February 2009 Archives

If like me you cannot attend the ICANN meeting in Mexico City, then you are probably looking for other methods for keeping track of goings on.

Twitter, which has become one of the most popular social networks,  has been adopted by both ICANN staff and many of the meeting delegates. You can find out what is going on by following the hashtag #IMX

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• ICANN Mexico (isquattedyour.eu)
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Short generic domains can be insanely expensive, so it was interesting to see how much xml.mobi would fetch at auction over on Sedo

The bidding heated up a bit in the last hour or so, but the domain went under the hammer for a mere $430, which is a lot lower than you might have expected.

Toys.com has been sold at auction this evening for a staggering $5.1 million!

Adam Strong covered the auction live over on Twitter:



More coverage over on DomainNameNews.com

Nominet was expected to announce the nominations for the PAB election this afternoon. What we got instead took me by surprise.

Since there were only three nominations put forward by the deadline all three get appointed without any election, leaving one free seat on the PAB.

In other words, there won't be a PAB election this year.

Considering how vocal some Nominet members were in the weeks prior to the PAB elections this turn of events took me quite by surprise. Several Nominet members had indicated that they were planning to run, but obviously decided against it.

Here is the official announcement that was sent out this afternoon:

On January 29, we issued a call for nominations for the election of four candidates to our Policy Advisory Body (PAB).

By the closing date for nominations on 17 February, we received three nominations. The following three candidates will therefore automatically be appointed / re-appointed to the PAB on May 1 without the need for an election:

- James Conaghan
- Mark Healey
- Michael Toth

We thank them for standing and for taking the time to supply the necessary documentation to go with their nominations, which we are posting here for information.  http://www.nominet.org.uk/policy/pab/election/

There is currently one vacant place on the PAB, and we will be consulting with the PAB for suggestions as to how they wish to deal with this situation. If you wish to provide PAB members with any comments then please email them at pab-feedback@nominet.org.uk

Congratulations to all three!

In totally unrelated news, someone is auctioning off one of Jim Davies' Nominet business cards for charity on ebay!




(Disclosure - as you will see from the official document I seconded two of the nominations)

Aftermarket.com are currently conducting a survey of their users. If you complete it (and it really does take about 10 minutes) you can enter for a draw to win $500 of credit, which isn't bad.

A lot of the questions relate to how you would like to buy and sell domains via an aftermarket provider, but what makes this survey different is that there are no compulsory questions that I could see.

While I've mentioned Bido in the past, as I thought it was a cool idea, I won't be in the future.

Why not?

Because they seem to think it's ok to send spam to members of DNForum.

If you want to market your website spamming people about it is NOT the way to do it.

Bido claim to be "revolutionary", but spam is hardly a revolution and sending a mass PM to members of a domainer forum is exactly that.

Bido need to get a clue.

And here is the "lovely" message:

 Dear Bido Friends
Greetings Bido Friends!

We are happy to announce that Bido is alive and kicking. Upcoming auctions have been loaded into the system, with the first auction this Thrusday, February 19th.

Over the past few months we've made enormous progress with the Bido auction platform!
We overshot our target relaunch date but for a good reason. The development efforts that have gone into our platform are of a world-class level and these things take time to produce, test, and refine. We were aiming for February 2nd, but then placed that relaunch date to February 16th, when all auctions were loaded in to the system. We feel this change was mandatory and in the best interest of everyone involved. We do not take changing this date lightly. There are numerous technology modules that power the Bido platform and we simply needed more time in the schedule to complete our testing and redesign efforts of each and every touch point. Thank you for all the feedback and your understanding in the interim.

Now on to the meat and potatoes! In these economic times, you may find that there's no better time than now to liquidate one or some of your domain name assets. With the economic uncertainty ahead of us, it may be wise to stash some cash for a rainy day. If you have a premium domain (or several) that you would like to auction with us, please submit them here. The best time to setup your auction with us is now, prior to our relaunch. The earlier your domain is chosen for auction, the quicker we can complete the contract, escrow, and listing process with you. While auctions are not running at this moment, we are still actively setting up the future auctions. So please submit your domains, and if they are chosen for auction, we will be in touch with you.

A version of Bido that is in the pipeline, and that will be released shortly after our relaunch, will take a total spin on the domain submission and listing procedure. We hear your comments and feedback about the current way auctions are chosen. Bido is a project that has phases, and the evolution of the platform will reveal numerous innovative features, features primarily based on the initial long term concept, as well as features sprouted from user interaction and feedback.

We would also like to take a moment and explain what being an Expert Member on Bido is all about. Our auctions actually break the mold and encourage comments on the sale from our users. To be able to participate in the commentaries, you must be an Expert Member. To apply to become one is easy, just log into your Bido account and click the link to request the designation. Expert Members gain benefit from participating in commentaries because in each commentary, we will permanently link back to the website of the expert member's choosing. We also pull down the Expert Members' RSS feeds, so if you have a blog, or some other feed URL, we will grab the recent entries and display them (and the respective links) in your Bido profile. This is very good for optimizing your website in the search engines with the relevant links back from our site. You will also gain exposure and notoriety for yourself and your brand as the other members and site visitors read your comments.

Thanks for your attention, your patience, and your domain submissions. We're happy to produce this revolutionary auction platform for you, our valued members, and we promise to continue to innovate and further the capabilities of Bido to enhance your online business.

While we have you, please take a moment to:
Join our Facebook group,
Follow us on Twitter, and
Join our Linkedin group!


Be sure to check out www.PortfolioHelp.com, as well as our domain
management platform www.DNZoom.com in the interim!

We have a thread running here on DNF if you would like to read and comment, please join in!

Regards,
The Bido.com Team

Domain auction site Bido.com, which was forced to close last year due to technical issues, is relaunching next week.

The first auction is scheduled for February 19th, with the inventory for upcoming auctions being made available on February 16th.

What makes Bido that bit different is their approach.

Unlike Sedo and other auction sites which offer thousands of domains at any given time, Bido only auctions one domain per day.

They also offer all auctions with an opening bid of $1 and no reserve.

Hopefully the technical changes they've made will work and they'll be able to stay open this time.

While the number of WIPO UDRP cases involving IE domains is not that big, there are still more than enough to show that trademark holders should pay attention to the IE namespace.

The most recent decision involved the domain "fatboy.ie".

If you are familiar with them Fatboys are a sort of beanbag. (You can find out more about them here)

In this case the domain fatboy.ie was being used to push traffic towards a competing brand selling a very similar set of products.

You can read the full decision here, but the outcome was pretty predictable and the current holder of fatboy.ie did not respond at any time

Research In Motion (RIM) are best known as the makers of the Blackberry. In the run up to Christmas last year there was quite a bit of interest shown in two things:

1. The Blackberry Storm
2. The Blackberry Application Store

Both developments were seen as RIM's attempt to regain market share against Apple and its iPhone and App store.

So it's hardly surprising to see that people would have tried to capitalise on the news via domains, namely:
bestblackberryapplications.com
bestblackberryapps.com
bestblackberrystormapps.com
blackberryapplicationstore.com
blackberryappsstore.com
blackberrystormapplications.com
blackberrystormapplicationstore.com
newblackberryapps.com
newblackberrystormapps.com

All of the above domains were subject to a WIPO UDRP ruling (D2008-1932) in RIM's favour.
The case isn't that interesting, as the other party did not attempt to defend their position.

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I'd hate to be an employee of Namedrive this week.

Earlier today word started spreading across multiple fora and blogs that Namedrive had suffered a security breach resulting in user logins being leaked. This supposedly only affected about 1% of their user accounts, but it's obviously highly embarassing for Namedrive.

More details over on DomainNameNews

During the sunrise period for .eu domains there was quite a bit of controversy, as a number of high profile names were grabbed by companies that had no legitimate right to them.

One of the domains that caught my attention at the time was dublin.eu (see Irish Times article).

So what about the .tel sunrise?

Were companies like Lantec, who grabbed the dublin.eu domain, actively seeking high profile names this time round?

Well the answer is pretty obvious - they were.

Dublin.tel received two applications during the .tel sunrise and the second one was successful.

So Dublin city won't be able to make use of the domain dublin.tel unless they either buy the domain from Lantec or are successful in a WIPO UDRP.

Whose fault is this?

Telnic's? No. Their process for validating sunrise applications was clearly followed, so blaming them is pointless. Lantec, like any other sunrise applicant, had to provide trademark information in order to apply for the domain.

ICANN's? No. They'd nothing to do with it.

Dublin city? That depends on your perspective. They probably should have applied for the domain or made representation to the registry to get the domain name added to the reserve list.

UPDATE: Here's the dublin.tel domain details: