After Oversee.net sold off the last of their high profile domain divisions, DomainSponsor.com, earlier this year (following the 2012 sales of Moniker.com and SnapNames.com) most have expected them to also jettison the Domainfest conferences they have been staging over the past decade (the last of which was held in Hollywood, California last spring).

That has now happened. On Wednesday (Dec. 16), Richard Lau, the founder of the NamesCon that just debuted last January in Las Vegas, announced that NamesCon has acquired Domainfest from Oversee for an undisclosed price. NamesCon promptly re-christened the opening day of their upcoming January 2015 show as Domainfest@NamesCon. 

With its rich history, the big question now is whether Domainfest will be given a new life of its own beyond its initial "name for a day" use at NamesCon. It looks as though it will. NamesCon acquired the Domainfest.com name along the with the conference and is already using it to promote NamesCon 2015. On the new home page at Domainfest.com, Lau states that Domainfest day at NamesCon will be "the first in a series of international DomainFest regional events."

NamesCon Co-Founder Richard Lau

If so, that would be a return to the roots of Domainfest which go back to smaller regional meetings in places like Los Angeles and Barcelona. It wasn't until 2007 that the large scale Domainfest Global events began with a show in Hollywood and a new domain in Domainfest.com that Donna Mahony had donated to Oversee (Donna staged her first Domainer's Choice Awards at the second Domainfest Global event in 2008). With Richard Lau and the entire NamesCon team focused on their upcoming sophomore show, now less than four weeks away, it will probably be awhile before they are ready to release more details on their plans for future Domainfest events. However, given what they have been able to do with NamesCon in such a short period of time, there will be a great deal of interest in the game plan they end up unveiling.