Be Interviewed on DomainSherpa
Every Friday, DomainSherpa.com provides you with a hand-selected, editorially-based review of the weekly news. In this summary, you will find the latest articles and videos produced by DomainSherpa staff and contributors. You will also find links to the best news articles in the domain name industry – so you don’t have to spend your time searching for news or reading something that was not worth your time.
This Week’s DomainSherpa Interview
- VIDEO: The .XYZ Generation: Youngest Applicant Spends $555,000 on 3 TLD Applications – With Daniel Negari
Most investors in the domain name industry would be nervous to invest $185,000 in a single premium domain name.But on today’s show we interview a 27-year-old entrepreneur who invested $185,000 not once, but three times this year, spending a total of over half a million dollars in application fees alone to register new top level domains.
This is the story of how a domain name investor built a registrar and is launching at least two (possibly three) registries.
Additional Resources
- DomainSherpa Portfolio Review – Oct 10, 2013
This is the show where we get into the minds of successful domain name investors – people we call Sherpas – and talk about the value of specific domain names. By listening to the Sherpas, we expand our thought process so we can become more successful investors ourselves.We’re joined by four Domain Sherpas: Adam Dicker, Michael Berkens, Page Howe and Rick Schwartz.
This Week’s News in Review
ICANN Sends Out 1st Community Priority Evaluation Invitations; .immo & .taxi – 10-Oct-13
ICANN has invited eligible community applicants to elect Community Priority Evaluation (CPE) as a potential method to resolve string contention. Today, the first two invitations were sent via ICANN’s Customer Portal to STARTING DOT on its .IMMO application, and Taxi Pay GmbH application for .Taxi..
Signed New TLD Registry Contracts Have a Wide Range of Priority Numbers – 10-Oct-13
Priority numbers helped companies at the beginning of the process but do not correlate closely with signed registry contracts. Yesterday ICANN executed its contract with dotCareer, LLC for the .career top level domain names. The application had a priority draw number of 119. A full week before, on October 2, Donuts executed its contract with…
Google and Amazon.com Backpeddle On Closed Top Level Domain Names – 10-Oct-13
Google to make one more domain open, Amazon relents on 25. Google and Amazon.com have changed their minds about operating some of their applied-for generic top level domain names as “closed” domain names. For many domains, the companies had planned to not offer second level domain name registrations, such as myname.blog, to the public. Instead,…
After 12 Years & Over 70 UDRP’s Sony Finally Gets Around to Filing a UDRP On Sonystore.com – 10-Oct-13
Sony has over 35 retail stores in the United States which sell just Sony Products and they are called Sony Stores. The official website for the stores is store.sony.com…
Purchase Domain Names at GoDaddy Directly Through Microsoft Office 365 – 09-Oct-13
You can now purchase a custom GoDaddy domain name directly from within Office 365 and we’ll automatically set it up for you. If your organization already has a GoDaddy managed domain name, you can update Office 365 to start using that domain name directly from within Office 365, too…
ICANN Will Be Forced to Act After Conflicting .cars Decisions – 09-Oct-13
A conflicting opinion over .cars leads to an interesting contention set problem. A panelist for a string confusion objection brought by Google against DERcars, LLC over the top level domain name .cars has ruled in favor of Google. By ruling in favor of Google, that means DERcars’ application for .cars will be put into a…
New UK Police Unit Threatens Domain Registrars Over Piracy – 09-Oct-13
The UK’s recently founded Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) has started sending out letters to dozens of domain name registrars, demanding that the addresses of websites suspected of piracy are suspended within 48 hours.
Top Level Domain Considered in Tes.co Domain Name Dispute – 09-Oct-13
TES.CO is confusingly similar to TESCO, and soon the top level domain will play a bigger role in domain disputes. In July I wrote about grocery chain TESCO filing a dispute against the domain name tes.co. A decision has now been rendered. UDRP panels typically disregard the top level domain name when it comes to…
Verisign: Over 150 Domains Registered Over Government Shutdown – 09-Oct-13
Verisign the registry for the .com and .net registry just released a graph showing a lot of activity with people registering domain names involving the Government Shutdown. It appears from the graph there have been over 150 domain names registered since October 1st containing the word :”shutdown”…
.UNO To Help Marketers and Companies Directly Reach the Hispanic Consumer More Simply – 09-Oct-13
Latinos, both in the U.S. and abroad, can soon look forward to a more friendly and relevant Internet. Dot Latin LLC announced Wednesday, September 11, that it had formally entered into an agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for the registry operation of .UNO, a new generic top-level domain (gTLD) specifically designed for businesses that want to provide information, products, and services directly to the Spanish-speaking marketplace…
Scott Day Gets Hit With UDRP On 16 Year Old GoldCoast.com By Owners of VisitGoldCoast.com – 09-Oct-13
Gold Coast Tourism Corporation Ltd just filed a UDRP against legendary domain investor Scott Day and his company Digimedia on the domain name GoldCoast.com
This is certainly a UDRP that will be put up on the HallofShame.com watch list. It appears the Mr. Day has owned this domain since 1997 or 16 years…
ICANN Gives New TLD Applicants a Faster Path to Market – 09-Oct-13
Top level domain applicants could start registering domains sooner, but there’s a catch. ICANN has changed its plan for mitigating the risk of so-called “name collisions” at the second level of new top level domain names, potentially allowing new top level domain applicants to start selling domains sooner than expected. It’s good news for applicants…
Above.com to Run Silent Auction for T.R.A.F.F.I.C. – 09-Oct-13
Above.com’s Domain Marketplace will host the Silent Auction online for the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East 2013 Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. For buyers there are some exceptional domains in the Silent Auction, and of course, any domains not sold in the Live Auction will get a second chance online in the Silent Auction.
Key Systems Publishes Graph Showing Time Line for Each New gTLD Roll Out – 09-Oct-13
Key-Systems GmbH which operates domain name registrars, domaindiscount24.com, rrpproxy.net, and brand protection company, BrandShelter.com released a graph today on new the date that each new gTLD is expected to launch…
Network Solutions Pprobing DNS Hijack – 09-Oct-13
Network Solutions is investigating an attack by a pro-Palestinian hacking group that redirected websites belonging to several companies. Pro-Palestinian hackers compromised DNS records held by Network Solutions, redirecting several websites to other domains…
New gTLD Applicants Get a Way to Avoid Name Collision Delay – 09-Oct-13
ICANN has given blessed relief to many new gTLD applicants by wiping potentially months off their path to delegation. Its New gTLD Program Committee this week adopted a new “New gTLD Collision Occurrence Management Plan” which aims to tackle the problem of clashes between new gTLDs and names used on private networks. The good news…
ICANN Director Quits, No Reason Given – 09-Oct-13
Judith Vazquez has resigned from ICANN’s board of directors, a year before her term was due to expire, but ICANN has provided no explanation. Vazquez joined the board in 2011, when she was appointed by the Nominating Committee. She had served two years of her three-year ICANN term and had one year left. This week…
ICANN Shuts Down Pacman Registrar From New Registrations and Transfers Until at Least Jan 30, 2014 – 08-Oct-13
The current breach is the third breach for Pacnames within a twelve-month period. Accordingly, Pacnames’ ability to create new Registered Names or initiate inbound transfers of Registered Names is suspended for 90 days pursuant to Section 2.1 of the RAA…
SilkApp.com Changes to Silk.co Gets Another $1.6 Million in Funding & Techcrunch Covers It – 08-Oct-13
TechCrunch.com has just covered the company previously known as Silkapp.com which has just rebranded to Silk.Co and that it raised an additional $1.6 Million in funding to bring it up to a total of $3.7 million in funding…
Fairwinds Partners Rolls Out BeyondTheDot.com to Cover New gTLDs – 08-Oct-13
FairwindsPartners.com which is a brand consultancy firm and also represented many Brand new gTLD applications, rolled out today a site to “let consumers know what to expect” from the launch of the new gTLDs…
La Salle U Allows The Direct Match Domain to Be Cybersquatted On for Over 13 Years & It Sells Email Addresses Too – 08-Oct-13
La Salle University won control of it’s direct match .com domain name today. LasalleUniversity.com in a one member UDRP ruling. The fact that La Salle, won control of this domain isn’t the story…
56 New TLD Contracts Signed, Donuts Has More Than Half – 08-Oct-13
New top level domain contracts are slowly (but surely) being executed. ICANN’s latest new top level domain name contracting stats show that 56 registry agreements have been signed. 55 of those have been published to ICANN’s registry page. Here’s a look at some of the stats so far: 32: The number of contracts signed by…
NBA, MLB, NHL and Colleges Team Up to Take Down Websites Selling Counterfeits – 08-Oct-13
Sports leagues team up to take down counterfeiters. A number of professional sports leagues and colleges have filed a lawsuit in an effort to seize domain names and shut down websites used to sell counterfeit goods. The suit (pdf) was filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Illinois. The plaintiffs include the NBA, NHL, MLB,…
Web Development Company Squares Off With Real Estate Firm Over “Ascent” Name – 08-Oct-13
Two California companies will head to court of business name. Electronic Creations Company (ECC), a web development company, has filed a lawsuit (pdf) seeking declaratory relief to fend of an attack from a California real estate firm. ECC owns a number of good domain names, including VH.com, Pup.com, We.org, and DuckPond.com. It also owns AscentRealEstate.com…
Microsoft Wins Control of 13 Bing Domain Names in UDRP: Bingfrance.com, Bingspain.com; Bingface.com – 08-Oct-13
Microsoft just won control over 13 domain names infringing on its Bing Trademark. Some of the domains like BingFrance.com, BingSpain.com and BingBrazil.com are easy to see why the company would want the domains…
Hosting provider LeaseWeb falls victim to DNS hijacking – 07-Oct-13
Hosting provider LeaseWeb became the latest high-profile company to have its domain name taken over by attackers, highlighting that DNS (Domain Name System) hijacking is a significant threat, even to technically adept businesses. For a short time on Saturday, leaseweb.com, the company’s main website, was redirected to an IP address that wasn’t under its control. This was the result of a so-called DNS hijacking attack in which attackers managed to change the authorized name servers for the company’s domain name…
DomainNameSales.com integrates with Godaddy and DomainTools – 07-Oct-13
DomainNameSales.com, the industry’s only open domain sales management system, is very proud to announce their new integration with Godaddy.com and DomainTools.com. These new integrations will allow our customers to list the names in their DomainNameSales.com account on a make-offer basis at Godaddy.com and DomainTools.com.
Sorry ThePrive.com, You Can’t Just Take Prive.com – UDRP Fail – 07-Oct-13
Company fails to grab domain name through UDRP. The operators of the sample sale website Privé, online at ThePrive.com, have lost a UDRP against the domain name Prive.com. This is despite the respondent not filing a formal response. There are a number of reasons the complaint failed, including that Privé is a generic term. But…
DomainNameSales.com Gets Sales Distribution on Go Daddy and DomainTools – 07-Oct-13
If you opt-in, GoDaddy and DomainTools customers will now see that your domain is for sale. DomainNameSales.com’s domain sales platform has been quickly adopted by a number of domain name investors. But until now it has been missing a key ingredient of domain sales – distributed listings. That changed today as the company announced a…
Only 40% of The World Pop Will Be Online By End of 2013; 4.4 Billion Remain Unconnected – 07-Oct-13
The UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU) today issued a report showing an additional 250 million people came online in 2012 and estimated by end 2013 that 40% of the world will be online, but 1.1 billion households, or 4.4 billion people will remain unconnected…
Yellowpages.com Sues YPOnline.com Owner for Trademark Infringement – 07-Oct-13
Owner of YP.com claims site infringes its trademark and the YPOnline.com constitutes cybersquatting. Online directory service YellowPages.com, which also owns YP.com, has sued YPOnline.com for alleged trademark infringement and cybersquatting. In the suit filed in U.S. District Court (pdf), YellowPages.com says that the YPOnline.com site mimics the look of YellowPages.com: For example, Defendant’s website mimics…
Google/Mastercard/Amex/PayPal/Discover Go After After Mugshots.com & Mug Shot Removal Sites – 07-Oct-13
According to Cnet.com, Google along with credit card processors Mastercard, Amex, Discover and Paypal are going after sites like MugShots.com…
Jones Distances Herself From Racy Go Daddy Ads – 07-Oct-13
Former Go Daddy general counsel Christine Jones has said she “didn’t particularly like” the company’s wildly successful, if sexually provocative, TV advertising. Jones is one of several candidates for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in the company’s home state of Arizona. She began her campaign officially this week, having come out on Twitter in August, and…
First-come, First-served Sunrise Periods On The Cards – 07-Oct-13
New gTLD registries will be able to offer first-come, first-served sunrise periods under a shake-up of the program’s rights protection mechanisms announced a week ago. The new Trademark Clearinghouse Rights Protection Mechanism Requirements (pdf) contains a number of concessions to registries that may make gTLD launches easier but worry some trademark owners. But it also…
Mockapetris Hired As ICANN Security Advisor – 07-Oct-13
DNS inventor Paul Mockapetris has been recruited by ICANN to act as senior security advisor to the Generic Domains Division under its president, Akram Atallah. It’s not clear precisely what Mockapetris’ role will be, though it doesn’t appear to be a full-time position. He is still chairman and chief scientist of DNS software vendor Nominum…
Domain Name Registrar Allows Completely Blank WHOIS – 06-Oct-13
In a very casual and low-key footnote over the weekend, ICANN announced it would be further bypassing the Affirmation of Commitments and ignoring the WHOIS Review Team Report. There will be no enhanced validation or verification of WHOIS because unidentified people citing unknown statistics have said it would be too expensive…
Autoweb.com Sells With Trademark for $1.5 Million to Autobytel & Launches Ppc Network – 06-Oct-13
According to a press release out today, as part of a bigger transaction AutoWeb has acquired the domain name AutoWeb.com and related trademarks from Autobytel (Nasdaq: ABTL), for $1.5 million in AutoWeb stock…
Founders Institute FI.co Incubator Portfolio of Companies Has a Valuation of $5 Billion – 05-Oct-13
TechCrunch.com just covered The Founders Institute which uses the domain name Fi.co, is an incubator, and just hit a big milestone, more than 1,000 companies have graduated from the program…
ICANN Names Inventor of DNS As Security Advisor to The Generic Domains Division – 05-Oct-13
ICANN today announced that Paul Mockapetris, inventor of the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS), has agreed to serve as Senior Security Advisor to the Generic Domains Division and its President, Akram Atallah…
Techcrunch Covers Another Company Built Around.tv: Iris.tv Raises $1.7 Million – 05-Oct-13
TechCrunch.com covered yet another startup that just got some angel funding and is built around a .TV domain name. IRIS.TV which was founded by the folks behind Jukebox TV is coming to market with $1.7 million in seed funding from angels in the media and finance world, including folks like Bob Jacobs, who was Bill Cosby’s long-time agent and is considered the “godfather of television syndication”; Nick Rau, co-founder of Vizu (which recently sold to Nielsen); former Viacom exec Jimmy Barge; and entertainment attorney Jor Law…
Registrars Given Access to Trademark Clearinghouse – 05-Oct-13
Accredited registrars on older contracts can now get access to the Trademark Clearinghouse for testing purposes, ICANN announced last night. Previously, ICANN was only handing out credentials to registrars on the new 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement, but many registrars complained that this didn’t give them time to evaluate the TMCH and the RAA at the…
First gTLD Extended Evaluation Results Published – 05-Oct-13
ICANN has delivered the first three results of Extended Evaluation for new gTLD applications, all passes. Dot Registry, which has applied for five corporate-themed gTLDs, flunked its Initial Evaluation on .ltd and .llc back in June on financial grounds, but complained a few days later that ICANN’s evaluators had screwed up. The company told DI…
Rare Domain Brands on the Market for the First Time Exclusively at DNX.com – 04-Oct-13
DNX, domain name exchange, a joint venture between InternetMedia and Media Options, is offering for the first time ever, what could be considered the premier portfolio of “domain hacks”…
Servers.com Domain Name to Be Sold in Bankruptcy Auction – 04-Oct-13
Prized domain name will be sold in a court ordered bankruptcy sale. The domain name Servers.com is headed to the auction block due to bankruptcy. Servers.com is one of the domains in the Ondova Limited Company bankruptcy. A previous portfolio of domains from Ondova sold for over $5 million, although it got hung up in…
Neustar Faces Its Verisign Moment – 04-Oct-13
Contract to run “telephone number registry” is out for bid. You may know Neustar as the registry for the .biz domain name, and the registry selected by many applicants for new top level domain names. But that’s not its bread and butter. Its business was built off of a single contract to administer the North…
Deal Capital Acquires Key Domain Name For Sourcing Business Valuation Services – 03-Oct-13
Deal Capital, a provider of expert M&A advisor services, announces the strategic acquisition of several top-level domain names including businessvaluations.org. “We’re always on the lookout for great domains to add to our portfolio,” says Nate Nead, Partner at DealCapital.com. “We’re particularly focused on acquiring domains that match our company’s services profile.”
CBS/CNET Quitely Sells Events.com to Bump Network & Gets Ready to Launch – 03-Oct-13
CBS Interactive quietly sold the Killer domain name Events.com sometime in late April of this year to BUMP Network, Inc. CBS Interactive purchased Cnet in June 2008 and acquired this domain name Events.com as part of that acquisition…
Bill Doshier is Creating Buzz Around .buzz – 03-Oct-13
After signing ICANN contract, .buzz is readying its rollout plans. Yesterday I sat down with Bill Doshier, applicant for the .buzz top level domain, while he was in Austin. Doshier was all smiles as he had just finished signing his registry contract with ICANN. Signing the contract is a big milestone for all new top…
Bill Doshier is Creating Buzz Around .buzz – 03-Oct-13
After signing ICANN contract, .buzz is readying its rollout plans. Yesterday I sat down with Bill Doshier, applicant for the .buzz top level domain, while he was in Austin. Doshier was all smiles as he had just finished signing his registry contract with ICANN. Signing the contract is a big milestone for all new top…
Namejet Selected By Daniel Negari for New gTLD .college Auctions – 03-Oct-13
NameJet.com and Daniel Negari’s XYZ.COM Registry have partnered to bring the new gTLD .COLLEGE to the public. NameJet will be managing the auction process for the Sunrise and Landrush phases of launch…
Schilling’s Uniregistry is Positioned to Become The Most Successful New gTLD Registry – 03-Oct-13
We think the Frank Schilling’s Uniregistry is uniquely positioned to become, pound for pound, the most successful new gTLD operator. So first a disclaimer, we don’t own any part of Uniregistry (unfortunately) and Uniregistry doesn’t and hasn’t even advertised on TheDomains.com. Finally this is obviously an opinion piece as opposed to a news post.
With that out of the way, Uniregistry has applied for just over 50 strings…
Eleven TLDs Get Removed From The DNS – 03-Oct-13
ICANN will soon remove 11 experimental internationalized domain name TLDs from the domain name system. The TLDs, which represent “.test” in nine scripts and 10 languages, were added to the root almost exactly six years ago in preparation for ICANN’s IDN ccTLDs program. Now that the program is quite mature, with a few dozen IDN…
.pink and Two Other gTLDs Get Contracts – 03-Oct-13
ICANN has signed Registry Agreements this week with three new gTLD applicants, covering the strings .wed, .ruhr and .pink. I would characterize these strings as a generic, a geographic and a post-generic. regiodot GmbH wants to use .ruhr as a geographic for the Ruhr region of western Germany while Atgron wants to providing marrying couples…
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