Ham is a devout Christian, and he spends $31,000 to add Christianrock.com to his collection, which already includes God.com and Satan.com. When it's all over, Ham strolls to the table near the exit and writes a check for $650,000. It's a cheap afternoon.

Just a few years ago, most of the guys bidding in this room had never laid eyes on one another. Indeed, they rarely left their home computers. Now they find themselves in a Vegas ballroom surrounded by deep-pocketed bankers, venture-backed startups, and other investors trying to get a piece of the action.

And why not? In the past three years alone, the number of dotcom names has soared more than 130 percent to 66 million. Every two seconds, another joins the list.

But the big money is in the aftermarket, where the most valuable names -- those that draw thousands of pageviews and throw off steady cash from Google's and Yahoo's pay-per-click ads -- are driving prices to dizzying heights. People who had the guts and foresight to sweep up names shed during the dotcom bust are now landlords of some of the most valuable real estate on the Web.

How to make money without really trying
The man at the top of this little-known hierarchy is Kevin Ham -- one of a handful of major-league "domainers" in the world and arguably the shrewdest and most ambitious of the lot. Even in a field filled with unusual career paths, Ham's stands out.

Trained as a family doctor, he put off medicine after discovering the riches of the Web. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue. (Like all his financial details, Ham would neither confirm nor deny this figure.)

Working mostly as a solo operator, Ham has looked for every opening and exploited every angle -- even inventing a few of his own -- to expand his enterprise. Early on, he wrote software to snag expiring names on the cheap. He was one of the first to take advantage of a loophole that allows people to register a name and return it without cost after a free trial, on occasion grabbing hundreds of thousands of names in one swoop.

And what few people know is that he's also the man behind the domain world's latest scheme: profiting from traffic generated by the millions of people who mistakenly type ".cm" instead of ".com" at the end of a domain name.

Try it with almost any name you can think of -- Beer.cm, Newyorktimes.cm, even Anyname.cm -- and you'll land on a page called Agoga.com, a site filled with ads served up by Yahoo (Charts, Fortune 500).

Ham makes money every time someone clicks on an ad -- as does his partner in this venture, the West African country of Cameroon. Why Cameroon? It has the unforeseen good fortune of owning .cm as its country code -- just as Germany runs all names that end with .de.

The difference is that hardly any .cm names are registered, and the letters are just one keyboard slip away from .com, the mother lode of all domains. Ham landed connections to the Cameroon government and flew in his people to reroute the traffic. And if he gets his way, Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) will be his as well.

"It's in the works," Ham says over lunch in his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia. "That's why I can't talk about it." He's nearly as reluctant to share details about his newest company, called Reinvent Technology, into which he's investing tens of millions of dollars to build a powerhouse of Internet businesses around his most valuable properties.

New ways to strike it rich on the Web
Given Ham's reach on the Web -- his sites receive 30 million unique visitors a month -- it's remarkable that so few people know about him. Even in the clubby world of domainers, he's a mystery man. Until now Ham has never talked publicly about his business. You won't find his name on any domain registration, nor will you see it on the patent application for the Cameroon trick.

There are practical reasons for the low profile: For one, Ham's success has drawn enemies, many of them rivals. He once used a Vancouver post office box for domain-related mail -- until the day he opened a package that contained a note reading "You are a piece of s**t," accompanied by an actual piece of it.

Bitter domainers are one thing, lawyers another. And at the moment, Ham's biggest concern is that corporate counsels will come after him claiming that the Cameroon typo scheme is an abuse of their trademarks. He may be right, since this is the first time he's been identified as the orchestrator.

When asked about the .cm play, John Berryhill, a top domain attorney who doesn't work for Ham, practically screams into the phone, "You know who did that? Do you have any idea how many people want to know who's behind that?"

Spreading the word
Kevin Ham is a boyish-looking 37-year-old, trim from a passion for judo and a commitment to clean living. His drink of choice: grapefruit juice, no ice. His mild demeanor belies the aggressive, work-around-the-clock type that he is. Ham frequently steers conversations about business back to the Bible. Not in a preachy way; it's just who he is.

The son of Korean-born immigrants, Ham grew up on the east side of Vancouver with his three brothers. His father ran dry-cleaning stores; his mother worked graveyard shifts as a nurse. A debilitating illness at the age of 14 led Ham to dream of becoming a doctor. He cruised through high school and then undergraduate work and medical school at the University of British Columbia.

Christianity had long been a mainstay with his family, but as an undergrad, he made the Bible a focal point of his life; he joined the Evangelical Layman's Church and attended regular Bible meetings. Ham recalls that it was about this time -- 1992 or 1993 -- that he was introduced to the Web. A church friend told him about a powerful new medium that could be used to spread the gospel.

"Those words really struck me," Ham says. "It's the reason I'm still working."

After he graduated from med school in 1998, Ham and his new bride took off for London, Ontario, for a two-year residency. By the second year, Ham had become chief resident, and when he wasn't rushing to the emergency room, he indulged his growing fascination with the Net, teaching himself to create websites and to code in Perl.

Information about Web hosting at the time was so scattered that Ham began creating an online directory of providers, complete with reviews and ratings of their services. He called it Hostglobal.com.

From there it was a short step to the business of buying and selling domains. About six months after he launched Hostglobal, Ham was earning around $10,000 per month in ad sales. But when one of his advertisers -- a service that sold domain registrations -- told him that a single ad was generating business worth $1,500 a month, Ham figured he could get in on that too.

From doctor to domainer
It made sense: People shopping for hosting services were often interested in buying a catchy URL, so Ham launched a second directory, called DNSindex.com. Like similar services operating at the time, it gave customers a way to register domain names.

But Ham added the one feature that early domain hunters wanted most: weekly lists of available names, compiled using free sources he found on the Web. Some lists he gave away; others he charged as much as $50 for. In a couple of months, he had more than 5,000 customers.

By the time he finished his residency in June 2000, his two small Web ventures were pulling in more money in a month -- sometimes $40,000 -- than Ham made that year at the hospital. That was enough, he reasoned, to put off starting a medical practice for three more months, maybe six. "It just didn't make sense not to do it," he says.

With a new baby in tow, Ham and his wife moved back to Vancouver, settling into a one-bedroom apartment. Ham's timing, it turned out, was spot-on. Tech stocks were tumbling, dotcoms were folding left and right, and investors were fleeing the Web. More important to him, hundreds of thousands of valuable domain names that were suddenly considered worthless began to expire, or "drop." Ham and a handful of other trailblazers were ready to snap them up.

Figuring out when names would drop was tedious work.

At the time, Network Solutions controlled the best names; it was for a long time the only retail company, or registrar, selling .coms. It didn't say when expiring names would go back on the market, but twice a day it published the master list of all registered names -- the so-called "root zone" file (now managed by VeriSign (Charts)). It was a fat list of well over 5 million names that took hours to download and often crashed the under-powered PCs of the day.

So Ham wrote software scripts that compared one day's list with the next. Then he tracked names that vanished from the root file. Those names would be listed briefly as on hold, and Ham figured out that they would almost always drop five or six days later -- at about 3:30 a.m. on the West Coast. In the dark of night, Ham launched his attacks, firing up five PCs and multiple browsers in each. Typing furiously, he would enter his buy requests and bounce from one keyboard to the next until he snagged the names he wanted.

11 Leaders who won by breaking rules
He missed a lot of them, of course.

Ham had no clue that there were rivals out there who were way ahead him, deploying software that purchased names at a rate that Ham's fingers couldn't match. Through registration data, he eventually traced many of those purchases to one owner: "NoName." Behind the shadowy moniker was another reclusive domain pioneer, a Chinese-born programmer named Yun Ye, who, according to people who know him, operated out of his house in Fremont, Calif.

By day Ye worked as a software developer. At night he unleashed the programs that automated domain purchases. (Ye achieved deity status among domainers in 2004 when he sold a portfolio of 100,000 names to Marchex (Charts), a Seattle-based, publicly traded search marketing firm, for $164 million. He then moved to Vancouver.)

Ham went back to the keyboard, writing scripts so that he, too, could pound at the registrars. Ham's track record began to improve, but he still wasn't satisfied. "Yun was just too good," he says.

Then Ham did something brash: He bought his way to the front of the line. Since registrars had direct connections to Network Solutions's servers, Ham's play was to cut out the middleman. He struck deals with several discount registrars, even helping them write software to ensure that they captured the names Ham wanted to buy during the drops. In exchange for the exclusivity, Ham offered to pay as much as $100 for some names that might normally go for as little as $8.

Within weeks Ham had struck so many deals that, according to rivals, he controlled most of the direct connections. "I kept telling them to hit them harder," Ham says in a rare boastful moment. "We brought down the servers many times." During one six-month period starting in late 2000, Ham registered more than 10,000 names.

25 Hot startups to watch
Rival domainers, locked out of much of the action, didn't appreciate Ham's tactics. It was one of them, most likely, who sent him the turd. "Kevin came in and closed the door for everyone else," says Frank Schilling, a domainer who figured out what Ham had done and sealed similar deals. "There was a ton of professional jealousy."

Ham, in fact, owes a lot to Schilling. Both men lived in Vancouver at the time, and after Ham sought out Schilling in November 2000, the two met at a restaurant to compare notes.

"How much traffic do you have?" Schilling asked. An embarrassed Ham replied that he had no idea. Schilling mentioned that he was experimenting with a new service, GoTo.com, that would populate his domains with ads. Ham spent the next week figuring out how much traffic his sites were generating, and he was amazed by the initial tally: 8,000 unique visitors per day from the 375 names he owned at the time.

"From then on," Ham says, "I knew that what I was building would be very, very valuable." He soon signed up with GoTo (which was later purchased by Yahoo). On his first day, Ham made $1,500.

The system worked then as it does now: People don't always use Google (Charts, Fortune 500) or Yahoo to find something on the Web; they'll often type what they're looking for into a browser's address bar and add ".com."

It's a practice known as "direct navigation," or type-in traffic, and millions do it. Need wedding shoes? Type in "weddingshoes.com" -- a site that Ham happens to own -- and you'll land on what looks like a shoe-shopping portal, filled with links from dozens of retailers.

Click on any one of those links, and the advertiser that placed it pays Yahoo, which in turn pays a cut to Ham. That single site, Ham says, brings in $9,100 a year. Small change, maybe, but the name cost him $8, and his annual overhead for it is about $7. Multiply that model several thousand times over, and you get a quick idea of the kind of cash machine that Ham was creating from his living room.

By early 2002, roughly $1 million a year was pouring into Ham's operation, which he ran with the help of his high school friend and current partner, Colin Yu. But again he felt the tug of his conscience. He occasionally left Vancouver to do medical missionary stints, helping patients in Mexico, the Philippines, and China. He found the experience rewarding, but the development boom he saw taking off in China just reminded him of the virtual real estate boom he was leading back home.

Soon Ham was back working full-time on the Web. "There was just too much more to do," he says.

A little taste
There was no looking back. The next few years were among Ham's most aggressive. One of his most valuable tricks was one he had experimented with in the early days, a practice called domain "tasting." Tasting takes advantage of a provision that allows domain-name buyers a free five-day trial period. Intended to protect customers who mistakenly purchase the wrong name, it handed aggressive domainers another means with which to expand -- and exploit -- their portfolios.

Ham cobbled together new lists of domain words in every combination, registering hundreds of thousands of new names for free, monitoring the traffic, and then returning the duds. By 2004, Ham had amassed such a deep portfolio that he pulled his names from third-party registrars, launched his own registrar, and then created another company, appropriately named Hitfarm, that could do a better job than Yahoo of matching ads with domain names -- for himself and 100 or so other domainers.

Like any shopping spree, though, Ham's tasting binge didn't last. It brought in so many names -- offbeat strings of letters, names with too many dashes, and other variations that humans would be hard-pressed to think of -- that Ham saw the quality of his portfolio dropping in proportion to its growing size. For every few thousand names he'd register, he'd toss back all but a hundred or so.

The hunt for typo-squatters
Tasting exacerbated another problem too: Ham's software grabbed all kinds of typographical variations of trademarked names. Called typo-squatting, it's a practice now coming under the same intense scrutiny long faced by cybersquatters. Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500) and Neiman Marcus are just two companies whose lawyers have brought anti-cybersquatting lawsuits, charging domainers with intentionally profiting from variations of their trademarks.

"Tasting changed everything," says Ham, who has since abandoned the practice, though he concedes that Hitfarm still holds some problematic names. "I said, forget it," he says. "Generic names are already too hard to come by. And the legal risks are too great."

The legal risks should diminish, however, if you don't own the domain names at all -- and that's the secret behind the Cameroon play.

New world order
The domain confab in Vegas is like any other trade conference: The real intrigue happens at cocktail hour. One subject in the air is Cameroon. Late last summer, domainers began noticing that something odd happens to .cm traffic: It all winds up at a site called Agoga.com. Domainers know, of course, that .cm belongs to Cameroon. And they know that whoever controls Agoga.com has created a potential gold mine.

What they don't know is who's behind it all.

At one of the meet-and-greets, Ham is standing drinkless, as usual, sporting a polo shirt, chatting with a few people he knows and some he's just met. In this crowd, it seems, everyone wants to know Ham. Finally, he is alone.

"I hear you're the guy behind .cm?"

Ham looks surprised by the reporter's question, then flashes a big smile and says, "I had help."

Over a series of conversations a few weeks later in Vancouver, Ham shares some details about a deal that, despite his innate reticence, he's clearly proud of. About a year ago, he says, he worked his contacts to gain connections to government officials in Cameroon. Then he flew several confidantes to Yaoundé, the capital, to make their pitch. His key programmer went along to handle the technical details.

"Hey," Ham says, flagging his techie down near the office elevator. "Didn't you meet with the president of Cameroon?"

"Nah," the programmer says. "We met with the prime minister. But we did see the president's compound."

Typo-squatters hit banks
It's an odd scene to picture: a domainer's reps in a sit-down with Ephraim Inoni, the prime minister of Cameroon, to discuss the power of type-in typo traffic and pay-per-click ads. And yet, as with most of the angles Ham has played, the Cameroon scheme is ingeniously straightforward.

Ham's people installed a line of software, called a "wildcard," that reroutes traffic addressed to any .cm domain name that isn't registered. In the case of Cameroon, a country of 18 million with just 167,000 computers connected to the Internet, that means hundreds of millions of names. Type in "paper.cm" and servers owned by Camtel, the state-owned company that runs Cameroon's domain registry, redirect the query to Ham's Agoga.com servers in Vancouver.

The servers fill the page with ads for paper and office-supply merchants. (Officials at Yahoo confirm that the company serves ads for Ham's .cm play.) It all happens in a flash, and since Ham doesn't own or register the names, he's not technically typo-squatting, according to several lawyers who handle Internet issues.

The method is spelled out in a patent application filed by a Vancouver businessman named Robert Seeman, who Ham says is his partner in the venture and who also serves as chief adviser at Reinvent Technology. (Seeman declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Ham won't reveal specifics but says Agoga receives "in the ballpark" of 8 million unique visitors per month. Fellow domainers, naturally, are envious.

"As soon as it started happening, there was a huge sense of 'Why didn't I think of that?'" says attorney Berryhill, who represents Schilling and other domainers.

Still, several companies have already tracked down Ham's attorneys, claiming trademark infringement. Ham argues that his system is legally in the clear because it treats every.cm typo equally and doesn't filter out trademarked names.

Berryhill concurs. "You can't really say that [wildcarding] is targeting trade-marks," he says. "It captures all the traffic, not just trademark traffic." Moreover, the anti-cybersquatting statute applies only to people who register a trademarked domain; using a wildcard doesn't require registering names.

Clever though it may be, .cm is "a very small part of our operations," Ham says. He won't disclose how much he pays to the government of Cameroon, whose officials could not be reached for comment.

The partnership has been a rocky one so far, and the system has sporadically shut down. But .cm is only one of several country domains where the typo play can work. According to Ham, he and his team are working with other governments. The dream typo play -- .co -- belongs to Colombia, to which Ham says Seeman paid several visits long before they began working on Cameroon. (Citing safety concerns, Ham hasn't yet made the trip. "I would only go if the president requests to meet me," he says.)

As for other countries he might soon invade, Oman (.om) is an obvious target. Niger and Ethiopia are out there too, but since they would play off less lucrative .net typos, they might not be worth the trouble.

As for Colombia, Ham says, "we're making progress."

The long view
Ham leans over his office PC to check on a domain auction. Steven Sacks, a domainer based in Indianapolis who works for Ham, is telling him about some names up for sale. Ham shoots back an instant message: "I like doctordegree.com ... and rockquarry.com ... sunblinds.com."

The days of figuring out the drop are long over. Everything's open now. Lists are easy to obtain. You can preorder a name before it drops and hope to get it. Or, like Ham, you can shell out five or six figures in online auctions. The only great deals, at least for .com names, tend to happen privately, when a domainer manages to find an eager or naive seller.

Ham still buys 30 to 100 names a day, but he's no longer getting them on the cheap. In fact, he and Schilling, who today maintains a $20 million-a-year portfolio from his home in the Cayman Islands, are often accused of driving up prices.

Take, for example, the $26,250 Ham paid for Fruitgiftbaskets.com, or the $171,250 for Hoteldeals.com. "The amount he will pay is crazy," says Bob Martin, president of Internet REIT, a domain investment firm that has raised more than $125 million from private investors, including Maveron, the venture firm backed by Starbucks founder Howard Schultz.

Nonsense, Ham says. The names are expensive only if you value them the way people like Martin do. The VCs and bankers, who were late to the domain gold rush, assess names by calculating the pay-per-click ad revenue and attaching a multiple based on how long it would take to pay off the investment.

Viewed that way, Ham's personal portfolio alone is worth roughly $300 million. But some of Ham's recent domain purchases would also look silly: They'd take 15 or 20 years just to justify the price, and that assumes continuation of the pay-per-click model.

How to scale Mt. Google
But Ham is taking a longer view. The Web, he says, is becoming cluttered with parked pages. The model is amazingly efficient -- lots of money for little work --but Ham argues that Internet users will soon grow weary of it all.

He also expects Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to find ways to effectively combat typo-squatting. Some browsers can already fix typos; Internet Explorer catches unregistered domains and redirects visitors to a Microsoft page -- in effect controlling traffic the same way that Ham is doing with .cm. "The heat is rising," Ham says.

When Ham buys a domain now, he's not doing pay-per-click math but rather sizing it up as a potential business. Reinvent Technology aims to turn his most valuable names into mini media companies, based on hundreds of niche categories.

Among the first he'd like to launch, not surprisingly, is Religion.com. Ham recently leased the entire 27th floor in his Vancouver building and is now hiring more than 150 designers, engineers, salespeople, and editorial folks.

Much of that effort is going into developing search tools based more on meaning and less on keywords. "Google is only so useful," Ham says.

The aim is to apply a meaning-based, or "semantic," system across swaths of sites, luring customers from direct navigation and search engines alike. Religion.com would then become an anchor to which scores of other sites would be tied.

"It's time to build out the virtual real estate," Ham says. "There's so much more value in these names than pay-per-click." Seeman's patent application even mentions the possibility of turning Web traffic from Cameroon and other future foreign partners into full-fledged portals.

It's all part of the master plan, as Ham aims to become the first domainer to move from the ranks of at-home name hunter to Internet titan. Smaller players have been selling out to VC-backed groups, and Ham expects that the best names will eventually be owned by just a handful of companies.

If he bets right, he might very well be one of them. "If you control all the domains," he says, "then you control the Internet."

Source
www.whataredomains.com

Geo Domain Names Rise in Value

2007-05-21T07:49:00.000-06:00

I’m writing today from the Atlanta suburb of Buckhead. Buckhead is the world’s most expensive neighborhood. Well, in domain name terms, that is. The domain name Buckhead.com sold for $250,000 this year. $250,000 seems like what someone would pay for a city name, not a neighborhood.

But geographic domain names continue to ride the rising tide of localization. How many times you have you heard about local search over the past year?

At first this seems counterintuitive. The internet is global. Why would someone want a domain that applies to only a small percentage of the world, not a generic word that people in every city might search for?

I recently purchased the domain of a small Austin suburb for $5,200. A traditional pay-per-click domain buyer would laugh at the price and say it’s too high. After all, the domain only gets about 10 hits per day. But this small suburb of 10,000 people is growing quickly. It should nearly double in population over the next five years. And it’s affluent. There are at least a dozen home builders in the suburb selling their share of nearly a thousand lots. If you were one of those developers, wouldn’t you pay $5,000 for just one lead that resulted in a sale?

The price of a city name is probably out of your reach. There’s no way I could buy Austin.com. But you can still join the rising tide of geo domains by buying neighborhoods, suburbs, and small cities.

Source
www.whataredomains.com

Comment sought on domain names

2007-05-21T07:48:00.000-06:00

The Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers has invited public comment on procedures for creating domain names, the first expansion for general use since 2000. Names added since then have been limited to specific regions or industries.

Domain names are key for helping computers find websites and route e-mail. There are currently about 250 domain name suffixes, most of them for specific countries, such as ".fr" for France. General-use names include ".com" and ".net."

Some critics of the nonprofit Internet organization have complained that it has been slow to approve new names and that the procedures sometimes have been arbitrary.

Businesses and trademark owners, meanwhile, worry that more names will lead to more "cybersquatting," the practice of grabbing names before companies can in hopes of selling them at a premium.

Source
www.whataredomains.com

Lack of posts

2007-05-21T07:47:00.000-06:00

I would like to apologize to everyone for the lack of new content lately. I am in the process of moving and it has been consuming all of my time. If there is a topic you would like me to discuss please drop me an email to whois@dr.com.

Thanks,
Justin Godfrey

This is definitely not Rupert Murdoch's MySpace

2007-04-30T12:59:00.000-06:00

A beta version of News's MySpace community site was launched this week in China, but users must be careful when typing the Chinese site's URL or may end up shopping for patio furniture.

MySpace China's Web site can be found at http://www.myspace.cn. But users who type the address http://www.myspace.com.cn in their browsers will instead find themselves visiting the Web site of Zhejiang Yong Qiang Group Co. Ltd., a company that specializes in outdoor furniture and accessories, such as reusable ice packs for coolers.

Representatives for Yong Qiang, which also uses the Yotrio brand, and MySpace China could not immediately be reached for comment.

A search of whois records maintained by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), which oversees the .cn top-level domain, shows the current MySpace.com.cn domain name registration was dated November 2003, less than six months after MySpace was founded. That was long before the first rumors of MySpace's interest in China appeared in the press.

The domain name MySpace.cn was registered in January 2004, according to CNNIC records.

Domain-name squatting is relatively common in China, where speculators have been known to register domain names that include product names of multinational companies, hoping to sell the names for a profit. In other cases, Chinese companies lay claim to a domain name before a multinational company begins to use it.

Such was the case with a Chinese domain similar to Google's Gmail service. A Chinese company, Beijing ISM Internet Technology Development Co. Ltd., registered the http://www.gmail.cn domain for its own e-mail service in August 2003, more than six months before Google first announced its free Web mail service.

Source
www.whataredomains.com

.biz domains set for rate hike

2007-04-28T12:00:00.000-06:00

NeuStar, the operator of ".biz," said it would raise fees 7 percent to $6.42, starting Oct. 19. In a letter to ICANN, NeuStar said the company was "taking this action to align .BIZ domain prices more closely with those of competing global TLDs," or domain names.

Another week, another price increase in Internet addresses. This time, it's ".biz" whose fees are going up.
In recent weeks, operators of ".com," ".net," ".org" and ".info" have announced increases beginning in mid-October in the wholesale prices for domain names -- what the operators collect from the companies that sell names on their behalf. Such charges are generally incorporated in the prices companies, groups and individuals pay to register names, and they apply to new registrations, transfers and renewals.

Many of the announced hikes became possible when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet's key oversight agency, agreed to new contract terms in December, permitting an annual hike of up to 10 percent a year upon six months' notice.

NeuStar Inc., the operator of ".biz," said it would raise fees 7 percent to $6.42, starting Oct. 19.

In a letter to ICANN, NeuStar said the company was "taking this action to align .BIZ domain prices more closely with those of competing global TLDs," or domain names.

With about 1.7 million names registered, the ".biz" suffix is the world's 10th most popular domain name and was one of seven ICANN approved in 2000 in the first major expansion of Internet addresses since the system was created in the 1980s.

The State of Global Cybersquatting in 2007

2007-04-17T00:02:00.000-06:00

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) reports Internet cybersquatting is exploding globally, up 25% in 2006 over the previous year, as even software colossus Microsoft's Bill Gates lost a symbolic case involving his Corbis images company, presided over by WIPO, as well. This article reports recent notable cases, trends in cybersquatting, and strategic developments being advanced against the issue

Cyberquatting is the predicament of the Internet era. In 2006, 1,823 formal complaints were lodged over internet address disputes, the most since 2000, before the WIPO"s arbitration and mediation centre. Cybersquatting" is defined as "the abusive registration of trademarks as domain names." The WIPO complained the domain name system itself was in danger of becoming a mere forum for "speculative gain" as cybersquatters have snapped up many choice addresses associated with top businesses, brands and other trophies in this intellectual property skirmish.

New methods have been developed to gain control of potentially lucrative addresses that have resulted in many trademark owners being stymied when trying to bring their product directly to consumers via the 'Net. For instance, WIPO reports that cybersquatters now use automatic software packages that troll for and instantly purchase esteemed domain names that may have temporarily expired. Then, they "park" at them and install pay-per-click portal sites. The creation by domain registration sites of introductory offers that allow a five-day test period encourages speculators, especially in newly opening top-tier generic domains, and emboldens anonymous registrations that ultimately aid the usurpation of valuable intellectual property rights.

These are the most common types of cybersquatting,

"Cybersquatting": Bad-faith intent registration; a cybersquatter can either sell to the highest bidder, or collect money by "domain parking";

"Typosquatting: This is cybersquatting of the tendency to mistype certain words in Internet addresses, such as spelling Google as "Googel";

"Domainer": A purveyor of domain names, who makes income from buying and selling them;

"Dropcatcher": A person or company who rushes to purchase, or "catch" popular domain names quickly when their registrations lapses;

"Domain Tasting": Getting domains for a "five-day free refund period" to test, then dropping for refund the ones that didn't pan out;

"Domain Parking": A way of making money by having a small site with just advertising linked to a related domain name, where the owner paid a small amount whenever a person clicks on an ad; which can add up to millions in some cases.

As WIPO deputy DG Francis Gurry recently stated, "While electronic commerce has flourished with the expansion of the internet, recent developments in the domain-name registration system have fostered practices which threaten the interests of trademark owners and cause consumer confusion. Practices such as ‘domain name tasting' risk turning the domain name system into a mostly speculative market." The commandeering of internet names made potent by years of ethical service and the hard work and risked capital of entrepreneurs not only creates a drag on the global economy, but also lessens trust in the Internet as a mode of commerce. Gurry asked for "concrete policy responses" to the issue.

Microsoft recently launched an international effort to recover domain names related to its far-flung empire, recovering internationally 1,100 domain names related to house brands, in the last six months alone, aided by a team of Microsoft researchers led by Yi-Min Wang, who played a large part in shutting down fake sites. Microsoft attorney Aaron Kornblum responded, "These sites confuse visitors who are trying to reach genuine company Web sites, which can negatively affect corporate brands and reputations as well as impair the end-users' experience online," adding "With every ad hyperlink clicked, a registrant or ad network harvests cash at the trademark owner's expense, while derailing legitimate efforts by computer users who are trying to go to a specific Web site." He finished, noting, "We hope that our stance and activity on this issue will help motivate and empower other companies whose brands are abused to take action."

Many would-be Internet entrepreneurs have discovered the hard way how seriously the Washington based software company approaches copyright violations. One Seattle newspaper has stated that Microsoft claimed that on each day last year, an average of 2,000 domain names illegally appropriating its trademarks were registered, three quarters by cybersquatters. But a Canadian boy was shocked by what he discovered about the mighty American computer ware behemoth. In 2004 Microsoft took to court a 17-year-old high school student from Victoria, Canada. After being mailed a letter from Microsoft's lawyers, Mike Rowe, who registered www.mikerowesoft.com explained, "Since my name is Mike Rowe, I thought it would be funny to add 'soft' to the end of it. I didn't think they would get all their high-priced lawyers to come after me."

Microsoft recently filed or amended four suits in the U.S.: (1) Microsoft Corp. v. Maltuzi LLC, Case No. C07-1419 (N.D. California); alleging this California company infringed on trademarks through massive "domain tasting," registering blocks of company related domain names; keeping some and dropping others depending on profitability.

(2) Microsoft Corp. v. Sule Garba, Darin Grabowski and Yi Ning, Case No. 06-1192RSM (W.D. Wash.). Microsoft alleges here owners of 217 infringing domain names hid their true identities behind registration privacy options. In the suit, Microsoft used the technique of naming all 217 persons "John Doe," which then allows further discovery to establish their true identities, and established all the persons involved. Here, it is claimed just three persons are behind at least 135 infringing domain names.

(3) Microsoft Corp. v. John Does 1-54, Case No. 07-2-08568-8 SEA (King County Superior Court, Washington). Microsoft filed a civil lawsuit in state court in Seattle, using as above the John Doe method to find the ownership of 54 infringing domain names.

(4) Microsoft Corp. v. John Does 1-105, Case No. C06-1766JLR (W.D. Washington). In December 2006, Microsoft filed a civil lawsuit in federal district court in Seattle to discover who was registering and "parking" infringing internet addresses. Microsoft has other cases in the midst of settlement, in the U.S. and worldwide, including a settlement with U.K.-based Dyslexic Domain Company Limited, who had registered more than 6,000 illegal domains.

Overall, cybersquatting remains a serious issue that can only be reigned in through government action, better laws, the organization of groups to lobby against it and private owner's vigilance. Billions of dollars in commerce are at stake, and therefore good legislation and strong responses against these thieves of intellectual property must be encouraged across the globe.

Source
www.whataredomains.com

GoDaddy Registers Dozens of Questionable Virginia Tech Names

2007-04-16T23:50:00.000-06:00

After seeing a post on the Second City CEO blog today about some rather graphic domain names being snatched up mere minutes after the Virginia Tech shootings this morning, we ran a few of the more sanguinary titles through a Whois search. GoDaddy came back on most of the results.

So we gave the domain name giant a call to get their take on things. We told Elizabeth Driscoll, GoDaddy's vice president of public relations, that names such as vatechmassacre.com were being registered through her company today. Driscoll said she "was not aware of that." She got off the phone to look into the matter. Thirty minutes later, she called back.

"I found one that has been registered to GoDaddy," she said. It was vatechmassacre.com.

We asked if she'd looked for other names. She said she had not. We presented her with more examples of names registered with GoDaddy today: vatechrampage.com, vtmassacre.com, etc.

Driscoll said it was impossible to stop people from registering tasteless names or predict what they might be used for. "Someone might use it to collect money to help victims," she said. ""It's a fact of life that when a major event happens, whether it's positive or negative, people flock to register domain names....We don't have the ability to monitor every site.".

GoDaddy usually becomes aware of a problem with one of their tens of millions of sites when a complaint is filed through their abuse department, Driscoll said. The company intervenes if it determines that a site is being used for "morally objectionable or illegal purposes."

"We consider each domain name or website on a case by case basis," Driscoll said. "I'm happy that you brought these to our attention."

At Driscolls's request, we e-mailed her the results of our whois search. We'll let you know if we get a response. A sampling of the GoDaddy names registered today that we turned up:

virginiatechshooting.com
virginiatechshooting.net
virginiatechshooting.org
virginiatechshooting.info
virginiatechshooting.us
vatechshooting.com
vatechshooting.net
vatechshooting.org
vatechshooting.info
vatechshooting.us
vatechshooting.biz
vtshooting.com
vtshooting.info
vatechmassacre.com
vatechmassacre.net
vatechmassacre.info
vatechmassacre.biz
vtmassacre.com
vtmassacre.net
vtmassacre.org
vtmassacre.info
virginiatechrampage.com
vatechrampage.com
vtrampage.com
virginiatechmurders.com
virginiatechmurders.net
virginiatechmurders.org
virginiatechmurders.info
virginiatechmurders.us
vatechmurders.com
vtmurders.com
hokieshootings.com
hokiemassacre.com
blacksburgshootings.com

Source
www.whataredomains.com

After vodka.com sold, i saw a flood of vodka names come on the market- do these names actually bring in sales, when you reg a variation of something?

2007-04-16T23:35:00.000-06:00

Yes and No.

Mostly these will be newbies that think they can make a quick buck, but most do not sell. When I first started domaining I seen ZYJ.com sell on ebay for X,XXX. I then registered TheZYJ.com. This is a great example of what not to do. If it is a good vodka domain then sure, it may sell, but most are already taken and have been for years.

I've made thousands of dollars by seeing a .com sell for $10,000 and running it through a registrar. I seen that the .net was open so I registered it and sold it to the same person that bought the .com. I made around $2,000 off the deal. This doesn't work too often though.

www.whataredomains.com

Why are some domain extensions cheap (like .info, .com, .net etc.) and why some of them are very expensive (like .eu, .tv, .am etc.)?

2007-04-16T23:31:00.000-06:00

Prices are set by the central registries. When you register a domain name through a registrar they are required to pay a minimum fee to the central registry as well as an ICANN fee. Registrars set their own pricing after that which is why you'll pay $19.99 a year for a .com at one registrar and $6.99 a year at another registrar.

What makes one domain better than another?

2007-04-16T23:29:00.000-06:00

Very hard question to answer.

There are many debatable factors which make a domain name valuable such as the term itself, age, length, even the current registrar. These are things you will learn once you become a more experienced domainer.

what is the difference between a "push" and a "transfer"?

2007-04-16T23:23:00.000-06:00

Great question!

A push is an internal account change at a registrar. If you purchased a domain name from me that was held at dynadot I would ask you for your email address and dynadot username. I would login to my account and use those details to push the domain name from my account to yours. Some registrars will require the gaining user to approve the account change while others will not.

A transfer is an external account change and is also a registrar change. If you purchased a domain name from me which was held at Dynadot I would first unlock the domain name and then send you the "auth code" for the domain name. You would login to your gaining registrar and submit the domain name and auth code. You will probably have to pay a typical registration fee for this and most registrars will add one year to the expiration day once they receive the domain name. I have seen transfer take from a few minutes to a week to complete.

When a service requires me to unlock a domain, what does it mean? Is it safe?

2007-04-16T23:19:00.000-06:00

I came across this article awhile back. It should answer all of your questions.

We've all seen this famous quote: "It's better to give than to receive." But how many webmasters are willing to give their domain names to anyone who asks? More than you think, unfortunately. Recent changes to domain name transfer policy means you could lose control of your domain name just by neglecting to read your email for a few days.

ICANN's New Policy

ICANN (Internet Corporation on Assigned Names and Numbers) is the agency that sets the policies that govern the sale, distribution, and protection of domain names. When you purchase a name, it's through an ICANN-approved registrar. If you have a trademark dispute pertaining to a domain name, it's handled through ICANN's dispute resolution process. ICANN also approves new top-level domain (TLD) extensions and sets domain name registration and transfer policies that registrars must follow.

It's this last responsibility that should concern you the most right now.

In an effort to streamline the domain transfer process, ICANN is imposing new regulations as of November 12, 2004. Section 3 details when and how registrars must handle transfer requests:

"Failure by the Registrar of Record to respond within five (5) calendar days to a notification from the Registry regarding a transfer request will result in a default "approval" of the transfer.

In the event that a Transfer Contact listed in the Whois has not confirmed their request to transfer with the Registrar of Record and the Registrar of Record has not explicitly denied the transfer request, the default action will be that the Registrar of Record must allow the transfer to proceed. "
In non-bureaucratic language, this means that anyone can transfer your domain name to a new registrar and change the contact and nameserver information if you fail to respond to the transfer notification within 5 calendar days (not working days!).

This completely changes the previous system, whereby the transfer was denied if the owner failed to respond.

A Response To Unscrupulous Registrars

If you've never had a problem transferring a domain name, consider yourself lucky! Many webmasters tell horror stories of registrars who refused to transfer names or hosting companies who registered themselves as the administrative contact and charged outrageous fees to the hapless webmaster.

These problems led to the change. ICANN hopes to make the transfer process easier and keep bad registrars and hosts from holding names hostage.

The ability to transfer at will isn't unlimited; registrars are allowed to deny a transfer in certain circumstances:

Suspected fraud
The name is in dispute
Reasonable cause to suspect the identity of the owner
Domain is within the first 60 or last 60 day period of registration
Payment for previous registration period hasn't been received
Domain is in "locked" status

Unfortunately, the change could make things worse. Reputable registrars will continue business as usual and process transfers with a minimum of fuss and bother. But the bad ones can say that they "suspect fraud" or "can't verify identity" or use any number of tactics to keep the name where it is.

The New Policy: Silence = Consent

Even more worrisome, it the change may make it easier for an unauthorized party to get control of your domain name. There have been numerous complaints against companies who send out fake renewal notices to customers. Unwary webmasters who respond to these fake notices soon discover that the "renewal notices" are actually transfer requests that move the name to a new registrar.

In December 2003, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) stopped the Domain Registry of America, a domain reseller, from using such deceptive practices.

For schemes like this to work though, the domain owner has to specifically respond to the written notice or email and take some action. But under new policy, the owner's silence is taken for consent. All the "bad" registrar has to do is request a transfer and hope you aren't reading your email on a timely basis.

Take steps now to protect your domain!

Lock Up Your Names

In previous Webmaster Tips articles, we've discussed several strategies to keep your domain name safe:

Always keep your email contact address current.
Make sure that you (not your hosting company) are listed as the Administrative Contact.

Now, we add one more safety tip: lock your domain name.

It's easy to check the status of your domain. Just go to the InterNIC Whois listing, enter your domain name and check the STATUS. What you want to see is this:

Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK.
Registrar-lock means that your domain name is locked and can't be transferred until you manually "unlock" it. A lock keeps any transfer from taking place, so be sure to unlock the domain before you try to transfer it.

Some registrars automatically lock domain names, while others offer it as an option. Check with your registrar to be sure your domain name is safely locked away. There should not be a charge for this service.

Source
www.whataredomains.com

In the domain name forums, what does XXX mean?

2007-04-16T23:02:00.000-06:00

You will see this alot, especially in the domain name appraisal section on the forums. If a member appraises your domain name at low XX this would be $10-25 and so on.

Examples:

Low XX $10-25
Mid XX $25-$55
High XX $60-99

You would use the same as above for higher numbers as well:

XXX means three figures. ($100-$999)
X,XXX means four figures and so on.

www.whataredomains.com

What does BIN mean?

2007-04-11T18:59:00.000-06:00

If you are a visitor to the domain name forums you will see "BIN" mentioned in some of the threads. This refers to the "Buy It Now" price. If someone lists a domain name with offers starting at $200 and the BIN is set at $1,000 this means that you can buy the domain name at $1,000 without going through the offer-counter offer process.

www.whataredomains.com

How to Use Domain Names to Make Money Online

2007-04-08T19:06:00.000-06:00

When people take about topic related to making money online. They generally will mention Google AdSense program, affiliate programs, how to sell products and services through a website and ebay, paid survey and so on. But have you ever heard about making money online with domain names? It is a new concept to profit online and there is a number of people earn a living with domain names. So how domain names can make people money? Good question. Here's how:

Purchase Domain Name at Low Prices, then Resell Them at Higher Price
Do you know, companies, e-entrepreneurs and Internet marketers that want to make their websites popular and powerful are willing to pay a lot for a good domain name. So this created an opportunity to make money online. What you can do is register those good domain names earlier and then sell to them at higher price. But nowadays, it is getting harder to profit online with this method as more and more people have aware of this opportunity and started to do the same.

Fortunately, there is one solution: buying expired domain names. Everyday, thousand of domain names are being abandoned by their owners and become expired domain names. Some of the main reasons the owners don't re-register their domain names are they have closed their online businesses, they have lost interest in operating their websites and so on. Expired domain names reached certain periods will be deleted and available to anyone who wants to buy it. Among these expired domains, you can find some profitable domain names with existing traffic to resell for profit at auction sites like ebay.

Park Your Domain Name to Earn Advertising Revenue
If you have domain name left unused or waiting for development, you may consider parking them to domain parking websites to generate extra income for you. For less than $5 per month you can park a domain to a domain parking company. The company will build a parked page with links or content and sponsored ads on your domain name. You drive traffic to the domain name and earn advertising revenue such as AdSense commission. Here are two companies that offer domain parking service:

Parkedgold.com
Godaddy.com - Cash Parking Program

You can also buy an expired domain name that builds in with existing traffic and park it to domain parking company to generate advertising revenue. To determine whether an expired domain name still has traffic comes in, you may check the domain's link popularity. If the domain has many inbound links, it is very likely that the domain name have a steady stream of traffic built in. You can find expired domain from Godaddy's domain auction at https://www.tdnam.com. Another way is to use a paid domain name search tool of Expiredtraffic.com to find profitable expired domain.

Source
www.whataredomains.com

VeriSign raises charges to register '.com' and '.net' domain names

2007-04-08T19:04:00.000-06:00

New York: The master-keeper of internet addresses ending in ".com" and ".net" - two of the most popular domain name suffixes - said on Thursday it would raise fees charged to register those names.

The annual levy for ".com" will increase seven per cent to $6.42, and the ".net" fee will go up 10 per cent to $3.85.

The per-name fees are what VeriSign collects from companies that sell domain names on its behalf, and such charges are generally incorporated in the prices companies, groups and individuals pay to register names.

With about 62 million ".com" names and 9.1 million ".net" names in use, VeriSign stands to ultimately make $29 million a year from the increase, which will take effect October 15.

However, the price hike applies only to new name registrations and renewals, and customers can lock in the old prices until October 14. Many brokers, known as registrars, offer multiyear deals for up to 10 years; Network Solutions, formerly owned by Veri-Sign, even offers a 100-year package.

VeriSign runs the Domain Name System computers that keep track of all the ".com" and ".net" names in use.

Computers from around the world check them continually to find out how to reach ".com" and ".net" websites and pass along e-mail.

The Mountain View, California-based company said the fee increases, the first since 1999, stem from a need to keep up with growing online use as well as threats from hackers.

"Over the last six years, VeriSign has dealt with two phenomenons when it came to the infrastructure," VeriSign spokesman Tom Galvin said.

He said VeriSign's DNS computers now get 30 billion queries a day, compared with one billion in 2000, while security exploits have grown eightfold over that period.

In February, the company announced Project Titan, an initiative to expand the capacity of its systems tenfold by 2010 - to four trillion queries a day. The extra capacity is needed to respond to any unusual surges from legitimate demand, as well as to overcome any denial-of-service attacks, in which hackers try to overwhelm the systems with fake traffic.

The price hike does not require any regulatory approval.

Source
www.whataredomains.com

Current observed prices for LLL and NNNs.

2007-04-02T21:31:00.000-06:00

Special thanks to DNP at DNForum.com.

Pricing Guide for 3-Letter (Composed Of Letters Only) Domains:

Current Observed Minimum Wholesale Price (regardless of letter combo) as of April 2, 2007:

3-Letter .com - $3400 (+ $50 since March 1, 2007 report)
3-Letter .net - $750 (+ $40 since March 1, 2007 report)
3-Letter .org - $250
3-Letter .info - $140 (+ $5 since March 1, 2007 report)
3-Letter .biz - $80
3-Letter .us - $110
3-Letter .mobi - $145 (+ $5 since March 1, 2007 report)

The quality of the letter composition can play a significant role in determining 3-letter valuations. General concensus states that the letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T are considered premium letters. Other lesser high quality letters include: J, K, U, V, W. Lower quality letters include: Q, X, Y, Z. Domains selling for less than the above figures would represent a strong buy in today's market. Premium letter only domains tend to fetch a 500% to 600% premium (or more) over the Minimum Wholesale Price. Mixed letter quality domains have valuations somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.

Pricing Guide for 3-Number (Composed Of Numbers Only) Domains:

Current Observed Minimum Wholesale Price (regardless of Number combo) as of April 2, 2007::

3-Number .com - $5500 (+ $100 since March 1, 2007 report)
3-Number .net - $875 (+ $50 since March 1, 2007 report)
3-Number .org - $325
3-Number .info - $190 (+ $5 since March 1, 2007 report)
3-Number .biz - $95
3-Number .us - $165 - (Note: These are the rarest of the NNN Domains, as the registry holds a high percentage of NNN.us names)
3-Number .mobi - $575 (- $35 since March 1, 2007 report)

.xxx rejected as domain ID for porn sites

2007-04-01T12:01:00.000-06:00

LISBON, Portugal — A key Internet oversight agency put the brakes on plans to construct an online red-light district, rejecting for a third time a proposal to create a voluntary ".xxx" address for pornographic Web sites.

Armando Franca, Associated PressPeople attend the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers meeting where participants debated whether to accept a proposal that would create a voluntary domain address for Internet porn. The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers on Friday cited fears that it would find itself having to regulate content and concerns that such a domain name did not have the support of the adult-entertainment industry.

"So the proposal is effectively rejected, and it is my understanding that as a consequence of this vote, we will not accept any further proposals" on the domain name in the current round of applications, ICANN Chairman Vinton Cerf said after the 9-5 vote. One member, ICANN Chief Executive Paul Twomey, abstained.

The company seeking the domain name, ICM Registry LLC, had been allowed to revise a previously rejected proposal. Although ICANN wants to close the current round, which began in 2004, a new proposal could be offered in the next round of applications.
And ICM's president and chief executive, Stuart Lawley, said a lawsuit against ICANN was likely over the rejected bid.

A few ICANN board members criticized their own agency as being too timid to tread toward controversial ideas.Susan Crawford, a board member who backed the ".xxx" domain name, said the Internet's success grew out of a principle that the network should be open to anyone or anything as long as it isn't illegal or harmful.

"In a nutshell, everything not prohibited is permitted," Crawford said.
Crawford, a professor at Yeshiva University's Cardozo Law School in New York, said no applicant "could ever demonstrate unanimous, cheering approval for its application."

Other board members, however, said the level of support for ICM's proposal was a factor, along with concern that ICANN could find itself in the tricky role of deciding or managing what content would have been appropriate for the new Internet address.

"This application doesn't meet the request for proposals mainly on the supporting community," said board member Raimundo Beca of Chile, who voted against the domain. The adult industry, he added, "has been from the very beginning so split about this."
Porn sites opposed to ".xxx" were largely concerned that the domain name, while billed as voluntary, would make it easier for governments to later mandate its use and push sexual content into what the adult-entertainment industry terms an online ghetto.

ICM, which had planned to charge $60 per ".xxx" name, had vowed to fight any government effort to compel its use and cited preregistrations of more than 76,000 names as evidence of support.

"We are extremely disappointed by the board's action today," Lawley said. "It is not supportable for any of the reasons articulated by the board, ignores the rules ICANN itself adopted for (new domains) and makes a mockery of ICANN bylaws' prohibition of unjustifiable discriminatory treatment."

Religious groups worried that ".xxx" would legitimize and expand the number of adults sites, which more than a third of U.S. Internet users visit each month, according to comScore Media Metrix.Focus on the Family lauded the decision, noting that from "the very beginning this idea held out false hope for parents concerned with filth on the Internet," said Daniel Weiss, a senior analyst for media and sexuality.

"It's a strange notion to suggest that we can help kids by sanctioning, endorsing and proliferating the very material that threatens them," he said.
But U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, chastised ICANN for not approving the domain name.

"These top-level domain names are the first signal to parents as to what their children are viewing online," she said. "For example, when we see '.gov' we know we are visiting a government agency, and '.edu' tells us an educational institution is about to appear. Yet, ICANN continues to turn its back on child protection by refusing to take similar steps to make harmful content as readily identifiable."

Given its voluntary nature, ".xxx" wasn't unlikely to have much effect on parents' ability to block porn sites. And because a domain name serves merely as an easy-to-remember moniker for a site's actual numeric Internet address, even if its use is required, a child could simply punch in the numeric address of any blocked ".xxx" name.

Lawley, however, said sites using ".xxx" would have been required to label themselves based on such criteria as the presence of nudity and whether it is in an artistic or educational context. Filters could check the labels even if a child were to try to bypass domain name-specific controls.

Nearly all of the board members opposing the domain cited concerns about content regulation, while supporters said ICANN should not block new domains over fears like that.

"I think that this — what this should alert us to is that we have a much higher, bigger problem that we need to be discussing, and I hope that conversation doesn't end here," board member Joichi Ito said.

Lawley added that "the part of the contract they are now claiming would lead them to content management was put in by them during the contract negotiations."

Source
www.whataredomains.com

What are the extensions and languages I can register an IDN in?

2007-03-26T00:53:00.000-06:00

Hope this helps!

com All
net All
org Danish German Hungarian Icelandic Korean Latvian Lithuanian Polish Spanish Swedish
info Danish German Hungarian Icelandic Korean Latvian Lithuanian Polish Swedish
biz Danish German Icelandic Norwegian Spanish Swedish
ws All
cn Chinese
cc All
tv All

What's in a name?

2007-03-25T19:17:00.000-06:00

What's in a name?

Cybersquatting is an old problem that has come back to haunt business in a new form. Laws passed in 1999 were meant to stamp out the practice, whereby enterprising individuals would register trademarked names such as burgerking.com and virgin.com and sell them back to the trademark owners for extortionate sums.

Cybersquatting did not go away, however. Cybersquatters have just become smarter, says Anthony Gold, intellectual property lawyer at Eversheds, and are finding new ways to get around the laws.

For example, cybersquatters can cover their tracks by using privacy services that hide the details of who owns a website.

This makes suing them more complicated. In a lawsuit launched last August, Microsoft had to get court subpoenas to discover the owners of 217 websites it claimed were infringing its trademark.

Some are taking advantage of the sheer volume of new domain names on offer, as new "top-level domains" such as .mobi, .eu and .asia, come into existence alongside the old favourites .com and .net.

"There are more than 240 national registries in addition to the generic top-level domains such as .com and .net. Even if you want to register only your basic brands, a big company would easily have to register 3,000 to 4,000 domain names across the world," said David Engel, intellectual property lawyer at Addleshaw Goddard.

Companies are increasingly struggling to police all the domain name variants available. Many are turning to specialists such as UK-based NetNames, which offers domain portfolio management services to companies such as Unilever, British Airways and Hilton Group.

Costs

Going through the courts and even arbitration can be costly. Arbitration costs about Â£1,000-Â£2,000, ($1,900-$3,800), with a court case likely to cost as much as Â£10,000. Although some companies such as Sony, Virgin and Hilton Group have made a point of never paying to get back domain names, for others it is simpler and cheaper to pay up when cybersquatters are not asking for exorbitant sums.

Cybersquatters are turning to new tactics such as "typosquatting", where they register a domain name that is a misspelling of a popular brand - such as hotmai.com or myspac.com. These pages get a lot of traffic from less than perfect typists.

Some typos present enough of a grey area to make them difficult to pursue the perpetrators through the courts.

Microsoft was, for example, forced to settle a case with Canadian student Mike Rowe, who registered MikeRoweSoft.com as his domain name.

But the key reason the cybersquatting has made such a strong comeback recently is that "domaining" - buying, selling and making money from domain names - has become a very big business.

Most of this trade is perfectly legal. The names bought and sold are not subject to trademark, but generic names such as diamonds.com or sex.com.

But a lot of trademarked names are also getting caught in the frenzy.

Thanks to advertising programmes such as Google's Adsense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, any internet page can now make money. Owners of web pages can place adverts on them and get paid small sums each time a visitor clicks on one of the ads.

For those unwilling to set up the advertisements themselves, specialist "domain parking" companies such as Sedo.com and NameDrive.com, can organise this for a share of revenues.

Names that cost just a few dollars to register can be resold for millions. Sex.com is reported to have been sold for $12 million last year, with diamond.com going for $7.5 million and vodka.com selling for $3 million.

Companies such as Sedo.com offer eBay-like auction sites for buying and selling these names, and a whole industry has developed around "dropcatching", or getting hold of a popular name that has been allowed to lapse.

Domainers in turn feel that some companies unfairly bully them to relinquish names that should not be subject to trademark. Many feel arbitration proceedings favour large companies over individuals.

Microsoft's new rush of lawsuits may inflame this controversy further still.

Source
www.whataredomains.com

Europeans Have Fun With Ridiculously Long Domain Names

2007-03-24T22:16:00.000-06:00

BRUSSELS, Belgium — What's in an Internet domain name? Sixty-three characters max.

The group managing the European .eu domain said Friday that six people last year registered the longest Internet addresses allowed, ranging from the tongue-twisting name of a Welsh village to the first 63 numbers that make up the mathematical constant pi.

One German user was firmly tongue in cheek when registering thisisthelongesteuropeandomainnameallovertheworldandnowitismine.eu — which doesn't live up to comic potential since it links to a site saying it is being held for a client.

Another German comedian registered both aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.eu and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.eu.

For those willing to give their fingers some typing exercise, the full version is: llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochuchaf.eu The village's site said the name actually refers to the Wupper part of the Welsh-speaking village on the Isle of Anglesey in North Wales.

For fans of pi — a figure that refers to the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter — a German technology company has registered the first 63 decimal places of the never-ending number: 141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.eu.

The European Registry of Internet Domain Names, or EURid, said Friday that almost 2.5 million .eu addresses were registered last year after its April 7 launch.

The most applied for names were sex.eu, hotel.eu, travel.eu and jobs.eu, it said.

The popularity of the new .eu "exceeded all expectations," EURid said as it become the third-favorite for Europeans registering Internet addresses, only topped by Germany's .de and Britain's .uk.

Source
www.whataredomains.com

Questions on `.xxx' Bid and Domain Names

2007-03-24T22:11:00.000-06:00

Questions on `.xxx' Bid and Domain Names

By ANICK JESDANUN Saturday, March 24, 2007

NEW YORK - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet's key oversight agency, is nearing a vote on creating a voluntary ".xxx" domain name for pornography sites.

Questions about the proposal and domain names in general:

Q. What are domain names?

A. Behind every machine connected to the Internet is a series of four numbers known as an Internet Protocol address. Domain names were created as an easy-to-remember shortcut _ it's much easier to remember "ap.org" than "165.1.59.220." When you type a domain name into a Web browser or an e-mail message, your computer checks a series of domain name servers to match the name to the equivalent numeric address.

Q. How many domain names are there?

A. There are currently 266 suffixes with a handful of others approved but not yet functional. Most are for specific countries or regions, such as ".fr" for France and even the legacy ".su" for the Soviet Union. Others are reserved for specific uses, such as ".mil" for the U.S. military and ".museum" for museums. Relatively few _ the most popular being ".com" _ are truly for global and universal use.

Q. How do names get added?

A. Most of the names date to the system's creation in the 1980s. In 1998, the U.S. government, which funded much of the Internet's early development, selected ICANN to oversee Internet addressing policies, including the addition of domain names. ICANN approved the first major round of additions in 2000, selecting seven names but essentially rejecting ".xxx" and several others. ICANN opened a second round in 2004 and received bids for 10. ICANN also has approved region-specific codes, including ".eu" for the European Union and ".ps" for the Palestinian territories.

Q. Where does ".xxx" fall?

A. The current proposal grew out of the 2004 round of bids, which ICANN specifically restricted to "sponsored" names, meaning their use would be limited to a specific community, be it the travel industry or porn sites. ICM Registry Inc., a Florida startup founded by entrepreneurs with backgrounds in domain names and U.K. Internet companies, sought its creation. If approved, its use would be voluntary just like any other domain.

Q. Why has a decision taken so long?

A. Of the 10 applications, only ".xxx" and ".post" for postal services remain pending. After considerable debate, ICANN rejected the ".xxx" proposal last May, but ICM came back with a new plan with more specifics. Even before that got a vote, ICM returned with yet another proposal to address concerns about ICANN's enforcement abilities and the independence of a nonprofit body that would set rules governing the domain's use. Each step meant a period for public commenting, and opposition among adult Web sites and religious groups remains strong.

Q. What happens if the name is rejected?

A. That would largely depend on the wording of ICANN's resolution, but ICANN rarely throws out a bid outright, meaning ICM likely could return later with a revision to address any concerns. However, ICANN appears ready to close the 2004 round of bids as it prepares to launch a new round. ICM also could seek to have the decision reviewed through ICANN channels or file a lawsuit if it believes ICANN failed to follow its own guidelines.

Q. What happens if the name is approved?

A. Assuming the U.S. government does not wield the veto power it has over ICANN, ".xxx" would be entered into the domain name system within months. ICM would establish a program to set aside certain names, such as trademarks and geographic places. Web sites wanting any remaining name would sign up with an approved registration company, which would forward to ICM $60 for each name sold. No site would be required to use the domain, and sites would be free to keep their existing names under ".com" and elsewhere. Parents could set their filtering software to block all ".xxx" sites, although that alone won't stop all such sites given its voluntary nature.

Q. Shouldn't ".xxx" be mandatory then?

A. Mandating the domain's use would raise significant problems, namely how to define pornography. Should any site with nudity be classified? What about artistic or educational sites, such as ones on breast feeding? And who should decide, given conflicts between pornography and speech laws around the world? Even if those issues are resolved, such a requirement wouldn't stop pornography entirely: A child could simply type in the equivalent numeric address to reach a porn site directly.

A service of the Associated Press(AP)
www.whataredomains.com

Where can I look up Trademarked terms?

2007-03-20T04:57:00.000-06:00

Your search will start here at the United States Patent and Trademark office.

Use this form for a basic search and this form for an advanced search.

Use this link to learn how to file for a trademark.

Termination of RegisterFly.com Registrar Accreditation Agreement

2007-03-17T13:01:00.000-06:00

ICANN today issued a formal notice of termination of RegisterFly.com's Registration Accreditation Agreement (RAA).

ICANN has issued a letter to RegisterFly [PDF, 902K] indicating that it will cease operating as an ICANN-Accredited Registrar on March 31, 2007. Under the terms of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA), ICANN must provide 15 days written notice to RegisterFly of its intention to terminate.

Effective immediately ICANN has terminated RegisterFly's right to use the ICANN Accredited Registrar logo on its website.

Between now and 31 March RegisterFly is required to unlock and provide all necessary Authinfo codes to allow domain name transfers to occur. Any and all registrants wishing to transfer away from RegisterFly during this period should be allowed to do so efficiently and expeditiously.

"Terminating accreditation is the strongest measure ICANN is able to take against RegisterFly under its powers," Dr. Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN said today.

"ICANN has been frustrated and distressed by recent management confusion inside RegisterFly," Dr. Twomey, President said. "I completely understand the greater frustration and enormous difficulty that this has created for registrants."

When the Agreement is terminated, ICANN can approve a bulk transfer of all current RegisterFly domain names to another ICANN accredited Registrar.

"Of course, RegisterFly does not have to wait till then. They can request ICANN to approve a bulk transfer immediately. I call on RegisterFly to act in the interests of registrants and seek such a transfer from us straight away," Dr. Twomey said.

ICANN intends to hold a forum to discuss the reform of the Accreditation policy and process at its Lisbon meeting in a week's time*.

A set of questions and points to inform the discussion will be made public prior to the Lisbon meeting.

* The Lisbon meeting is one of three meetings held a year by ICANN to meet with global stakeholders. It will take place from 26-30 March 2007.

Domain Roundtable 2007

2007-03-16T17:12:00.000-06:00

The Domain Roundtable Executive Committee is pleased to announce the 3rd Annual event running August 13 - 15, 2007 in beautiful Seattle, Washington. This year, we're going to crush the tired old formulas of cookie-cutter domain conferences and bring together the domain industry with the most exciting breakthrough topics and attendees ever presented. The potential will be there for you to experience incredible deal-making, domain sales and networking opportunities like never before.

The Domain Roundtable Conference 2007 will introduce domainers and domain companies to industry-changing innovations, more valuable discussions, incredible networking systems and a more diverse demographic of domain-interested attendees never offered at a domain conference.

The theme of our event is "Domains Breaking into the Open Market of the Business Community". The Domain Roundtable Conference 2007 will provide domainers a path for domain sales outside the confines of the domain industry. Industry insiders and the outside business community will converge to provide a platform for expanding the wisdom of domain values to brand managers and developers in other industries. This is the new and needed direction for the domain industry to take and the Domain Roundtable Conference 2007 will be the first in pioneering access to the business community at large as a fully proactive domain market.

To strengthen the complete program, we will introduce a new technology to network in profound ways with professionals there who share your interests. Every attendee will be in tune with meeting who they want, have a chance to sell their domains, and learn new strategies in profiting from their domain portfolio.

Don't miss this unprecedented event. Stay tuned for frequent updates by signing up for our newsletter and RSS feed.

The Domain Roundtable Conference 2007 - "Stay tuned, sign up, get rich."

More information at:
http://www.domainroundtable.com/

What are the best payment methods when selling domain names?

2007-03-15T03:14:00.000-06:00

There are MANY different types of payment methods.

I personally use Paypal for any transaction under $10,000. Before the buyer and I come to an agreement I make him/her aware that I will require that he/she pay the paypal fees. A great tool for calculating paypal fees can be found at www.PPcalc.com. There are some downfalls to using paypal. If a buyer does a chargeback on their credit card or even disputes the transaction with paypal you will have a hard time winning. I suggest that you only use paypal with people that you know you can trust.

Escrow.com also provides a service for domain names. There is also a fee involved with this and usually the buyer will pay the fees or the buyer and seller will split the fees. Make sure to work this out before you initiate the Escrow transaction. Escrow is one of the best ways for a transaction, though the downfall is that there is no time limit on the transaction. The domain name will not be released to the buyer until all of the funds have been received.

A bank wire is another option. This is a great risk to the buyer since he will be sending the money to your bank account and relying on you to push him the domain name once you receive the funds. Usually the funds are available within 2-3 business days from the day of the wire, though it all depends on your bank. You will need to provide the buyer with your name, bank account number, routing number, bank name, address, and phone number. More information on bank wires can be found here.

There are some other smaller payment processors out there including Moneybookers.com and Epassporte.com. I have used both of them and they worked great for me. Both of them work similar to paypal. I recommend Western Union as well..as long as you and the buyer can trust each other. Western Union poses a great risk to the buyer.

WhatAreDomains.com

153% Growth in U.K. Secondary Domain Market

2007-03-15T03:11:00.000-06:00

Growth in .co.uk domain value exceeds that of .com

Cologne, Germany, March 13, 2007 – Annual statistics for 2006 compiled by domain marketplace Sedo and DNJournal, the domain industry trade magazine, reveal a surge of 153% in the value of all published .CO.UK domain sales worldwide, in comparison to a growth of 79% in 2005. Already one of the world’s most expensive online addresses with an average sales value of £2,062.15. The increasing scarcity of quality .CO.UK domains, and the continued recovery in the UK online industry, have steadily driven prices higher in the past years.

The percentage share of reported domain sales worldwide for .CO.UK in 2006 has strengthened by 0.5%―in contrast to a slight drop in .COM sales―an indication of the growing importance and market value of .CO.UK domain names. Last year a staggering 84% of the total volume of published .CO.UK domain sales were conducted through Sedo.co.uk, the leading marketplace for buying and selling domain names.

Sedo’s U.K. statistics, which include all domains bought and sold by U.K. entities, have shown a continuous increase in sales prices over the last two years. The highest value transactions involving U.K. entities in 2006 were a confidential .COM domain (£662,315.00) and CRUISES.CO.UK (£95,000.00). In comparison, the top sales for 2005 were a confidential .COM domain (£30,567.80) and a confidential .CO.UK domain (£25,339.90).

For further detailed statistics please refer to the following link: market-statistics 2006.pdf

U.K. market sales statistics for 2006 demonstrate an overall increase in the volume of sales, number of domains sold and of the average selling price. The volume of published sales for both .CO.UK and .COM domains grew by 68% and 185% respectively. The number of .co.uk domain sales increased by 52% and .COM sales grew by 32%. This has lead to an additional upturn in average selling prices of 10% (.CO.UK) and 116% (.COM), signalling the maturity and ongoing development of the .CO.UK domain name market.

Nora Cotter, Sedo’s Director of Operations, United Kingdom, comments, “the number of UK-based Sedo members has increased by 34% in the last year alone; indicative of the growing importance of the U.K. market in general. The prospects for 2007 point towards continued success. We look forward to focusing on, and dedicating additional resources to the U.K. market to welcome more new clients and working to ensure we provide current users with complete customer satisfaction.”

For more information, please contact:
Bianca De Bono
Sedo GmbH, Marketing Associate
Tel: +49 221 34030386
Bianca.debono@sedo.com

Source
WhatAreDomains.com

Reported sales

2007-03-14T20:16:00.000-06:00

Usually I list the top sales from DNjournal.com but there are simply too many of them. DNJournal compiled all of the sales from the last two weeks and they were posted last night. I suggest that everyone take a look at them. It's good to see the market steadily gaining speed!

DNJournal.com sales report:
http://dnjournal.com/domainsales.htm

How would you rank tlds?

2007-03-14T12:48:00.000-06:00

Well, I feel this is all a matter of opinion. Most people would rank them as follows:

.com
.net
.org
.info
.us
.biz
.ws

I feel that .info values are steadily rising. I have seen more .info sales recently than .net and .org. I would rank them as follows:

.com
.info
.org
.net
.us
.biz
.ws

Again, this is all a matter of opinion. The top 4 will always be valuable if it is a generic term.

Complaints rise last year over domain names

2007-03-14T02:28:00.000-06:00

The UN copyright agency that arbitrates more than half the world's cybersquatting cases saw a 25 per cent increase in complaints last year.

The World Intellectual Property Organization received 1,823 complaints in 2006, alleging abusive registrations of trademarks as Internet domain names.

The growing number of professional domain name dealers who use computer software that automatically registers expired domain names or temporarily registers them without paying charges, is of concern to trademark owners, WIPO said.

Most of last year's disputes have been resolved.

Source

WhatAreDomains.com

DNJournal

2007-03-14T00:25:00.000-06:00

Several great domain name sales were listed on DNJ tonight..including one from me. I had the only reported .info sale for Six.info on DNjournal.com!

Let's keep up the good work guys!

Here is a link to the screenshot!

King of the Clock

2007-03-12T01:54:00.000-06:00

WhatAreDomains.com was recently crowned "King of the Clock."

Visit KingoftheClock.com to purchase the "King" spot for only $10.

Where can I find the legendary "Masters of their domains" article?

2007-03-12T01:50:00.002-06:00

Here's the article in full.

Masters of their Domains

Forget condos and strip malls. Domain names, the real estate of the Web, have been delivering far greater returns. How some of the savviest speculators on the Net are making millions from their URL portfolios.

By Paul Sloan
December 1, 2005

(Business 2.0) – On a balmy night in late October, hundreds of partiers, most sporting red or blue Hawaiian shirts, pack the Delux nightclub in Delray Beach, Fla. It's a swank place--outdoor decks, two bars, plush, bed-size sofas scattered throughout--and the crowd arrives in chartered buses and stretch Hummers. Many head straight for the guy rolling cigars and toss back shots as if it were 1999. Which, to them, it might as well be.

They call themselves domainers. They make their living buying and selling domain names and turning their Web traffic into cash--lots of it. They have gathered in Delray Beach for a trade show called Traffic that this year boasts 300 paying attendees, more than twice the number that came for the first show, in '04.

The man behind the conference, Rick Schwartz, couldn't be happier--and he isn't even around when midnight strikes and bikini-clad women take to the dance floor to raffle off prizes and peel off their tops. Schwartz, 52, began buying up domain names 10 years ago. Like many early players, he gravitated to where the money was: porn. He snapped up names like Ass.com, Makeout.com, and Porno.com, to name a few. It was a quick path to riches: Adult sites were paying handsomely for the traffic; mainstream sites were not--at least not yet.

Today, Schwartz owns about 5,000 names, with less than a third falling into the "adult" category. He's the industry's biggest promoter, preaching the power of domains to anyone who will listen and bringing domainers together with moneymen and execs from the likes of Google and Yahoo. He sports a $65,000 Rolex on his left wrist, a $32,000 diamond bracelet on his right, and is astounded that he--a community college dropout--is living like a king in a waterfront house in Boca Raton.

"I don't like to work," Schwartz says, almost yelling as if to convince everyone within earshot that they're fools if they do. "I figure any moron in the world can generate work for themselves and tie up their time. I have one laptop, no employees, and no product whatsoever--none! This is magic." Magic, he claims, that's earning him $2 million a year.

And you thought the domain grabbers vanished with the dotcom bust. The boom in Internet advertising and the success of the pay-per-click ad model are making the go-go '90s look sluggish. Back then, buying a domain name was pure speculation: Snap up Whatever.com and sit back until some big company with a get-on-the-Internet-at-any-cost mentality offers you a set-for-life payday to buy it.

Now it's all about the income stream. A single good domain name--Candy.com, Cellphones.com, Athletesfoot.com--can bring in hundreds of dollars a day, in some cases while the owner hardly lifts a finger. Schwartz, for instance, directs his traffic to one of the many small companies that serve as go-betweens with Google and Yahoo, the two giants that make this all possible. The middlemen, known as aggregators, do all the heavy lifting, designing the sites and tapping into one or the other of the search engines' advertising networks to add the best-paying links. Many other big domainers cut out the middlemen, creating their own webpages and working directly with Google or Yahoo.

The secret? It has to do with what's known as type-in traffic, or, in Wall Street jargon, direct navigation. Though it may seem odd in the era of powerful search engines, it turns out that millions of Internet surfers don't use search at all. Instead, they type what they're looking for right into the top of their Web browser. Looking to buy candy? Type in Candy.com, a name Schwartz bought in May 2002 for $108,000. A page filled with links to candy-related products comes up. Click on one of the ads and the advertiser pays Google, which in turn sends a share to Schwartz and the company that runs Candy.com. Some days Candy.com makes Schwartz $300 in profits; the site paid for itself in a year and a half.

No one knows for sure how much Web traffic comes from type-ins, and Google and Yahoo execs won't discuss it. But privately, during one of the late-night parties at the Traffic conference, one Yahoo official estimates that type-ins could make up 15 percent of its search business. Marchex, a Seattle-based public startup whose strategy rests largely on type-in traffic, estimates that it accounts for nearly 10 percent of the global paid search market, which is projected to soar from $9 billion this year to $23 billion in 2009.

That's why some domain names are commanding six- and seven-figure price tags and attracting big-money players. Private money manager Stuart Rabin is cutting those sorts of checks to domainers two to three times a week. In November 2004, Marchex shelled out $164 million for a single domainer's portfolio. Even a few venture capital firms are now placing bets. Earlier this year, Boston-based Highland Capital paid $80 million to acquire BuyDomains, a company with 500,000 names, according to people familiar with the deal. Says Highland principal Richard de Silva, who wouldn't confirm the price, "These are profit machines."

Domainers have their heroes, and one of the most mysterious is a man named Yun Ye, a Chinese citizen living in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is credited with boosting the entire market when he sold his portfolio of more than 100,000 domains to Marchex. His names were bringing in more than $20 million a year in revenues--and $19 million in profits--when Marchex paid the equivalent of 8.6 times annual earnings, based on figures provided in SEC documents.

"He is our god," says domainer Michael Bahlitzanakis the moment he hears Ye's name uttered at a Delray Beach party. Every domainer knows of Ye, but few have ever met him. He's the domainers' Keyser Soze. "My attorney happens to be his attorney, but that's as close to him as I can get," says Bahlitzanakis, 29.

A onetime hotshot programmer, Ye used his software chops to build the bulk of his domain empire in the late '90s and early 2000s. He became a master at what's known as "catching," or buying up domains that were dropping because people gave up on them or forgot to pay the annual registration fee. At the time, the system was secretive, and domainers were trying to figure out what names were expiring and when. In the dark of night, Ye would sit before a bank of computers and, like a conductor, launch programs he wrote to shoot rapid-fire requests to purchase names.

His prowess quickly became clear. Chad Folkening, a domainer in Indianapolis, was disorganized in those years and sometimes missed renewal deadlines. He noticed that Ye was grabbing his expired names with lightning speed. After Ye had snapped up 100 of them, Folkening decided he needed to talk to Ye. "I was eating, sleeping, and drinking Yun Ye," he says. E-mail drew no response. Nor did phone calls. So in late 2001, Folkening traveled to an address near San Jose listed on Ye's domain registrations. "I figured I was going to walk up to his front door, knock, and say, 'Yun Ye, I just had to meet you,'" says Folkening, who now owns 7,000 names. Instead, the address led him to a Mail Boxes Etc. outlet. Folkening stuck Post-It notes on Ye's box asking him to call. Ye sent Folkening an e-mail a couple of days later, but the two never met up. Two years later, some acquaintances of Folkening's set up a get-together with Ye in a Los Angeles bar. "I did most of the talking, then he left," Folkening recalls. It wasn't until the next day that it dawned on Folkening that the man he'd had drinks with was probably an entirely different Yun Ye, which the real Ye confirmed to him in an e-mail. (Ye's attorney, John Barryhill, says Ye won't talk to the press, and he adds, "I don't answer questions about him.")

When Ye was building his portfolio, there was really only one way to make money from names--reselling them. That began to change in 2003 as paid search--developed and pushed by Overture, now part of Yahoo, and current market leader Google--started to take off. The technology powering the whole thing is complex, but not the basic business model: Advertisers pay only when someone clicks on their ads. And to get their links listed high in search results--or on a domainer's page that someone lands on by typing a name into a Web browser--they bid on keywords.

Generic names are gold for domainers, but names that target a specific audience are also valuable. Take, for instance, people looking for information on anorexia or bulimia. Type the phrase "eating disorders" into Yahoo's search engine and an ad from Remuda Ranch treatment center in Wickenburg, Ariz., appears across the top of the results. To win that spot, Remuda pays Yahoo handsomely--$3.06 per click was the price when Business 2.0 checked in early November. But the way many people looking for the same information go about it is to type www.eatingdisorders.com into their Web browser. That takes them to a page with five links to treatment centers, and again Remuda sits at the top of the page. But here's the difference: Click on it from this page and the $3.06 Remuda pays Yahoo for the referral gets shared with the domainer who owns the name.

In this case, that's Frank Schilling, a reclusive man who has quietly become one of the world's most powerful and respected domainers. Schilling bought the name in late 2002 for $1,100, snapping it up in an auction. It struck Schilling as a smart one to own since eating disorders are common. "What I didn't realize," he says, "is that more than 100 people a day blindly type the name into their address bar." Today, he says, the site gets around 120 click-throughs a day, providing steady, easy cash.

Ironically, Schilling came close to selling off his portfolio at the same time as Ye--until Vice President Dick Cheney inadvertently persuaded him to keep building his business. It was the evening of Oct. 5, 2004. Schilling, who is 36, was monitoring his sites from the Ritz-Carlton in Naples, Fla., where he and his family had been living since Hurricane Ivan leveled their house in the Cayman Islands a month earlier. As Schilling was scanning traffic data, he noticed that something wasn't right. An enormous burst of traffic was threatening to take down his servers.

He pulled up Google News, quickly discovering the culprit. The vice presidential debate between Cheney and Sen. John Edwards was going on, and to defend his record, Cheney told viewers to look at Factcheck.com. Cheney had meant to say Factcheck.org, a site run by the University of Pennsylvania. Factcheck.com was one of Schilling's.

Schilling had two options: Take down his servers, which could cost him tens of thousands of dollars in traffic to his other sites, or redirect Factcheck.com surfers elsewhere. The onslaught was useless to him, after all, since he only makes money when a visitor clicks on an advertiser's link. No fan of the Bush administration, Schilling thought of an anti-Bush ad that financier George Soros had run in the Wall Street Journal. Seconds later, he pointed the surging traffic to GeorgeSoros.com, so that anyone seeking out Cheney's record--and many millions did--was greeted with the message "Why We Must Not Reelect George Bush."

For Schilling, it was an epiphany. At the time, he had an offer on the table to sell his portfolio for more than $100 million; the potential purchaser, whom Schilling won't disclose, was in the middle of auditing his business. The experience--a flood of people surging across the Internet and ending up at a page he controlled--made Schilling realize that the value of domain names would become exponentially greater over time. "A few keystrokes and look what I did," says Schilling, flipping back his shoulder-length blond hair and typing into the air. "It was totally surreal." Since the night of the debate, he's added another 100,000 names to his portfolio, bringing his holdings to more than 300,000--cash-generating generic names that are again attracting well-financed suitors.

One of those suitors is Rabin, a soft-spoken man who keeps a white handkerchief tucked into his suit jacket pocket. Rabin runs a private fund called Jacobson Family Investments from the 56th floor of Carnegie Hall Tower, a suite with sweeping views of Central Park and uptown New York City. It's a fitting view, since the Internet in 2005 looks to Rabin a lot like Manhattan 100 years ago--awash in real estate opportunities.

Rabin teamed up a year ago with a Harvard-trained finance whiz named Bob Martin and domain speculator Marc Ostrofsky. They named their company Internet REIT and, according to Ostrofsky, are spending $250 million, probably far more, buying out domain owners as fast as they can find good names. (Ostrofsky, for the record, was the man who pulled off the much-publicized sale of Business.com for a reported $7.5 million in December 1999.)

When Martin and Ostrofsky approached Rabin about forming a business, Rabin knew little about domains. Then he did some research and was astounded. Type-in traffic is a growing phenomenon, the fixed costs are minimal, and U.S. advertisers are expected to spend $26 billion on the Internet by 2010--roughly double the current level. He immediately thought of the billboard industry a decade ago, before Clear Channel and Viacom bought up the small operators. "We've only just begun the roll-up phase," says Rabin, 39. "This market will likely be in the billions."

The team of Martin, Ostrofsky, and Rabin is working the Delray Beach conference hard. Ostrofsky, the salesguy, dives right in: "What are your names? What's your monthly traffic? What kind of multiple are you looking for?" Ostrofsky pulls aside Bahlitzanakis, the Ye worshiper. Bahlitzanakis, who works from his apartment in Queens, N.Y., owns fewer than 100 names, but at least one is a gem: Cellphones.com. The site--a plain page with relevant links--makes an average of $1,300 a day.

Bahlitzanakis spends his last night in Delray Beach at an Internet REIT party, tossing back Grey Goose vodka and tonics. He returns to his hotel room in the early morning to find a contract under his door. Total price: $4.2 million. He paid $90 for the name in 1996. "I just went to my 10th high school reunion, and I thought to myself, 'Who's laughing now?'" Bahlitzanakis says.

Ostrofsky talks about fuzzy concepts like "mindshare" when it comes to evaluating a name. But like all the top domainers, he and his crew also analyze traffic data. Internet REIT figures it will run some of its sites, like Officesupply.com, as virtual stores, with links to suppliers and products. But they're expecting that the pay-per-click model will drive the business.

From his office in Houston, Ostrofsky trolls the Web late each night to find prospective sellers. That's how he ended up negotiating with Marie and Bob Benz at their home in Philadelphia one evening in September. The couple, both doctors, began buying names in 1995 as a hobby. They bought some they liked--Heartdisease.com, Highbloodpressure.com, Athletesfoot.com. In some cases, they developed the sites and added content; in others, they set them up as simple landing pages with relevant advertising links.

After an evening of talk, Ostrofsky and the Benzes reached a deal, and Internet REIT is paying $3.6 million for their 101 names. Says Bob Benz, who specializes in kidney diseases, "It's a lot more lucrative than being a doctor."

Plenty of things could spoil the domainers' party. Internet advertising could turn south. Click fraud, in which someone writes a program that repeatedly clicks on paying links, could become a bigger problem for the paid search industry, making advertisers reluctant to spend. The model itself could change entirely. Or sites could become so commercial that Web surfers sour on them.

But the way domainers look at it, they own the property. "And if you own the real estate," Rabin says, "people are going to wind up there at some point." Soon, he figures, Wall Street at large will begin to catch on, providing opportunities to tap into the public markets. Then big Internet players like Rupert Murdoch or Barry Diller could buy out the domain owners. Some even speculate that Google or Yahoo--or Microsoft, which is entering the paid search business--will roll up the domainers, cutting out a layer and serving up the type-in traffic directly to their advertisers.

In the meantime, Google and Yahoo are trying to keep the type-in business coming--and execs from both companies are using the Delray Beach conference to court the folks who control it. As the party at Delux winds down, 14 Yahoo executives pile into a stretch Hummer with a few of the domainers, including Schilling, who has an exclusive contract in which Yahoo serves all the ads for his sites. The limo heads 35 miles south on Interstate 95 to Scarlett's Gentlemen's Club. The men kick back in the VIP section, outfitted with plush booths and red velvet curtains.

When the woman in charge of the area comes by and mentions the cost of the booths, the Yahoo crew gets nervous. And in the end, no one wants to submit the $1,000 tab to the expense department back at headquarters. Finally, Schilling pulls out a roll of cash and pays up. Not a big deal for a guy who owns a share of a jet. But considering that Schilling's traffic generated more than 1 percent of Yahoo's $3.6 billion in revenues last year, you'd think one of those guys could have stood up and taken one for the team.

Source:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2005/12/01/8364591/index.htm

More than $4 Million in Domain Names Sold at Moniker's T.R.A.F.F.I.C WEST Live Auction

2007-03-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

WhatAreDomains.com

POMPANO BEACH, Fla., March 9 /PRNewswire/ -- $4.3 million of premium domain names were purchased during Moniker's T.R.A.F.F.I.C WEST Live Auction on Wednesday, March 7 at The Venetian Resort, Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

In total, 155 domains, or 67 percent of the domains offered for bid by Moniker, were successfully sold. The average buyer spent over $77,000 during the three hour event. Individual investors and domain focused companies purchased various premium domains, including these top sales:

- Families.com $650,000 - Greeting.com $350,000 - Blogster.com $275,000 - ET.com $225,000 - Settlement.com $200,000 - OL.com $150,000 - PX.com $120,000 - HomeForeclosures.com $90,000 - RealEstate.mobi $85,000 - Mozambique.com $82,500

"Domainers and businesses alike are realizing the value of premium domain names as real investment opportunities," said Monte Cahn, co-founder and CEO of Moniker.com. "Wednesday's auction proved that individuals and companies are willing to pay significant sums of money to help manage and grow their online brand reputation. Moniker's sale percentage was more than double what it has averaged at previous auctions. We look forward to the next domain auctions at the Casino Affiliate Convention in Amsterdam in May, T.R.A.F.F.I.C New York in June, Internext in Hollywood, Fla. in August, and T.R.A.F.F.I.C East in Hollywood, Fla. in October, among others scheduled in 2007."

All the top-level domain extensions, including .mobi, .net, and .org. had good representation and sales at the auction. RealEstate.mobi was the highest grossing .mobi domain fetching $85,000, while Model.net sold for $50,000 and We.org sold for $36,500.

Silent Auction Continues at Moniker.com

The bidding is not over yet as T.R.A.F.F.I.C. attendees and proxy bidders continue to bid on over 3,500 domain names during Moniker's Silent Auction. The silent auction will run online until March 14, 2007 and provides additional opportunities to purchase premium domain names strategic to overall portfolios. Individuals can access the Silent Auction by visiting http://www.moniker.com/silentauction/index.jsp

Next Live Auction at Inaugural T.R.A.F.F.I.C. New York

Moniker's next Live Auction of domain names will be during T.R.A.F.F.I.C. New York on June 19-22, 2007 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Domain owners interested in selling their names at auction may contact Moniker at sales@moniker.com.

About Moniker

Moniker is the first and only provider of Domain Asset Management(TM), a complete set of business services that provide companies a single-point-of- access to help manage and maximize the value of their domains. These services include name creation, registration, acquisition, portfolio management, appraisal and escrow services, traffic monetization and after-market sales - all backed by unsurpassed customer service and security.

With more than a decade of experience, Moniker is a top 10 domain registrar, holds the industry's highest customer retention rate and pioneered the industry's first domain appraisal formula. It is considered the industry's premier marketplace to buy and sell domain names.

Customers include savvy investors, Web entrepreneurs and forward-thinking global companies, including Marchex, Nokta, Future Media Architects, AOL, Yahoo, the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, Lions Gate Films, Bank of America, Microsoft, Jupitermedia, Geosigns, Mainstream Advertising and many others.

Moniker, with headquarters in Pompano Beach, Florida, is an operating unit of Seevast Corporation, a company of marketing services firms that drive sales, build brands and leverage core assets for their clients.

International domain names succeed in testing

2007-03-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

Internationalized domain names have moved a step closer to reality, following ICANN's announcement that it had successfully completed testing.

Currently, domain names can be composed of just 37 core symbols, including numbers, letters from the Latin alphabet and the hyphen.

Many countries whose languages use other characters--such as Chinese or Arabic--have long been demanding the ability to use internationalized domain names (IDNs) based on those characters. Advocates see this development as crucial to retaining a single global Internet.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers--the organization that administers domain names--commissioned a laboratory test of IDNs in October 2006. The test was designed to establish whether the use of encoded internationalized characters would "have any impact on the operations of the root name servers providing delegations or the iterative mode resolvers."

ICANN announced the results on Wednesday. "No impact at all could be detected," wrote tester Lars-Johan Liman. "All involved systems behaved exactly as expected."

All details of the test setup and design are available on ICANN's Web site so that it can be replicated if desired.

However, the test did not include the "end-user perspective" or a live root test. It instead concentrated on "replicating the root server environment." This suggests that significant further testing needs to be done before IDNs are allowed.

Source

Registerfly goes offline

2007-03-06T19:30:00.000-07:00

The web site for troubled domain registrar RegisterFly went offline early Tuesday and remains unavailable. The downtime follows weeks of problems with the registerfly.com site, with domain name owners saying they have been unable to manage or transfer their domains. Amid growing concern about the status of domains at RegisterFly, ICANN has asked a California court to force RegisterFly to turn over its database of domain data and compel an emergency audit of its books and records.

ICANN has also reached out to central domain registries to protect domain owners. "Last Friday, ICANN convened a telephone conference among those needed to implement a plan that will help cease unintended deletions," ICANN said on its blog. "This will prevent names from being deleted from the registry and becoming available for re-registration by others."

A dynamically updating chart of RegisterFly's web site performance is available. Netcraft offers a web site performance monitoring service that provides similar charts, along with e-mail alerts when an outage occurs.

RegisterFly's operations descended into chaos last week amid allegations that the former president and CEO misused company funds. As the company's principals battle one another, thousands of domain names have been caught in the crossfire. RegisterFly says that at least 75,000 customer domains expired as a direct result of the company's financial and management problems. A lawsuit filed by RegisterFly's parent company, Unified Names, blames the meltdown on misuse of company funds by President and CEO Kevin Medina, who was fired by the company's board.

ICANN has taken heat from RegisterFly customers, who say the group should have acted sooner. "ICANN is not a regulator," the unsigned blog post stated. "We rely mainly on contract law. We do not condone in any way whatsoever RegisterFly’s business practice and behaviour." While it has taken steps to prevent domain deletions, ICANN offered little solace to domain owners hoping to transfer their names to another registrar: "The options for customers to transfer their names to another registrar at this stage are limited. We will advise if we have more information on this point."

120M Domains Registered

2007-03-06T19:07:00.000-07:00

www.whataredomains.com

Domain name registrations reached 120 million in the fourth quarter of 2006, representing a 32 percent increase over the previous year, and an eight percent rise over the previous quarter.

According to the Domain Name Industry Brief for the fourth quarter of 2006 released by VeriSign today more than 11.6 million new domain names were registered in the quarter.

This figure represents a three percent increase year on year with an average of 10.1 million new domain names registered each quarter in 2006, compared to an average of 8.7 million in 2005. Country Code Top Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) increased 31 percent year over year to 43.7 million, and 10 percent from the previous quarter with more than four million registrations. China added more than 500,000 domains in the fourth quarter alone, a 43 percent increase over last quarter. The base of .com and .net domain names grew to 65 million domain names by the close of 2006. New .com and .net registrations were added at an average of 2.1 million per month in the fourth quarter of 2006 for a total of 6.2 million new registrations in the quarter. VeriSign processed an average of 24 billion queries per day in operating the Internet infrastructure for .com and .net.

VeriSign chief security officer, Ken Silva, said with the number of global DNS queries increasing, the infrastructure has to be ready to respond.

"The network is changing, and with new services like voice and video migrating to the Internet, and the proliferation of Internet-enabled devices, it's important that the security and capacity requirements keep pace," he said. VeriSign recently announced Project Titan, a major initiative to increase capacity of its Internet infrastructure ten-fold by 2010 to accommodate future growth.

Information on the project is available at www.verisign.com/titan. Copies of the 2006 fourth quarter Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained at www.verisign.com/domainbrief.

Source

Domain name industry continues to grow.

2007-03-05T23:47:00.000-07:00

VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), the leading provider of digital infrastructure for the networked world, today released the VeriSign® Domain Name Industry Brief for the fourth quarter of 2006. According to the report, which highlights key industry data for worldwide domain name activity, total domain name registrations reached 120 million, representing a 32 percent increase over the previous year, and an eight percent increase over the third quarter of 2006.

The domain name industry continued to experience strong growth in the fourth quarter of 2006, with more than 11.6 million new registered domain names. This figure represents a three percent increase year over year and a 23 percent increase from the third quarter. There was an average of 10.1 million new domain names registered each quarter in 2006, compared to an average of 8.7 million new domain names registered each quarter in 2005.

Country Code Top Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) increased 31 percent year over year to 43.7 million, and 10 percent from the previous quarter with more than four million registrations. China added more than 500,000 domains in the fourth quarter alone, a 43 percent increase over last quarter.

The base of .com and .net domain names grew to 65 million domain names by the close of 2006, representing a six percent increase in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter of 2006, and a 30 percent increase year over year. New .com and .net registrations were added at an average of 2.1 million per month in the fourth quarter of 2006 for a total of 6.2 million new registrations in the quarter.

Increasing Usage

VeriSign processed an average of 24 billion queries per day in operating the Internet infrastructure for .com and .net during the fourth quarter of 2006. The VeriSign Domain Name System (DNS) continued to maintain operational accuracy and stability for 100 percent of the time during the fourth quarter of 2006.

"With the number of global DNS queries increasing, the infrastructure has to be ready to respond," said Ken Silva, chief security officer, VeriSign. "The network is changing, and with new services like voice and video migrating to the Internet, and the proliferation of Internet-enabled devices, it’s important that the security and capacity requirements keep pace.”

VeriSign recently announced Project Titan, a major initiative to increase capacity of its Internet infrastructure ten-fold by 2010 to accommodate the continued growth of the Internet. More information on VeriSign's Project Titan may be obtained at www.verisign.com/titan.

VeriSign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide Internet users throughout the world with significant statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry and the Internet as a whole. Copies of the 2006 fourth quarter Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained at www.verisign.com/domainbrief.

About VeriSign

VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), operates digital infrastructure services that enable and protect billions of interactions every day across the world’s voice and data networks. Additional news and information about the company is available at www.verisign.com.au

Contacts

VeriSign Media Relations: Emma Keen, ekeen@verisign.com.au, +61 2 9236 0572

Statements in this announcement other than historical data and information constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause VeriSign's actual results to differ materially from those stated or implied by such forward-looking statements. The potential risks and uncertainties include, among others, the uncertainty of future revenue and profitability and potential fluctuations in quarterly operating results due to such factors as the inability of VeriSign to successfully deploy and expand the technology referenced herein, to successfully develop and market new products and services, and customer acceptance of any new products or services; the possibility that VeriSign’s services and announced new services and technology may not result in additional customers, profits or revenues; and increased competition and pricing pressures. More information about potential factors that could affect the company's business and financial results is included in VeriSign's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including in the company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2005 and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. VeriSign undertakes no obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements after the date of this press release.

Source

Finally, some hope for Regfly customers.

2007-03-05T23:44:00.000-07:00

ICANN locks down at-risk Registerfly domains

ICANN plans to sue scandal-hit domain name registrar Registerfly.com tomorrow, saying the company is putting its customers' estimated 2 million domain names at risk.

And in an unprecedented move, ICANN has persuaded the four major generic top-level domain registries to lock down all Registerfly's customers' domains for a month, so they cannot expire and then be hijacked by speculators or domain traffic monetization firms.

ICANN said in a letter to Registerfly Friday that Registerfly is refusing to hand over data about its customers' domains, as required by its registrar accreditation agreement, and that it will enforce the contract in court by filing suit on Tuesday.

Registerfly is over two weeks into a bitter coup d'etat in which now-CEO John Naruszewicz ousted former CEO Kevin Medina and sued him, claiming Medina had been siphoning off customers' money to pay for expensive escorts, a penthouse apartment and cosmetic surgery.

The customer web site Registerflies.com, which has been the social hub and occasional customer support channel for aggrieved and panicky Registerfly customers for the past weeks, also contains allegations of a criminal nature against Medina, which we were unable to verify.

Customers say they have been losing their domains, and thus their web sites, email addresses and in some cases livelihoods, as they have been unable to renew expiring domains or transfer them to another registrar. In some cases they say they have paid multiple times and lost domains anyway.

Nowadays, when a domain registration expires it is almost always re-registered immediately by automated systems run by domain speculators and/or domain parking firms. The original registrant often has to pay a premium to get their former property back.

ICANN, the de facto regulator of the domain name industry, stepped in over a week ago -- customers say that was a year too late -- threatening to cut off Registerfly's accreditation if the problems were not resolved within 15 business days.

It also demanded Registerfly hand over copies of its customer data, so that registration rights could be protected if the company was in fact in terminal decline. Registerfly refused to hand over the data, according to correspondence published by ICANN yesterday.

The ICANN letters claim two more breaches of the registrar agreement, and a promise to sue.

Not able to get its hands on the data, ICANN has got VeriSign, NeuStar and Afilias, which run the .com, .net, .biz and .info namespaces, to lock all pending-expiration Registerfly domains into a "Server-Delete-Prohibited" status.

"This will prevent them from being deleted from the registry and becoming available for re-registration by others," ICANN said.

What domain names do you have for sale?

2007-03-04T23:53:00.000-07:00

Normally you can find my domain names listed on the right ---------->
but I will post a list. If interested, please contact me at whois@dr.com or godfrey90sf@aol.com.

Considering offers on the following. BIN prices are listed.

Pics.info (X,XXX offers)
Man.info (X,XXX offers)
Jens.info (X,XXX offers)
Book.biz (X,XXX offers)
Guns.info (X,XXX offers)
Liquors.org $5,000
Wines.org $40,000
Collectable.net $2,000
Australians.net $9,000
Australians.org $7,500
Wineries.org $11,000
Wineries.tv $5,000
LakeOntario.info $500
Viajando.info $600 (Traveling in Spanish; .com sold for $90,000 in 2005)
Jolene.info $300
Dockets.info $400
Virgos.info $500
Accommodation.net $40,000
EthanolStation.org $2,000
EthanolPlant.net $2,000
Registrations.org $15,000
458.net $1,200
481.net $1,000
Benji.info $300
Nadeau.info $300
HybridDrives.org $500
Savana.info $400
Little-Rock.net $500
usacasino.info $300
disneychannel.info $300
papillion.info $450 (city in Nebraska)
northplatte.info $450 (city in Nebraska)

Considering offers on:

franchises.org
honeymoons.net
centrefolds.org
chateaux.org
grandstand.net
tax-returns.net
winesearch.net
ladyluck.org
financialplanner.net

What is .tel?

2007-03-04T10:51:00.000-07:00

ICANN just announced the addition of .tel to the DNS root zone, making it the 15th top level domain under contract with ICANN on the Internet.

What is .tel all about?

According to Telnic, the domain registry in charge of .tel, individuals and companies will be able to use the .tel domain to publish and update their contact information directly in their domain's DNS records, allowing them to decide, in real time, by what means their friends, colleagues and clients will be able to reach them. This could include: VoIP, conventional telephony (fixed or wireless), email, SMS, Skype, AIM and many more. (PDF file)

Apparently, .tel isn't a domain in the traditional sense. It will not be competing with .mobi, which was introduced last year and is all about "making the Internet mobile".

Instead, .tel plans to become a cutting edge, decentralized, globally accessible and privacy-enhanced contact directory:

Here's how it could work…

Imagine you want to call your friend Hank Magellan, who is stored in your phone directory as hankmagellan.tel. Your phone or computer connects to hankmagellan.tel and receives a response with all contact options that Hank has decided to offer at the current time. This might include phone:hankmagellan.tel, skype:hankmagellan.tel, cell:hankmagellan.tel, aim:hankmagellan.tel, and email:hankmagellan.tel.

You decide which of these contact method you want to use. In case you go for Skype, your phone launches the Skype application and sends out a request for skype:hankmagellan.tel. The DNS server responds with whatever Skype username Hank has told it that he is using at the moment. Your phone uses that username to call Hank on Skype.

But what if Hank wants to be left alone? He could instantly deactivate all records except email:hankmagellan.tel and voicemail:hankmagellan.tel. You realize that he doesn't want to be disturbed, so you send him an email from your device to whatever address Hank is currently using.

All of this is completely transparent. You don't have to memorize or store all of the numerous contact options of each of your friends and associates. All you need is yourfriend.tel and you're set.

First come, first served…

In an email to the Daily Domainer, a Telnic representative confirmed that .tel domains will be issued on a first come first served basis. So, for all the Adam Smiths out there, the first one to buy adamsmith.tel gets it. Everyone else will need to get asmith.tel, adams.tel and eventually asmith123.tel or some other combination. Adam may already have another online username (with Skype, AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Google, Hotmail, etc…) that he may choose to use, for example: wealthofnations.tel.

In order to avoid confusion when searching for a person within the .tel domain, Telnic will allow domain name owners to add keywords to the domains to help distinguish themselves in a search. For example, a search for Adam Smith might turn up several results, but when the searcher sees the key words, "London, Scuba instructor, nickname: Smithy" he will know he found the right one.

What about privacy?

Telnic will allow owners of .tel domains to restrict access to particular pieces of information to certain people (very much like a buddy list). For example, a domain owner could choose to make his work number public and accessible to everyone, whereas he could restrict access to my cell phone number to just his family and his lawyer.

Privacy features to defeat spam

By using the privacy features, .tel owners will be able to prevent access to sensitive contact details including emails, home or mobile telephone numbers or any other means they find confidential. Preventing unsolicited communication is an issue which the user can easily manage, and in fact is already being done today. With a simple click, users can configure their Skype client to only allow contact from people on their contact list (their buddies). The .tel domain will work in the same manner.

The future of telecommunications?

For .tel to reach critical mass it needs to be supported by a large number of devices and applications. To promote this process Telnic plans to release free applications to allow .tel domains to be integrated with the commonly used address books found in computer systems and mobile phones.

Is .tel a stroke of genius that could revolutionize and enhance the way we communicate, or a solution in search of a problem? No matter the answer (post your views below), it is already certain that tens of thousands of individuals and companies will want to be the first in line to register theirname.tel to make sure that nobody else does. Telnic plans to announce the official .tel launch timetable shortly.

Source

What is a "C & D" letter?

2007-03-03T15:36:00.000-07:00

Cease and desist (also called C & D) is a legal term essentially meaning "halt" or "end". It is used in demands for a person or organization to permanently stop doing something (to cease and desist from doing it).

The term is used in two different contexts: A cease-and-desist order can be issued by a judge or government authority, and has well-defined legal meaning. A cease-and-desist letter can be sent by anyone, although typically they are drafted by a lawyer.

Cease-and-desist letters
A cease-and-desist letter is a letter demanding that the recipient stop continuing a certain behavior. The behavior in question can include publishing materials or making statements that the letter's sender considers copyright infringement, trademark infringement, patent infringement, slander, or libel. The letter typically threatens legal action if the recipient continues to publish the materials in question or make statements similar to the ones in question. It is similar in form, although not in function, to a demand letter, which alerts the recipient to a pending claim for money damages, usually as a result of a tort or a breach of contract.

There have been criticisms from civil liberties and free speech groups that cease-and-desist letters may be used by wealthy individuals and corporations to bully their less-monied opponents into silence, as many people will comply with even an unjustified cease-and-desist letter due to their unwillingness to engage in an expensive lawsuit. Such groups call this a chilling effect on free speech.

In the US, a recipient of a cease-and-desist letter put in a "reasonable apprehension" of litigation may respond through a request for declaratory judgment proceeding in his own jurisdiction.

A Cease and Desist Letter can also be drafted by a person who is being continually harassed and/or intimidated by an individual or a group.

Court orders
A cease-and-desist order is an order from a judge or government ordering a halt to an illegal activity. This prohibition is sometimes done as the outcome of a trial, in which case it is a permanent injunction against the activity, and sometimes done as an emergency measure to prevent possibly irreparable harm, in which case it takes the form of a temporary injunction. An injunction against speech issued before it occurs (e.g. preventing a pending publication) is called prior restraint.

Administrative agencies
Many government administrative agencies also have the ability to issue cease and desist orders. Government agencies frequently issue cease and desist orders to halt the sale of unregistered or fraudulent securities, to halt unsafe banking practices, and to enforce licensing statutes. Frequently, these orders will contain a period of time for the subject of the order to request a hearing. If a hearing is not requested, the cease and desist order will become final and the agency will be able to enforce its order in a court of law.

Where can I get a flash game arcade script?

2007-03-02T15:29:00.000-07:00

Easy answer:

www.MyGameScript.com

Mygamescript.com is run by a friend of mine, Kawing. I've done several business transactions with him, all of which were flawless.

My Game Script is a simple yet powerful script, enabling you to run your own flash game arcade website with full control. They have several different packages available to suit your needs, the Basic Package enables you to set up an empty game arcade, where you can manually upload and add your own games through the sophisicated admin panel. They are also happy to offer the Standard Package (300+ flash games) and the Super Size Package (1,350+ flash games) to start off your arcade. They also have the biggest game pack in the Mega Size Package (2,300+ flash games). All of their packages are very affordable and offer great value for money. They would recommend shopping around but we doubt you'll find a better deal.

For further information visit them at Mygamescript.com or email support@mygamescript.com.

What is overture? Where is it located?

2007-03-02T01:39:00.000-07:00

Who is "Microsoft Legal?"

2007-03-02T01:32:00.000-07:00

We've all noticed MICROSOFT LEGAL on the domain name forums. The man behind the mask is Aaron Kornblum. I've spoke with him on multiple occassions and he is a great guy. Here is a Q/A session with him from 2005.

REDMOND, Wash., Feb. 10, 2005 — The joke about e-mail inboxes filling with pitches for Viagra or other erectile dysfunction medication is almost a cliché - industry analysts estimate about a quarter of all spam involves solicitations for Viagra or an illegal, non-FDA-approved, potentially hazardous generic. But Pfizer Inc, the maker of Viagra (sildenafil citrate), does not find it funny. Nor does Microsoft, which for the last two years has been waging a multi-pronged attack on the barrage of spam streaming into Internet users' inboxes.

But it may be Pfizer and Microsoft who ultimately have the last laugh, after teaming up to investigate two international spam rings allegedly selling Viagra generics manufactured overseas. Today, the two companies filed lawsuits aimed at shutting down those spam rings, making them the latest in a series of strikes by Microsoft against spammers. Combined, the two companies today filed a total of 17 new actions against defendants they claim are involved in the sale and advertising of potentially harmful medications. The defendants allegedly sent hundreds of millions of e-mails using illegal and deceptive techniques that violate the year-old federal CAN-SPAM law (the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003) and other state and federal laws.

PressPass talked to two members of Microsoft's Internet Safety Enforcement team, Attorney Aaron Kornblum and Senior Investigator Stirling McBride, as well as Pfizer Chief Corporate Counsel Marc Brotman, about the alliance with Pfizer and the joint investigation that led to today's anti-spam lawsuits.

PressPass: How did Microsoft and Pfizer come to work together against spam?

Kornblum: Today's actions are the result of initial conversations with Pfizer which began last summer. Pfizer contacted us because they were receiving unwanted attention for e-mail spam advertising Viagra, which was troubling for several reasons. First, many people were blaming Pfizer for this spam. Second, Pfizer was concerned because the products people were purchasing online through this spam scheme were not Viagra. Lastly, Pfizer was concerned because its intellectual property, such as trademarks, was being used in the illegal spam e-mail, as well as on the Web sites the spam e-mails were directing people to in an effort to deceive consumers into believing the sites were associated with Pfizer.

Brotman: One consumer sent a letter to our CEO, screaming about all the Viagra e-mail he was getting - he said he received 20 in one day, and several thousand in just a few months. The fact is, Pfizer does not send spam. This is a very strict company policy. It wouldn't make sense - we do not sell Viagra directly to consumers, so we would not send out e-mail offering the product directly for sale. All of the e-mails people are getting that offer Viagra for sale, or cheap or generic Viagra - none are supported by Pfizer in any way. In fact, most of these sites are not offering Viagra, but counterfeits that may contain contaminants, may not work, or worse yet, could make people sick.

We felt we could fight back on the sale and advertising of the products, but our problem was that we didn't feel we had a good way of stopping the spammers. Then I happened to read a newspaper article about how aggressive Microsoft had been in battling spam, and was one of the leading companies in fighting the spam problem. So it made sense - Pfizer is an advanced company in fighting illegal generics and counterfeit drugs on the Internet, and Microsoft is advanced in the fight against spam, so jointly we could achieve more than we could separately. We together leveraged the expertise and legal claims that individually we might not have been able to.

PressPass: How did the actual investigation come together?

Kornblum: Knowing of our work at Microsoft in the spam and cybercrime-enforcement space, Pfizer telephoned our team to talk about how we might work together to stem the tide of these illegal solicitations involving their product. Last summer we began to investigate these cybercriminals on a joint basis, and uncovered two international spam rings we believe promoted Viagra and other pharmaceutical products through illegal spam. We coordinated a team of investigators and lawyers and went after these spammers together. Microsoft is targeting the defendants for sending hundreds of millions deceptive spam e-mails over its networks, and separately Pfizer is targeting these related defendants in parallel lawsuits for hosting the Web sites that misuse their intellectual property. So we're coming after this spam from two directions, which I think is an approach not taken before, and is unique to both companies.

PressPass: What are the lawsuits resulting from the joint investigations?

Kornblum: Our efforts together have led to a combined total of 17 lawsuits today against pharmacy-related defendants by the two companies. Each company filed parallel lawsuits against two separate international spam rings. Microsoft is suing each ring for alleged illegal spamming, and concurrently, Pfizer is suing each of these rings for trademark infringement and dilution, and unfair competition.

Both companies today are also filing separate and additional legal actions: Microsoft is filing three other lawsuits against other alleged pharmaceutical spammers and Pfizer is filing 10 lawsuits against other defendants, claiming improper use of Pfizer trademarks in domain names, such as bioviagra.com. So overall, there are 12 actions being filed by Pfizer and five by Microsoft.

PressPass: How would you characterize the partnering and cooperation?

McBride: I would say that the investigation that resulted in today's legal actions with Pfizer was a fantastic model of cross-industry cooperation. Pfizer has been a great company to partner with, and our aims were very complementary - Microsoft was focused on spam and Pfizer was focused on fake pharmaceuticals. So because we believe these investigative targets were using spam to advertise the fake pharmaceuticals, it was a natural place for us to come together and join forces - an obvious alliance. We shared all the work of the investigation and shared all the costs associated with the investigation - I would characterize Pfizer as a great partner in anti-crime. Another cross-industry success story was our collaboration with Amazon.com last year against spammers who spoofed Amazon.com's domain name and sent large quantities of illegal spam over Microsoft's networks and to our customers. We've also teamed up with other industry partners and government and law enforcement entities in unique and collaborative ways to fight spam and cybercrime.

Brotman: Microsoft, from day one, has been incredibly enthusiastic about our collaboration. Our work together uncovered more than just the defendants to our lawsuits - there were a couple of times where we found a site that we thought was a problem but turned out not to be. But that was a positive as well, since it meant that this site is legitimately selling real stuff. Also in this case, one of the sites we initially thought could be important was registered to someone in our backyard, in New York state. In our investigation together, we found the person who is registered as owning the domain name. It turns out that individual had no clue his identity was being used. We found out he's just a victim too, just like a number of consumers who buy from these scams.

PressPass: Were these common or typical spam operations?

McBride: Every spam outfit out there has its own characteristics. One of the things we're still looking into in our work with Pfizer is exactly how this particular spam ring operates. Typically, though, there are a lot of similarities among spam operations. In this case, we did see a fairly common setup known as an affiliate program. This means there is a central Web site that has the products for sale, and the person running the ring hires a group of people to advertise the site and drive people to the site - do the actual spamming, in other words. These are the affiliates. Each of them sends out spam to a large number of recipients, and embedded in each spam e-mail is a link to the site they want people to visit. Embedded in the link is an affiliate tag, frequently a number, so when the recipient clicks that link and goes to the Web site, the site detects this tag, indicating where the visitor comes from and who referred them, and gives credit to the spammers for customers and potential customers. These people work really hard to insulate and cover themselves, masking their identities to make it hard for companies or law enforcement to determine who they are.

PressPass: Have law-enforcement organizations been involved in this cooperative effort?

Kornblum: To this point in our joint investigation, criminal authorities have not been involved. As we go forward, we certainly will consider all our options as we learn who is responsible, and consider all of our potential next steps. Microsoft does work frequently and quite closely with law enforcement on Internet safety investigations and have referred cases to law enforcement. We regularly partner with law-enforcement agencies and governments, both here and abroad, providing technical expertise and other support to investigations and to government enforcement actions, including technology tools to help them develop their own leads.

Globally, we've now supported more than 125 legal actions against spammers - including filing 94 civil suits in the United States - with many in conjunction with governments throughout Asia, Europe and Latin America. Many are still ongoing but many have led to judgments or injunctions. Among our biggest actions:

• In January Microsoft provided support to the attorney general of Texas, Greg Abbott, in his lawsuit filed against world's fourth-largest spam ring. Microsoft also filed a lawsuit against this spam operation.

• In 2004 we supported attorneys general spam enforcement actions in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, as well as various Federal Trade Commission enforcement work.

• In 2003, we teamed with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer in an effort that led us to the world's third-largest spammer and a number of his affiliate programs.

• We have partnered with AOL, EarthLink and Yahoo! to establish the Anti-Spam Technical Alliance (ASTA) and have twice joined together to filed lawsuits against spammers, including the first batch under CAN-SPAM when the federal law was newly enacted.

• We filed the first lawsuit against a so-called bullet-proof Web hosting service, a service which helps spammers set up shop with minimal risk of being shut down.

• We filed the first lawsuits under a new provision of the CAN-SPAM federal law called the 'brown paper wrapper' clause referring to improper labeling of e-mails with sexually-explicit content.

Our anti-spam containment efforts span product and practice groups across Microsoft with vast resources being invested in other anti-spam areas like technological innovation in spam filtering and e-mail authentication, global consumer education and so on. But our team of professionals is on the job every day, identifying these cybercriminals and taking them offline. We have changed the economics of spam and will continue to do so.

PressPass: Why does Microsoft feel it is important to fight spam so energetically?

McBride: Microsoft is dedicated to providing its customers with the best online experience they can have - spammers work hard to spoil that experience with unwanted and potentially fraudulent e-mail. We're deeply committed to combating any effort that diminishes our customers' user experience. We're doing that by using the tools in our arsenal, such as capitalizing on laws such as CAN-SPAM and other state and foreign laws to raise the stakes in the spam game. Microsoft is using its position in the industry to help protect its customers, by putting up barricades to spammers' success and making the risk for the spammer not worth the reward. Spammers make a lot of money if they're successful, so part of what we're doing is upping the cost of business - sending spam isn't so cheap if it means they have to hire an attorney, pay civil or criminal costs, or even go to jail in some cases.

Kornblum: Our customers have told us spam creates real challenges for them. We don't want personal or business communications impeded, or in any way impacted by the spam out there. We recognize it's going to take a comprehensive effort, so we're developing technology tools, such as continually enhancing our SmartScreen learning filters for Hotmail and Microsoft Outlook, as well as collaborating with industry partners to realize the adoption of Sender ID, an e-mail authentication technology to detect forged domain names. We're helping to educate our customers on how they can protect their e-mail address and fight spam. We're working on new legislative issues relating to emerging online threats such as phishing and spyware,. And we're working on new enforcement initiatives with industry leaders like Pfizer, Amazon.com, Earthlink and Yahoo!. There's still a lot to do, but we're achieving significant successes, such as putting spammers out of business or in jail, or our SmartScreen technology blocking upwards of 90 percent of spam from reaching our Hotmail customers. The cumulative impact of all these steps together is making a difference.

PressPass: Is there anything the typical computer user can do to help fight spam?

McBride: One of the things people need to do is employ the same common sense online as they do in the real world. Suppose someone was to call you on the phone or show up at your door and tell you they were from MSN or your bank and that they had inadvertently lost all your account information. Chances are all of us would hesitate to give it to them without some effort to find out their identity or their legitimacy. But if this same enquiry comes from e-mail, a lot of people just hand over that personal information. People just need to use common sense and treat business over e-mail just like they would treat any other kind of business.

Where can I sell IDNs?

2007-03-02T01:29:00.000-07:00

There are a few places to sell IDNs:

DNforum.com
IDNforums.com
Namepros.com

These are primarily the popular domain name forums, though IDNforums.com deals almost solely with IDNs.

Reported Domain Sales

2007-03-02T01:26:00.000-07:00

Mon. Feb. 19, 2007 - Sun. Feb. 25, 2007

Refresh.com $115,000
PopupBlocker.com $75,000
Moka.com $72,223
Career.net $52,500
Office.de €38,200 = $50,540
Submission.com $42,000
SexVedio.com (typo) $42,000
SexVidoes.com (typo) $41,250
Buff.com $40,500
BloodTest.com $40,251
LatinoPorn.com $40,000
Maklare.se ("broker" in Swedish) 275,000 SEK = $39,366
Villa.de €27,500 = $36,383
NudeBollywood.com $35,250
Dressy.com $34,501
Hentei.com $30,250
BollywoodNude.com $30,250
XXXCams.com $30,000
Lagenhet.se $28,648
FruitGiftBaskets.com $26,250

Source: DNjournal.com

Domain Scams and How to Avoid Them

2007-02-28T22:25:00.000-07:00

Domain Scams and How to Avoid Them

On any given day hundreds of different scams are launched and scores of fraudulent sites spring up to dupe consumers. Websites such as AllForDomains.com, EveryDayIncome.com, and Domains.Profit.com were all created to scam inexperienced domainers.

The basic concept of these scam sites requires an “interested buyer” and a naïve domain seller. In the case of the AllForDomains.com scam, the seller receives a promotional email for a one-time free trial advertisement in order to sell their domains. Soon after posting the advertisement an interested buyer contacts the seller and requests an appraisal. The seller is then offered several appraisers including AllForDomains.com which also happens to be the cheapest option. The seller pays to get the domain appraised and attempts to reply to the prospective buyer but never gets a response.

Similarly, EveryDayIncome.com requires the seller to promote their domain names through their advertisements. The seller will receive three or more responses from interested buyers. A clever domain seller was able to catch that although the emails appeared to be coming from three separate domainers the incoming mail header signified that they had all come from the same mail server.

To the untrained eye these sites may appear to be legitimate. However, domainers should exercise caution when appraising their domains by only using trustworthy sites or services that have been recommended by others who have had positive experiences. Thanks to those who have spread the news about such bogus sites and it appears that EveryDayIncome.com and Domains.Profit.com are no longer in operation.

Create an informative web site to warn others of domain scams and shed light on the domain industry with domains such as InternetAdvisors.org, FraudExaminers.com, InternetFraudWatch.com and InteractiveConsultants.com. Achieve your entrepreneurial goals and establish your online business with memorable and marketable domains such as ChatHelp.net, EducatorSite.com, HelpfulWebsites.com, and CyberSpeak.com

Source: Sedo.com

How do I sell to endusers?

2007-02-28T18:58:00.000-07:00

Great question. I have been selling to end users over the past few months. This is a good way to get maximum profit from your domain name. Lets take ScienceMuseums.org as an example. What I do is simply email any Science Museums that I can find in Google. Tailor each email to the person that you're sending the email to because you don't want to spam them. Send out each email individually. You can only expect 1 person to reply out of 10 emails that you send out, and only 1 out of 100 may be interested in the domain name. Be sure to include your Full name and a phone number where you can be contacted.

EXAMPLE:

Mr. Smith,

I am currently selling ScienceMuseums.org and I thought that your company might be interested. The current asking price is $2,000. I can provide professional references upon request. Please reply regardless, the asking price may be negotiable.

Thanks in advance,

Justin T Godfrey
(307) 220-7075

Nearly 4,000 Domain Names On the Block During Live and Silent Events

2007-02-27T17:42:00.000-07:00

-- Nearly 4,000 Domain Names On the Block During Live and Silent Events --

POMPANO BEACH, Fla., Feb. 27 /PRNewswire/ --

Moniker, the first and only provider of Domain Asset Management(TM), today announced several additional high value domain names will be available during its exciting
Live and Silent Auctions held at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. West on Wednesday, March 7,
at 2:30 pm PST, at The Venetian Resort, Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas.

T.R.A.F.F.I.C. West attendees and proxy bidders will be able to place
bids at the Live Auction or via the Web in the silent domain auction.

New domain names added to the auction catalog include:

* AirlineTickets.net * LimousineService.com
* AntiVirusSoftware.com * MedicalRecord.com
* Bourbon.com & Whiskey.com * Pizza.mobi
* Carbs.com * Plans.com
* CheapGames.com * RealEstate.mobi
* Closings.com * Ringtones.net
* ConsumerElectronics.com * Settlement.com
* CurbAppeal.com * Singles.mobi
* Debit.com * SlideShow.com
* Directions.mobi * SpecialOffer.com
* FamilyPhotos.com * Spend.com
* FashionPolice.com * SportingGoods.com
* FreshFood.com * Televisionshows.com
* Friendships.com * Text.com
* GarageSales.com * Transplant.com
* HealthcarePlans.com * TruckLeasing.com
* HomeForeclosures.com * VideoShop.com
* Homerun.com * WeightLossPills.com
* InsuranceQuotes.com

To see a complete list of the nearly 4,000 domain names that will be up
for auction at either the Live or Silent event please visit
https://marketplacepro.moniker.com/files/Master_Auction_Domain_List.xls

"The auctions at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. West are poised to be our biggest
ever," said Monte Cahn, co-founder and CEO of Moniker.com. "Businesses,
investors, and domainers alike, see the value of the viable domain names
that Moniker brings to auction. Domain names cover every vertical, from
finance to travel and politics to shopping, making this event important for
business and domineers who are looking for a new gem to add to their
investment portfolios."

To take part in the live bidding, one must be a registered attendee of
T.R.A.F.F.I.C. West, which runs March 5-8, 2007. Though the conference is
sold-out, individuals and companies interested in proxy bidding can contact
sales@moniker.com for additional information on how to participate.

Unique Domains Also Available at Online, Silent Auction

Moniker will also host an online Silent Auction in conjunction with the
Live Auction in Las Vegas with thousands more names to bid on. The silent
auction will run online March 6, through March 14, 2007. The Silent Auction
provides additional opportunities for individuals to purchase domain names
that will support their overall portfolio.

Domain Financing Available

Moniker, along with its partner Domain Capital, will offer domain
financing to leverage domain purchases made at this event or for other
transactions. Moniker and Domain Capital are pioneers at using domain
values as collateral, and have been working together to offer financing
solutions for virtual real-estate for years in a fashion similar to real
estate mortgage financing.

Auction Broadcast in Real Time on WebmasterRadio.FM

The Live Auction will also be broadcast live on WebmasterRadio.FM,
keeping proxy bidders up to speed on the action in Las Vegas. Tune in by
visiting http://www.webmasterradio.fm/. WebmasterRadio is the premier free
online radio network focused on the B2B marketplace. During the auction,
listeners will be able to join the chat room and connect with peers in real
time.

About Moniker

Moniker is the first and only provider of Domain Asset Management(TM),
a complete set of business services that provide companies a
single-point-of- access to help manage and maximize the value of their
domains. These services include name creation, registration, acquisition,
portfolio management, appraisal and escrow services, traffic monetization
and after-market sales -- all backed by unsurpassed customer service and
security.

With more than a decade of experience, Moniker is a top 10 domain
registrar, holds the industry's highest customer retention rate and
pioneered the industry's first domain appraisal formula. It is considered
the industry's premier marketplace to buy and sell domain names. Customers
include savvy investors, Web entrepreneurs and forward-thinking global
companies, including Marchex, Nokta, Future Media Architects, AOL, Yahoo,
the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, Lions Gate Films, Bank
of America, Microsoft, Jupitermedia, Geosigns, Mainstream Advertising and
many others.

Moniker, with headquarters in Pompano Beach, Florida, is an operating
unit of Seevast Corporation, a company of marketing services firms that
drive sales, build brands and leverage core assets for their clients.

Where can I find a domain name sales agreement?

2007-02-27T17:08:00.000-07:00

There are several located on the internet, but I went ahead and found one. I also added a Non-Disclosure agreement (NDA), just remember to modify the exisiting info. Feel free to download it for free:

Download it here.

Looking back on the crash

2007-02-25T19:00:00.000-07:00

Its been almost 7 years since the dot com crash in March of 2000. I have always been interested in stories of how people made millions..this is an article that ran on the five year anniversary of the dom com boom and details what exactly went wrong.

As celebrations go, it will be a muted one. But at 9pm this evening, anyone who tried and failed to make a fortune in the dotcom boom can be forgiven for sitting back, pouring themselves a glass of millennium bubbly, and thinking about what might have been.

It will mark exactly five years since the Nasdaq, the US technology index, closed at a dizzying peak of 5048.62 - more than double its value just 14 months before. That Friday night, the young investors who had won millions in funding at networking events such as First Tuesday - and who were pumping much of that cash into marketing their patches of dotcom turf - probably felt little reason to worry. The net was the future, and they were part of it.

It was all downhill from there. In the next day of trading, the Nasdaq lost 2.8% of its value. The day after - as Lastminute.com floated on the London stock exchange, briefly achieving a market capitalisation of £800m - it fell 4%. By October 2002, it had plunged to 1114.11, a total loss of 78% against its peak.

Along the way, companies such as Boo.com, Clickmango.com, Ready2Shop.com, Pets.com, Toysmart.com and many more went from being leaders of a revolution to tombstones in dotcom graveyards chronicled by the likes of Fucked Company - and the business pages of a delighted tabloid press.

Survivors, of which Lastminute was one, were left battling to turn a profit in a market where business to consumer websites were as unfashionable as a fur coat in summer.

Rob Hersov, then boss of Sportal - now vice-chairman of executive plane company NetJets - says the collapse was precipitated by nothing less than "mass market hysteria".

"Those were incredibly heady days," he says. "Fun - absolutely. We thought we were making a difference. We thought we were getting out there, shaking things up, doing something no one had done before. We really were pioneers - buccaneers."

Fellow South African Brent Hoberman, who co-founded Lastminute.com with Martha Lane Fox, and who remains chief executive, describes the atmosphere as frenetic. "There was a community of young people starting businesses, everybody looking for deals - a frenetic amount of deal-making and deal activity.

"It was a time when outsiders from an industry were often more effective than insiders. Not knowing everything about an industry made you able to challenge the rules. New players see the effects of a disruptive technology more easily than a player who is already in the market."

Toby Rowland was another 20-something caught in the rush. With partner Richard Norton, he raised £3m in his first funding round for alternative health website Clickmango - which launched in 2000 with ads fronted by Joanna Lumley - but had to close in the wake of the crash.

Even the name of the company - because "older women love mangos", says Rowland, with a grin - was a measure of the exuberance of the times.

"When 1999 came along it was a wonderful time when everything seemed possible - and you couldn't not do something," he says.

"The intoxicating smell in the air was that of dotcom money being made left and right," agrees Tristan Louis, a developer who worked at Boo.com's London office. "Those of us that had been in the business for a while were worried about it being a bubble. But we worried for so long - in internet time - that by 1999, the worry turned to concern that maybe we were among the ones who didn't "get it", who didn't really understand the power of the net.

"It felt a little like our wildest expectations about the transformational power of the net were being exceeded at a faster rate than we thought."

As spring 2000 came, many had a sense of impending trouble. Sportal's Hersov said he knew by then that the boom was too good to be true - but he had already become involved in a costly race to make a profit before the market fell away.

His site owned potentially valuable wireless and broadband rights, in perpetuity, to a list of major European football clubs - Real Madrid, AC Milan, Juventus, Bayern Munich and Paris St Germain - and he believes that if he had sat on them and done nothing, Sportal would now be a billion-dollar company. In the end, he ended up selling the websites for £1 in November 2001.

"Everyone felt like they could get in and out in time," he says. "And I reckon most rational people knew the market would come off. People were saying: 'it's going to come off 10%, 15%' - that was the rational thing to think, not 50%. No one expected the complete meltdown; they expected the market to start dropping, but not to melt."

Julie Meyer, co-founder of First Tuesday, puts it this way: "It's not that I didn't think it was coming. It was that you never see the shape of things until it happens."

The first crack was the collapse of Boo.com. The e-clothing company, founded by Swedes Kajsa Leander and Ernst Malmsten, had launched in the summer of 1999 with more than £70m of startup capital, the most ever raised by a dotcom.

Employing more than 400 people in London, New York and four European cities, it tried to sell designer clothes in 18 countries across the world - with the help of Ms Boo, an irritating avatar who needed the Macromedia Flash plug-in to work.

As a measure of just how hubristic that was, Freeserve - then Britain's top ISP, now owned by Wanadoo - had only just started offering unmetered dial-up access, which meant that few customers who looked at the site could get as far as buying clothes.

And it didn't work on an Apple Mac. Throw in the tales of Concorde flights and high living in five-star hotels, and you had the archetypal dotbomb. By the time it went bust in May 2000, Boo.com had run up more than £10m in debt.

The trouble was that Boo led to comparisons that were harmful to other businesses - particularly Lastminute.com.

"It was a bad thing for us," says Hoberman. "The parallels were very frustrating, and they were all the more easy to make because it was a man and a woman who were young, and both women were very attractive. What I said to everyone at the time was that that was about the only parallel."

But Boo's demise did focus attention on real problems that affected dotcoms: the high cost of technology, the high cost of marketing, and the fact that customers were not yet online in big enough numbers to drive e-commerce.

"The correction had to happen," says Hersov. "There was too much money chasing too many ideas, no viable revenue stream in most cases, technology that just wasn't ready for what everyone wanted it to do - the whole thing got ahead of itself."

Mike Antliff of Digital Animation Group - in those days makers of virtual newsreader Ananova, now purveyors of animated characters known as WeeMes to mobile phones - agrees. "The market wasn't mature enough. We were technology-driven. We're much more market-driven now."

Those who got their timing right, of course, made cash. Hersov may have lost out with Sportal, but the internet incubator Antfactory, which he co-founded, was sold in 2002 for £77m. Peter Wilkinson, who reputedly sketched out the idea for Freeserve on a napkin, sold his Sports Internet business to BSkyB for more than £300m. Lastminute.com turned its first quarterly profit in 2002, although it went back into the red after making a series of acquisitions in a bid to increase its scale.

And in what now seems an extraordinary piece of deal-making, the centrepiece of the boom - First Tuesday - was sold in late 2000 to an Israeli internet company, Yazam, for £26m.

Meyer, who now works as a venture capitalist for Ariadne Capital in London, says: "The art is to find a buyer that really wants what you have."

According to Hersov, though, Europeans were at a disadvantage. "You needed to be at the epicentre to make money," he says. "You needed to be based in Seattle or Silicon Valley, and you needed to have launched something in 1997. For anyone else, and that applies to most Europeans, who launched two years after that, it was very difficult to get a technical platform, team in place, revenue stream, path to profitability, go public, cash out - the time just got shorter and shorter the further you got from the epicentre."

Some, of course, are still looking forward. Lastminute.com, like many companies, has bold plans to exploit mobile devices by using location based maps, offering theatre and restaurant deals.

Rowland is philosophical about the failure of Clickmango, but now runs Midasplayer.com, a skill gaming website he describes as "to gambling as Country Life girls in pearls are to pornography". Last month, he says, the company turned its first profit.

He misses the sense of community of the early dotcom days - now, he says, there are "a lot of lone wolves out there, doing their thing".

"We need a First Tuesday," he adds. "Someone's going to have a First Tuesday and there's going to be like 500 people there. It can happen - I believe it.

"I wish Julie (Meyer) would do it. Just for fun."

Source

Picturing the dot-com boom and bust: 'Men in Gold'

2007-02-25T18:34:00.000-07:00

What's it like to be rich in Silicon Valley? Visitors to a San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibit can find out by watching candid videos of seven dot-com boom-and-bust survivors who share what money means to them.

Five months ago, the museum commissioned the project, Living Pictures/Men in Gold, from French artist Silvie Blocher, who had spent hours interviewing each of the seven men. Though volunteers, they seem almost vulnerable in front of the camera while discussing their innermost thoughts--many of which can be particularly fascinating to someone who has never had a lot of money.

One entrepreneur tells of how straight out of college, after being paid $100,000 in cash, he and his girlfriend rolled around (with their clothes on) in the bills and took polaroids. It was "a moment when money was like cocaine," he says. That statement is followed by silence and then an awkward giggle.

The men were all ambitious, Blocher said in an interview on Friday. They have "an unbelievable wish to do something, even if they can't say what," she said. They also realized that there are things that money can't buy, like love, reputation and happiness. "The question of image and identity was the most interesting subject for me in these videos," she said.

Many of the men are not identified, which was a shame because it would have been interesting to see who they were, given some of the candid comments they made. One of them--Rusty Rueff, chief executive of digital-music company Snocap--does identify himself. He talks on camera about his desire to leave a legacy by contributing to his former university. "There is a sense of making sure that your life carries on past the years that you walk the earth," Rueff says. "Does anyone care about a name on a wall 20 years, 50 years, 100 years from now? I hope they do. I hope the name is still there."

Another man talks about entering grade school when he was 4 years old, after his father was killed. "When I finished school, I realized, simply, I wanted to be rich."

Several of the men made a connection between money and sex. "Money certainly is erotic," says one. "Money makes you feel big, powerful and safe. It's really delicious to have money...it means you think you can do anything you want, and you can do anything you want."

Another man makes a more direct connection to sex: "Money can be a sexual experience without an orgasm." And a third admits to having had sex in his Porsche.

One man, identified later as Mayfield Fund venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, talks about encountering Silicon Valley's exclusive, white, inner circle. "I have not had my revenge yet on the insiders...to explode the circle from the inside," he says.

One man admits that he is "tight-fisted with money and a penny pincher." He says, "I find that is the way to build successful companies, and it's impossible to not have that pour out into your everyday life." He also talks of the devastation that the dot-com bust inflicted on San Francisco's South of Market community, where many dot-com companies were located. He talks of the empty buildings, sidewalk sales of pricey Herman Miller chairs and desks, and near giveaways of expensive computer equipment. "It all just disappeared overnight," he says sadly.

French native Jean-Louis Gassee, recognizable because of his years in the industry, first as an executive at Apple in the 1980s and then as founder of Be, humorously discusses his bad-boy reputation. "I had a reputation for being flamboyant and abrasive, and now that I'm at peace, I call myself a recovering a-hole-aholic."

To Gassee, "Silicon Valley is like Disneyland, only with technology."

The exhibit, which runs through May 13, presents a sharp contrast to another Blocher exhibit, Living Pictures/Je et Nous (I and Us), being shown right next door. The subjects of that exhibit are from a poverty-stricken Paris suburb.

Source

"RegisterFly has flown..."

2007-02-24T05:17:00.001-07:00

Brawling RegisterFly partners in fight to the death
Malaysia Sun
Saturday 24th February, 2007

Big News Network.com: The extraordinary unraveling of embattled domain registrar RegisterFly.com has continued into the weekend.

The two principal shareholders John Naruszewicz and Kevin Medina at the weeks-end were still trading verbal blows, while ICANN stepped in to the fray after nearly three years of complaints. Whilst most focus has been on the failure of the company's support systems, allegations of fraud and corruption were flowing freely Friday, not only from the principals involved, but from ICANN.

Meantime the control of RegisterFly.com, seized by Naruszewicz on Tuesday, was back in the hands of Medina late Friday. Both parties are accusing the other of hijacking the company's Web site and administration, which has been effectively dysfunctional for weeks. Medina has also replicated the current site at www.registerfly-inc.com so if he loses control again, or the original site is brought down, he can continue to trade on.

Whilst existing customers are up in arms over the loss of control of their intellectual property, and their inability to obtain redress, RegisterFly remains open for business, offering its services to new, unsuspecting customers. Despite its registration, renewal, and transfer systems all being dysfunctional, RegisterFly continues to take payments for orders it cannot fulfill.

One large customer who was unaware of the behind-the-scenes debacle tried to acquire what is called a "Flypack" around two weeks ago. A Flypack is a coupon for multiple domains which reduces in price dependant on the volume. These "coupons" can be used to register, renew, or transfer domain names. With the system in-operative the customer's attempts to pay a few thousand dollars for several hundred domains on his credit card was unsuccessful. The customer issued a support ticket and sent an email asking for help. Late Friday Kevin Medina emailed the customer saying he had tried to put the charge of nearly $7,000 through, but was unsuccessful. "I tried to charge your card and it failed," he wrote. "I tried to charge in different amounts but it did not work," he added. He asked the customer to contact the credit card company and have them approve the amount.

While the two 50% shareholders fight for control, the company's hundreds of thousands of customers are getting angrier and angrier. In a normal situation they would be leaving the company in droves. The only problem is their domain names are locked up, and their authorization codes are being withheld preventing transfers to alternative registrars. Domain names reaching their expiry date are simply being lost. With many of these involving Web sites a large number of customers are losing complete businesses or at the very least, important business tools. Compounding the problem is that many of RegisterFly's customers are managing domains and Web sites on behalf of others.

Court documents filed last week by interests associated with Naruszewicz claim 75,000 domain names have been forfeited by RegisterFly.com in the past month alone, due to the registrar's failure to pay registration fees.

Due to the inability of the courts to move swiftly, and ICANN having only initiated a potential breach notice, it appears that without the principals entering into a form of settlement, the death of RegisterFly.com is inevitable.

Already ICANN in its breach notice has raised concerns the registrar "may be bankrupt or insolvent." Even more concerning is that a number of complaints received by ICANN relate to allegations of fraud. Another bombshell from the domain name authority in its breach notice which was made public Friday, but was issued Wednesday, is that the complaints date back to at least 2005. One of the most frequent complaints was that customers were being overcharged two, three and four times per transaction. RegisterFly customers who believe the current serial support issues at their registry are a recent phenomena will be disturbed to know that from late 2005 until early 2006 ICANN was receiving large numbers of complaints that emails and support tickets were going unanswered, and the call hold time was frequently in excess of 30 minutes.

If customers had their credit card company reverse any overcharges, ICANN says RegisterFly "retaliated by denying the customers access to all of the registered names in their account," not just the names involved in the relevant transactions.

It appears ICANN simply forwarded all the complaints received to eNom, which was the primary registrar, with RegisterFly being a reseller.

On January 17 2006 ICANN told eNom it was receiving an "unusually high number of complaints concerning RegisterFly." eNom responded with an explanation from its reseller RegisterFly, which indicated that RegisterFly intended to move its customers domain names from eNom to its own account. Incredibly a month later, at the very time ICANN was accrediting RegisterFly, eNom was contacted again and was told its own accreditation was in potential breach as a result of allegations that its reseller RegisterFly was altering customers' Whois data and populating the Whois record with "intentionally inaccurate data." eNom was told at the time that any domain registrations through its accreditation, even if processed through RegisterFly, were eNom's responsibility.

In April last year ICANN says it continued to receive complaints about RegisterFly. Customers reported being locked out of their accounts, and having domain names disappearing from their accounts. Kevin Medina, says ICANN, responded by saying the issues were as a result of "growing pains."

In May 2006 the complaints started to include reports of "stolen" registrations and renewals. On the 19th of May ICANN says it received a complaint from an owner of 220 domain names who, after a heated argument with RegisterFly, noted the Whois information for his 220 names was changed to reflect "Kevin Medina" as the registrant instead of the domains owner. It took several weeks for RegisterFly to address this issue with ICANN, culminating at a meeting between ICANN staff, Medina, and RegisterFly.com's Glenn Stansbury, where the "inordinate number of complaints ICANN had received regarding RegisterFly" was discussed. Medina and Stansbury both assured ICANN that "RegisterFly was working hard to improve its customer service."

The pair also said they were working to relieve the pressure on their employees in the Risk/Fraud department. It was in this discussion that the RegisterFly executives dropped another bombshell: employees in the Risk/Fraud department were being paid "strictly on commission." The policy was changed "as a result of RegisterFly's discussions with ICANN."

By early December 2006 ICANN says it was still receiving "ever-increasing complaints from RegisterFly customers about over-charging." At a meeting on December 3rd 2006 ICANN met with Stansbury and Mark Klein, the company's Vice President of Sales, who had only joined the company weeks earlier after 5 years at Tucows Inc., to discuss the high volume of complaints which included issues surrounding RegisterFly's failure to renew customers domain names, failure of the support systems, billing errors, insufficient funding of registry accounts, and nonpayment of ICANN invoices.

ICANN says Stansbury and Klein repeated previous assurances that the issues were being corrected, and that the registrar was opening a new customer service facility within a week. ICANN's concerns were detailed in a document handed to the RegisterFly executives at the meeting. Stansbury promised to respond in writing within one month (January 3 2007). ICANN never received a response.

In January 2007 ICANN continued to receive complaints from RegisterFly customers, but complaints by then were also coming in from other ICANN-accredited registrars, ICANN board members, and the U.S. Department of Commerce. Deeply disturbing was the fact that the most common complaint by RegisterFly customers was that transactions that were billed and paid for were not being effected at the registry. "In addition, multiple-year renewals and registrations were only being processed for one year instead of the number of years that had been paid for."

With Naruszewicz and Medina heavily engaged in a bitter dispute, their business dysfunctional but still trading, serious allegations of fraud, misrepresentation, misleading conduct, and theft, afoot; and control of the company's Web site and administration constantly changing amidst claims (by both sides) of hijackings and sabotage, it is unlikely customers can do anything other than stand on the sidelines while the drama plays out.

A slim hope may be concerted action by the domain names industry involving ICANN and some of the leading accredited-registrars. Action could include making application for a court order for authorization codes to be released to customers so transfers can take place, ICANN extending expiry dates of names under RegisterFly's control for up to a period of say six months from now (as a first step) to ensure no more names are lost, and alternative registrars dividing up and taking over blocks of domain names, and acting as interim registrars, at least until the dust settles.

John Naruszewicz, in a statement published Thursday on Registerflies.com said he had personally pledged all of his personal assets, mortgaged his home, leveraged all assets, and was securing large letters of credit to restore the company. Regardless of his motivation, and the extent of his commitment, he needs first to get control of the company's Web site, and it seems even the support emails, which were all clearly in the hands of his partner, Kevin Medina, as of late Friday night.

As for Medina, regardless of the slanging match between he and his partner and the very public, but unproved, claims raised against him in court documents, he has been the President and CEO of RegisterFly during its history of failures, and is unlikely to be part of any solution to the company's woes. His time in any event, since regaining control of RegisterFly late Friday, has been spent trying to process credit card payments from unsuspecting customers, for fictitious services.

For all intensive purposes it appears RegisterFly has flown.

Escape the Bomb game

2007-02-23T23:53:00.001-07:00

Try out this game.

Escape The Bomb Point and click escape game.

Let me know what you get!

dotMobi to auction premium mobile domain names

2007-02-23T12:33:00.000-07:00

Mobile internet development company dotMobi is to auction off 15 select domains at the Traffic West 2007 conference in Las Vegas.

DotMobi, the informal name of mTLD Top Level Domain Ltd, is a Dublin-based domain name provider which ensures that services and sites developed around .mobi are optimised for use by mobile devices.

Although the company may change this list, the following .mobi names are scheduled for auction on 7 March: 'airfare', 'areacodes', 'cam', 'casinos', 'creditscore', 'directions', 'ea't, 'libre', 'loancalculator', 'models', 'newmusic', 'pics', 'pizza', 'realestate' and 'singles'.

These names come from the dotMobi Premium Names list. Rather than the traditional 'first come, first served' basis on which most domain names are sold, this is a list of commonly used words and phrases which dotMobi has set aside to be sold separately.

The names will be distributed in batches throughout 2008 using auction and Request for Proposal processes.

The names will join the current list of around 400,000 .mobi domains that have been registered since general registration commenced in October last year.

Neil Edwards, chief executive at dotMobi, said: "The sale of these 15 highly desirable names allows dotMobi to fund initiatives for the web developer and content provider communities, such as a developer forum and the free mobile readiness testing and reporting tool."

Edwards is hoping that this auction is as least as successful as the last one in 2006 when .mobi domain names sold for a combined total of just under $400,000.

"Last October, the Traffic auction put three .mobi domains into the top 15 emerging domain sales for 2006. The demand for these domains demonstrated the industry excitement around mobile content," he said.

"We expect this list of 15 names to draw an equal, if not greater, demand. And with the variety of free tools and developer partners we have, building content behind these names will be a simple and affordable proposition for the buyers."

Source

How many possible combinations are there of LLL/NNN?

2007-02-23T12:28:00.000-07:00

LLL.com/.net/.org = 17,576 possible domains

NNN.com/.net/.org = 1,000 possible domains

LNL.com/.net/.org = 45,656 possible domains