I have been writing a few articles about the SnapNames fraud that took place over the past five years. I speculated that DomainQueue selling domains to iREIT helped uncover the scam. And finally, I pointed out a few mistakes that Nelson Brady made while maintaining his domain portfolio.
When I called eNom, their tech support rep tried to tell me it was a problem with the registry operator and how they display their data. Not as bad as the GoDaddy rep who told me I needed to pay for an upgraded “business listing” in order to update my whois record the day before.
I’m in the process of updating the whois on a lot of domains and noticed that eNom seems to be removing spaces from whois contact info. I’m guessing this is just a temporary bug in their system because domains that have not been updated recently are still showing normal-spaced whois info. Time to contact eNom support and see how long it will take them to escalate to a developer.
Another brand protection company has completed registrar registration. With the large amount of trademark infringement in the domain space, it’s surprising there aren’t more brand protection companies filing to be registras.
Netenforcers
Had to dig up some historical domain sale and found two sites:
DNSalePrice.com - very very slow, but lots of history
NameBio.com - slick, but only 20% of the data on DNSalePrice.
I was really surprised that so few resources exist for this market. It would seem prudent that sites like Sedo and TDNAM would want everyone to know current sales prices. Either it is too much work, or they are worried expectations will rise even more, cutting out on their bread and butter, sub $1000 sales.
Sedo is the next venue to sell some of the premium .MOBI domains. What makes this remarkable is the switch from “premium” live auctions such as TRAFFIC to the less exciting, and less profitable online auctions. It is possible that the poor showing at the last TRAFFIC where only a single premium .MOBI was sold because of the high reserve prices. Some of the 100 domains on auction at Sedo don’t even have reserve prices. It will be interesting to see how this auction performs because it will likely affect .MOBI estimates and private party pricing.
.MOBI auction at Sedo
Fabulous has gone public with the final release of Fabulous+ putting numbers to the madness: 15 templates and over 4000 images. The new interface for previews is the coolest part, and encourages viewing multiple designs.
Fabulous Plus launch
The march to add IDN TLD’s takes another step with IANA’s board approval to create IDN .test TLD’s and insert them into the root servers.
IDN .Test Root-Zone Evaluation Finalized
NameDrive was taken out by a massive DDOS attack last week. What makes this particularly interesting is the length of the outage, approximately 24 hours. Most parking companies are dealing with DOS attacks on a daily basis, but the larger companies have better systems in place to deal with them. While the outage was reimbursed, it’s another reason to park with larger companies who can mitigate the risks or at least compensate members for their problems.
Internet ramraiders rear-end domain parking service
How comfortable would you be knowing that your webhosting company wants your website? I would think them savvy and smart, but I wouldn’t think that they were really looking out for my website’s best interest. The domain space is so sketchy that webhosting companies should be on their best behavior. There is only so much room for Direcnic’s and RegisterFly’s.
“DOMAINS FOR SALE? WE’RE INTERESTED.”