The domain королев.com was sold at Sedo today for $4,000. королев means Korelev and is a popular Russian last name. As a result of this sale, a spontaneous landrush began and many popular last names that included IDN characters were swiped within minutes. I was lucky enough to register a few Russian and Japanese surnames, [...]

Chris Chena’s initial interview with DNJournal shook up the domaining community. Many were left wondering, how does a kid from Paraguay build the leading Spanish domain portfolio? I also thought, damn why didn’t I invest more in Spanish names earlier on. Maybe I wasn’t there in time for the 90′s but I was certainly into [...]

Tina Dam is a hero. She passionately lives and breathes IDNs. As Senior Director of IDNs at ICANN she has spearheaded the ccTLD Fast Track Process and has tirelessly spoken in favor of IDNs. Tina has persuasively advocated for IDN usage in order to open up the Internet to speakers of all languages. Also noteworthy [...]

Here are the top 5 reasons why domain investors stay away from IDNs, and the rebuttals to each: 1. A native would never type an IDN in foreign characters and then .com in Roman characters. IDN.com will be worthless as you don’t have foreign characters on both sides of the dot. Not true. Dot com is [...]

Got milk ads can be funny, especially in Spanish. Latinos couldn’t stop laughing when the ads came on where “Got Milk” was translated as “are you lactating?” (¿Tiene leche?) The humor was unintentional.  And the Milk Board has smartened up since the unfortunate “¿Tiene leche?” campaign was released years ago. The moral of the story, [...]

(Image courtesy of the Phoenician and Flickr) Goal setting involves a combination of predicting the future and creating it.  Where will I be, and where will the world be in 5 years, if all continues along the same trajectory?  Given the predicted result, what changes should I make in the here and now? All signs [...]

QR Codes are quick response bar codes such as the one above and can be found in the corner of Japanese advertisements instead of domain names.  If you are equipped with a camera phone that has the right software, by taking a snapshot of the code you are quickly directed to a URL.  This technology, [...]

Market inefficiencies are a great thing.  After all, that is what creates a deal is, isn’t it?  If everyone knew that the price of a certain domain was $20k nobody can make a huge profit off of the buy, right?  Well the beauty of domains is that as of now, there is no formula and [...]

Buying symbol domains is not wise unless one enjoys obscure hobbies or extremely speculative investments. For those unfamiliar with the market, you actually can own ♥.com  or §.com, which are represented by xn--g6h.com and xn--eba.com, respectively.  Unlike true IDNs which are characters of a foreign language, symbol domains are not intuitive or easy to type [...]

                There are many influential domainers who are uneducated about IDNs and put them down.  Why?     1. Most influential domainers made their money by buying English .com’s and since that is what worked for them, they narrowly propose sticking to this tried and tested method.  Remember, [...]