Rick Latona has done an excellent job of developing out Vino.com. But “Vino” means “Wine” in Spanish. Does that mean that Rick should be obliged to relinquish his Vino.com domain to the owner of Wine.com? That’s silly isn’t it. “Vino” is a different word and brand than “Wine”. It is similarly unprecedented to suggest that [...]
Google Adwords is one of the cheapest ways to get targeted clicks to your sites. Buying an IDN is one of the most cost-effective ways to own a super-premium, category-killer, I-put-Jeff-Bezos-to-shame domain. Too bad the two don’t mesh. In planning out the development for some of my better IDNs, I found that if you use [...]
As reported by Domain Name Wire, Chuck Gomes, Vice President of Policy and Compliance for VeriSign Information Services, elaborated on Verisign’s plan to “unlock” IDN.com names so that owners of a IDN.com can own an IDN.IDN. In December, Gomes first explained Verisign’s goal of unlocking IDN.com in an IDNBlog interview (here). Gomes initially said that [...]
Bangladesh has filed a formal application for an .IDN Bengali ccTLD. Bangladesh has a population of over 162,000,000 (here). It may be populous, but it is also a poor country with low levels of Internet penetration (even if you may have come across the occasional Bangladeshi coder) — in fact most Bengali words have nearly [...]
Newcomers to the IDN industry often wonder if they arrived too late. Has the window of opportunity closed? My answer is definitely not. In the IDN sales chart below, maintained here , you can see that there are still opportunities for those willing to spend x,xxx. In particular, the Japanese names (Pregnancy).com and (Tickets).jp look [...]
Poker.org just sold for $1 million. Sex.com should definitely exceed $5 million in the forthcoming auction. This is electrifying news for domainers big and small. It should increase your confidence in the industry and in the money that can be made at the very top. When you have a one word irreplaceable “got-to-have-it” domain, time [...]
Finally. Sam Nunez, the VP of Product Management at Sedo just announced that “Sedo will add support for Chinese, Japanese and other ‘multi-byte’ characters [for] IDNs starting next week.” This was just posted as a comment to our IDN series on Elliot’s Blog (link here). Thanks for all who made this happen — to Elliot [...]
I just vacationed in Mexico. It was a great vacation, with plenty of beach and guacamole. I also learned a good amount about the non-U.S. use of domains. My eyes gravitated towards every billboard or T.V. ad that used a domain name. I was particularly curious as to whether I saw a preference for ccTLDs [...]
Right before the weekend, ICANN posted an update to the terrorist threat that jeopardizes the upcoming ICANN Nairobi meeting. Initially, on Thursday, ICANN posted that the U.S. State department released the following statement: “As of early February 2010, individuals affiliated with al-Shabaab al-Islamiya were planning suicide bombing attacks on the US Embassy and Kenyan International [...]
With great pride, I can announce that we rented out a billboard rotation in the famous Fashion Show Mall in Las Vegas. The Fashion Show Mall is owned by General Growth Properties Inc. and boasts over 250 stores including Saks and Bloomingdales. Yes, this is similar to our earlier Times Square billboard (here), which gave [...]
