May 19th, 2010
A domain registrar that mainly caters to Danish customers has been accused of scamming people out of large amounts of money.
The company is called BuyDomains.dk, but as far as I know it has absolutely no connection to the leading U.S. company BuyDomains.com founded by industry legend Michael Mann.
However, the owner of BuyDomains.dk, Christina Weberg, is in fact based in America. According to Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet, she controls the company from Phoenix, but lets her mother run operations from Denmark.
Several customers have complained that they have been charged for domain names without their acceptance. In other cases they have lost their domains because BuyDomains.dk charged for renewal but in fact never renewed the domains, which were than registered by strangers.
Local police authorities have received more than 50 complaints and are looking into the matter.
The company claims the irregularities are due to “technical problems” and promises to refund customers. But several customers do not believe this will ever happen.
May 14th, 2010
The domain name slots.com has been sold for $5.5 million, easily making it the biggest sale of 2010 so far and one of the largest ever.
Although the transaction still has to be concluded, domain company and marketplace Moniker has confirmed that buyer and seller has agreed to the price. The domain was auctioned off without any bids reaching seller’s reserve price, but later Moniker managed to broker the deal between the two parties.
Of course, “slots” is a huge gambling keyword. This only makes you wonder what poker.com would go for…
The last few months seem to have been good for domaining with many huge sales. Also just sold is dating.com for $1,750,000 at DOMAINfest in Ft. Lauderdale.
May 5th, 2010
Domain auction site Bido.com has announced it is closing its doors immediately. This is really quite a shame. Although the marketplace struggled to secure a satisfactory amount of quality names for sale, it was quite liquid. And I think it has introduced many new people to the world of domaining.
I actually bought quite a few nice ccTLD domains there, and the transactions were always very smooth. Besides, the user interface was easily the coolest in the industry.
With the domain name bido.com and the underlying technology now up for sale, it will be interesting to see what will show up in its place. Hopefully still something related to domains.
April 27th, 2010
The company behind the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa in Dubai, has managed to get possession of the domain name burjkhalifa.com following a ruling by the National Arbitration Forum.
Developer Emaar Properties failed to register the domain name when the 828 meter tall building suddenly changed name from Burj Dubai to Burj Khalifa (in honor of the ruler of Adu Dhabi) just before the inauguration in January. An individual in Pakistan registered the new name before Emaar could (and should have).
The National Arbitration Forum finds the domain was registered in bad faith, and that the domain was not used in an acceptable way.
The respondent did not file a response in the case.
April 16th, 2010
In the domain world, most resellers want to get hold of generic names such as hotel.com or fight.com. The reasoning is that these kind of domains are what web surfers often try to type in, and that – if developed and optimized – they will secure high search engine rankings.
While this is certainly true, let’s not forget that far from all large companies use generic words as their corporate names. Made up names such as Xerox and Starbucks and family names such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard are still abundant. And then there are the companies that find really great creative names for their company and domain names.
I recently noticed one that I think is particularly clever. DontForgetTheMilk.com lets you create your own online shopping/grocery lists. Okay, it is not the shortest of domains, but it is certainly memorable and right to the point.
A similarly creative company is Remember The Milk, which offers online to do lists and task management.
In short, if generic domains are out of reach (too expensive), it is still possible to create a great and memorable online presence with a bit of creativity.
April 13th, 2010
I am auctioning off the domain name lono.com (LONO.com) over at Sedo. This is a really nice pronounceable so-called CVCV (consonant/vowel/consonant/vowel) domain that often attracts very high prices.
The reserve price has been met with an initial bid of $2,500.
Please feel free to join the bidding 
April 2nd, 2010
Sedo’s premium .tv auction is now underway, and already there is some hectic bidding going on.
After less than 24 hours of the auction, japan.tv has attracted 33 bids and stands at $9,999. Also jobs.tv, business.tv, germany.tv. and re.tv have all received bids of over $5,000.
Only four domains have yet to receive bids – including nudity.tv…
It looks like prices will go quite high for these names that where previously reserved. But there might still be deals to be made. Although reserve has not yet been met, a name such as invest.tv has so far only received two bids and stands at $80. My guess is the reserve price is below $2,000, so a final bidder could scoop that one.
The .tv extension is actually the country extension of the island nation of Tuvalu, but is mostly associated with TV related sites. The registry recently reduced registration and renewal prices for many premium .tv names, which seems to have sparked new interest in this extension.
March 28th, 2010
There are quite a few domains that can be misunderstood. I stumpled upon another rather funny one that was about to expire and be auctioned off at NameJet (it seems to have been renewed by now though).
Eurosexchange.com was apparently meant to be a site with information about exchange rates for the European currency – hence “euros exchange”. At least the domain still shows ads for foreign exchange.
But the domain could also be read as “euro sex change”. A site for people wanting to go to Europe for a sex change operation? There are endless opportunities with this one 
March 22nd, 2010
There are many ways to find available domain names out there, but I have come across one that I think is pretty cool. At url2domain.com, you can enter any URL and see if any words there are available as .com domain names.
For example, if you enter techcrunch.com, it will extract available domain names from the front page of the popular internet industry news source.
Of course, you might get some available domains that are not that interesting – e.g. the last name of a TechCrunch reporter – but who knows? A nice name might show up.
Other nice services that are quite similar include EstiBot.com. Here, you can enter a large amount of text copied from a web page, and it will automatically extract words as domains and then give their appraised value. However, you will need to have a paid subscription in order to do this (it is free to get appraisal for just a few domains).
March 17th, 2010
I am auctioning off a great premium domain at Sedo. The name I am letting go is lmd.com, and since it is a no reserve auction, the domain is guaranteed to sell to the highest bidder.
This is a really nice one, and I am only selling it in order to get funds for another project. So please come over and bid at Sedo from this Thursday:
Domains name lmd.com for sale at Sedo’s monthly GreatDomains auction
