Miami Police Department Lets MiamiPolice.com Drop - Gives Cybersquatter Early Christmas Gift

The slogan on the Miami Police Department website at Miami-Police.org says "Professional Law Enforcement." I don't doubt that is true, but when it comes to professional intellectual 

property management - not so much. According to story at NBCMiami.com Thursday, the local police department let the far more intuitive and desirable domain MiamiPolice.com drop because, citing a tight budget, they didn't want to pay the renewal fee. They are however paying to keep the far less desirable, hyphenated domain  Miami-Police.com - go figure.  

As if that weren't misguided enough, the department has also let the expiration date for MiamiPolice.org pass and it is now in Redemption. Apparently no one there got the memo about hyphenated domains losing large percentages of their American audience to the non-hyphenated versions. MiamiPolice.com and MiamiPolice.org both have high value for redirecting visitors to the less memorable Miami-Police.org if nothing else. Cybersquatters certainly know that, which is why one quickly pounced on MiamiPolice.com when it dropped and now has it on a parking page to take advantage of the traffic created by those typing in the more intuitive abandoned name (the domain is under WhoIs Privacy). 

Believe it or not, the Miami Police Department was notified repeatedly by a knowledgeable local citizen that they were about to lose MiamiPolice.com and informed why they should spend the modest renewal fee to keep it. The citizen even offered to pay the renewal fee for them but they still weren't interested. 

A police department spokesman told NBCMiami reporter Jeff Burnside the department didn't need the domain because they already had their Internet presence covered. The police statement said, “From the time we established an Internet presence, we have always used miami-police.org (we also own miami-police.com) and our internal network is miami-police.net..." I can hear everyone who knows anything about domain names groaning loudly right now. 

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News Aggregator Domaining.com Organizes Domain Sale to Pay Back Bloggers

Domaining.com is a popular domain news aggregation site that allows you to view headlines from the industry's most popular blogs, news and information sites in one convenient location. 

When a headline catches your eye you can click on it and be taken to the original site to read the full article. It's a win win platform for all involved. Domaining.com gets its headline content at no charge and in return the content producers get additional traffic that is driven to their site from the Domaining.com links.  

The way it works is that anyone who wants to put a name up for sale in the event (only one name per person), can submit it for consideration here. Carrillo plans to put the 100 best submissions in a sales newsletter that will go out Monday, January 9, 2012 (this is a new date, one week later than the one originally announced). In addition to his own mailing list, Carrillo has also gotten support from  DNForum.com, DomainState.com and AcornDomains.co.uk who have agreed to distribute the sale list to their members. Sellers will pay a 10% commission on any domains sold with those proceeds going back to the bloggers. 

I think its a thoughtful gesture on the parts of Domaining.com, DNForum.com and DomainState.com - one that is fitting for the holiday season. If the sale goes well it should provide a nice belated Christmas gift to some of the men and women who have helped develop the domain industry's blogosphere into such a rich source of free news, information and advice. 

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Why Prominent Domain Investor Dr. Chris Hartnett is Buying Guns and Ammunition

Dr. Chris Hartnett, whom we did a very popular Cover Story on in June 2008, is one of the most well-known investors in the domain business. However, Chris has always believed in 

diversifying one's assets to hedge against disaster in any one category. In the past he has put money in a number of other desirable assets including gold and gemstones. However, according to a new story at TheDaily.com, Hartnett is among a growing number of private investors who have come to believe that  guns and ammunition now offer one of the safest havens for those who want  to hedge their bets. 

Many who know Chris, a pacifist at heart who has been a nearly life long practitioner of transcendental meditation, will undoubtedly be surprised to hear about his interest in firearms, but Hartnett told TheDaily.com that, from a financial standpoint, the category was too attractive to ignore. 

“Old, rare, antique and unique guns bring big money,” Hartnett noted. He said his collection includes some unusual guns including sniper rifles that can hit a target 1,000 yards away.

Dr. Chris Hartnett

Hartnett also buys ordinary guns, along with cases of bullets, because he feels they are likely to hold their value during good times and appreciate in value during turbulent times. 

Hartnett told TheDaily that pawn shops have been one of the best sources for building his collection. He also utilizes an auction site at GunBroker.com, where Benelli shotguns, Springfield rifles and Ruger .357 revolvers are among the most popular items. "If things ever get really bad, guns and ammo will be a big commodity,” Hartnett opined.

If you look at Wall Street there is more evidence that Hartnett could be on the right track. TheDaily noted that despite a stagnant economy, shares of publicly traded gun companies soared this year, even though returns for the Standard and Poor’s 500 were flat. Smith and Wesson rose 17% while Sturm Ruger exploded, gaining 118%. 

For disciples of diversification, that means the next time they are ready to pull the trigger on a domain purchase they may have to consider whether the money would be better spent on a .38! I have to admit, I never saw that conundrum coming!

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We Have White Christmases Too: Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah From Florida!

We had a wonderful Christmas here on Florida's west coast Sunday. Diana and I hosted a dozen family members for dinner and opening of gifts. It was 82 degrees and sunny, so snow was a little scarce in our neck of the woods. We still  have White Christmases, it's just that the white stuff here is sand instead of snow! We are both transplanted Midwesterners so that took a little getting used to at first but we have adjusted over the years and have come to appreciate that it is a lot easier to shovel sunshine than snow! Our Christmas wish is that you and your families are having an equally joyous Christmas or Hanukkah season and that 2012 will be your best year ever.

Ron and Diana Jackson wishing you and your families 
a joyous holiday season and a prosperous New Year.

With Christmas falling on Sunday this year, most workers got today off instead. There was no mail delivery, the banks were closed and a lot of our friends at the various domain industry companies are also enjoying a well deserved day off. Some won't have to return to work until after New Year's Day but it will be back to business as usual here tomorrow. That's fine with me too because, as the old saying goes, when you do what you love you never work a day in your life. 

I still love the domain business and the the hundreds of uniquely gifted people we have had the pleasure of meeting in it over the past decade. As every new year approaches I am filled with eager anticipation to see where this constantly changing industry will take us next and whose paths we will have an opportunity to cross. I don't see how life could get much more interesting than this and I know we have been especially blessed to be a part of it. Thanks to each and every one of you for that.

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Global Domain Name Registrations Continue to Grow at a Rapid Clip - Up Over 8% From a Year Ago

Verisign (the operator of the .com and .net registries) has released their latest quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief, this one covering the third quarter of 2011. The latest report shows domain registrations worldwide continued to grow at a steady clip in 3Q-2011. The quarter closed with just under 220 million domains registered across all TLDs - a jump of over 8% from the same quarter a year ago. 

Just since the end of the previous quarter (2Q-2011) the number of registered domains went up by 4.9 million names, a healthy 2.3% rise that marked the third consecutive quarter that the number of registered domains rose by at least 2%.

Of the approximately 220 million domains now registered, the majority (112 million domains) are .coms or .nets. Just under 89 million registrations are ccTLDs and the country codes grew even faster than the overall market - rising almost 10% from the same quarter a year ago. 7.8 million more ccTLD domains are registered now than at the same time in 2010. The most popular ccTLD, Germany's .de, is also the second most popular extension in the world, trailing only .com. 

.Net is the third most popular TLD followed by .uk (Great Britain) and .org. Rounding out the top ten, in order, are .info, .tk (Tokelau), .nl (Netherlands), .ru (Russia) and .eu (the European Union).

Verisign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide Internet users throughout the world with significant statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry and the Internet as a whole. Copies of the 2011 third quarter Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained at: http://www.verisigninc.com/DNIB. 

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Afilias Announces 2011 .Info Award Winners - Will Hand Out $18,000 in Prize Money

The operator of the .Info registry, Afilias, has announced the winners of its 2011 .Info Awards recognizing the best websites built on .info domains this year and also celebrating the 10th anniversary of the .info extension. The top three sites were selected by combining scores from a seven-person panel of judges with votes the public cast for their favorites.

The $10,000 First Prize went to TrafalgarSquare.info, a site celebrating London's world-famous landmark that was built by a developer based in Bulgaria. 

The $5,000 Second Place Prize was won by Typografie.info, a German-language website community of people interested in graphic design and typography. 

The $3,000 Third Place Prize was awarded to FrauenUndHIV.info, a German website for women 

interested in learning more about or living with HIV/AIDS. Judge Anand Parthasarathy said, "I found FrauenUndHIV.info to be a model of its kind: friendly information and advice, neatly organized and displayed without visual flourishes. I can imagine how useful this would be for all who need to explore the subject of women and HIV in the privacy of their own homes."

Afilias said that dozens of sites representing 17 countries were submitted for this year's awards.  Personal websites made up 28% of the entries, just ahead of business sites with 27%.  Non-profit websites comprised 15% of the field and blogs made up 10% with other categories holding single digit shares.

In addition to the cash awards that go to the winners, five people who took time to vote in the competition will be chosen at random to receive an Amazon Kindle Fire tablet. The winners of the .Info Awards and the Kindle Fires will be contacted individually to arrange receipt of their prizes.

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Lana Del Rey to Appear On Saturday Night Live January 14 in First American TV Appearance

The music career of Lana Del Rey continues to explode. Today it was announced that the sultry young singer, whose bandwagon I've been on since the beginning of her independent label

days, will make her first American TV appearance on NBC's Saturday Night Live January 14, 2012. The show will be hosted by Harry Potter himself - Actor Daniel Radcliffe - and I would bet that Lana produces more magic on the program than the world's most famous wizard. 

Lana, who signed a major label deal with Interscope Records a few months ago, has become the most talked about new artist in the music industry and 

Lana Del Rey in November 2011 issue of Rolling Stone

has already hit the top of the charts in several countries outside the U.S. Now Americans will find out what all of the commotion has been about. 

Lana's latest video for "Born to Die" has gone ballistic with over 2.6 million views as of today. The video and her upcoming appearance on SNL is stoking major interest in her major label debut album that is due out January 31.  

Lana del Rey, (the alluring stage name adopted by Lizzy Grant, the eldest daughter of our friends, Rob and Pat Grant) is a unique artist and I couldn't be happier to see the rest of the world now appreciating her talent. As I've written several times before, I always felt it was just a matter of time and now Lana's time has come. 

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800-Pound Gorilla Go Daddy Gains Even More Weight as Huge Private Equity Investment Closes

Last summer the world's biggest domain register, Go Daddy, announced that the company had entered into an agreement with three private equity firms to make a strategic investment

in the company that is also a force in website hosting and related areas. That agreement was finalized today. Terms of the deal were not announced but it likely involved hundreds of millions of dollars going to Go Daddy from investors KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures.

A Go Daddy press release about the deal said, "The partnership creates a vibrant technology company poised to expand farther and faster internationally...This new alliance expands Go Daddy's resources and is primarily focused on expansion of its cloud-based technology product offerings and acceleration with international growth."

The company said it is primed for double-digit sales increases for an eighth consecutive year. Since the investment venture was first announced July 1st, Go Daddy surpassed the 50 million domain names registered mark, an Internet first, and grew its website hosting base beyond 5.2 million accounts.

Greg Mondre, Managing Director of  one of the three investors, Silver Lake, said, "Go Daddy is well positioned to expand with the exponential growth of the Internet. Whether you are a small business or a thriving operation anywhere in the world, Go Daddy has the resources to create or elevate your Web presence. We are absolutely focused on making it easy for small businesses to get bigger."

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.FR Registrations Heading Up as France Opens Its ccTLD to Most Europeans - Still No Go For Americans Though

I've always been a fan of ccTLDs that represent the world's major economies, including France's .fr extension. I've reported a lot of good .fr sales through the years but was disappointed to learn early on that the country's very strict Nexus requirements precluded me from registering .fr domains. I still can't but thanks to a major policy change that went into effect December 6, 2011, a lot more people can. 

In fact AFNIC the administrator of the .fr extension has opened the country code to all companies and residents of European Union nations as as well as Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. AFNIC put the same eligibility rules in place for five ccTLDs representing related territories that AFNIC has responsibility for, including Wallis and Futuna (.wf), French Southern and Antarctic Territories (.tf),  Reunion Island (.re), Saint-Pierre and Miquelon (.pm) and Mayotte (.yt). 

Midway through the first day of wider availability for these extensions (Dec. 6), AFNIC posted some early results. By 1:30pm local time that day 3,500 domains had been registered through 70 different registrars. 50% of those registrations were .fr domains and 18% were .re. Another 11% went to .pm with .yt getting 6% of the new regs and .tf 5%. 

AFNIC said that 62% of those early registrations were made by buyers from France (including 9% from Reunion Island). The next highest shares went to individuals or companies based in Germany with 13%, the United Kingdom with 6%, Belgium with 3% and Italy with 2%. 

Now, if we could just get AFNIC to let Americans join the party too! Especially since the number of good terms in the growing extension is rapidly dissipating. According to HosterStats.com over 2.1 million .fr registrations were active as of Dec. 1, 2011. So how about it AFNIC? We may not be in the EU but we do a lot of business with France too and I've got the wine to prove it! :-)

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Hot New Nashville Singer/Songwriter Bree Brings David Castello Back to the Future

Unless you've been hiding under a rock you are already familiar with domain industry giants David and Michael Castello of Castello Cities Internet Network (owners of Nashville.com, PalmSpring.com, Whisky.com and many other great generic domains). I first told their story exactly five years ago this month in a December 2006 Cover Story called Band of Brothers: How Michael and David Castello Morphed from Struggling Musicians to Domain Millionaires. 

Before getting into domains, David and Michael were top notch rock musicians (see this video from their music heyday with Michael singing and David on drums: http://www.michaelseven.com/ ). In a strange twist of fate the two would go on to become rock stars in the domain business instead of the music world (our gain - the music industry's loss). 

Michael remains retired from the stage, but David,  who also ran clubs on L.A.'s world famous Sunset Strip, has suddenly found himself back behind his drum kit doing what he has always loved to do best.

This unexpected trip back to his roots and new plans for his future was set in motion earlier this year when he met a stunning young musician named Bree who simply blew him away. The two moved to Nashville this past summer and have been making big waves ever since they arrived in town.

David Castello

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Tebowing.com - Registered Less Than 60 Days Ago, Getting Millions of Visits, Now Worth Big Bucks?

Lynch wanted to talk to me about the possible value of the Tebowing.com domain name now that this craze had gone viral. That is almost impossible to determine without knowing exactly how much traffic is coming through the site and how much revenue it is now generating (also as a developed site with interesting content, any price paid now would likely be for more than the domain name alone). At the moment, not much is being done to monetize that traffic. There is just an ad for Tebowing T-Shirts with proceeds to benefit Denver area charities and a couple of PPC banners pulled from an ad network. 

In any case, lots of  other speculators have also jumped on the bandwagon. Within 2-3 days of when Tebowing.com was registered October 25th, the term "tebowing" was taken in every other well-known extension, including  many representing countries outside the U.S., including .co.uk, .in, .ws and many others. As of this writing the only notable extension I saw still available was the European Union's .eu. Odds are, most of those alternatives will be wasted money, but it just shows how fast a new term can take off when the media gets on board. 

As for the .com, it definitely has significant value beyond reg fee now, so the owner came up with a  winner with that choice. Just how valuable his asset is, or will be in the future, remains to be seen. That will be influenced by how long Tim Tebow continues to reign as the Mile High Messiah, however as a Heisman Trophy winner and a widely admired role model, Tebow will continue to have a  huge fan base for years to come, so tebowing may well have a long shelf regardless of how the rest of his pro career goes.

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DOMAINfest Global 2012's PITCHfest Contest Offers Opportunity to Find Investors for Your New Online Business Idea

On Friday I told you about a Fantasy Domaining Contest that DOMAINfest Global is currently running with an all expenses paid trip to the Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 2012 conference in Santa Monica, California going to the winner. There is another contest that will be held at the show that will be of special interest to anyone who is trying to launch a new online business, service or technology idea. That is the 3rd annual PITCHfest Contest on February 1st that will give participants a chance to pitch their projects to a panel of angel investor judges and around 700 internet entrepreneurs and investors expected to be at DOMAINfest Global.  

Each contestant will have three minutes to make their presentation, then two winner's trophies will be handed out. One will be the judges's choice and the other will be selected by members of the audience who will pick their favorite through a real time text message voting system.

The 2012 panel of judges be feature a group of well-connected angel investors including:
  •  John Morris, Chairman Emeritus of Tech Coast Angels, the largest angel organization in the country.
  •  Jeff Cohn, entrepreneur/VC involved in SoCal investment opportunities and CEO of two nationally recognized crowd-sourcing location based mapping services.
  •  Scott Jarus, Oversee.net Director and Chairman and CEO, Ironclad Performance Wear.
  •  Ben Kuo, founder of SOCALTECH LLC, and the publisher of socalTECH.com, has been active in supporting Southern California's high tech industry.

Stefan Wrobel (Smartvark.com)
2011 PITCHfest Judges Winner

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Fantasy Domaining Contest Offers All Expenses Paid Trip to DOMAINfest Global 2012 in California

The 2012 DOMAINfest Global conference is less than 8 weeks away. A Who's Who of the domain industry will be in Santa Monica, California for the event that runs January 31 

through  February 2 at the oceanfront Fairmont Miramar Hotel. You could be there too and thanks to a Fantasy Domaining Contest being run by the conference organizers, you could be going all expenses paid!

First prize in the contest is free admission to the show (the current ticket price is $1,195), $1,000 in travel expenses and four free hotel nights. If that doesn't get your competitive juices flowing, nothing will. 

Here's how it works. The contest is a bit like Fantasy Football in that contestants “draft” their initial roster from a master list of 1,000 domains, put some in-play, substitute domains in-play, and trade domains with other contestants. Entrants will be using the portfolio acquired in the draft to test their skills and intuition in projecting the PPC revenue from domain names.  

Each contestant will draft/select a portfolio of 35 domains from the master list owned by Oversee.net. The master list can be downloaded if you want to take some time to analyze the domains or  use Oversee's online search filters to find domains with desired keywords or categories. Choose the domains that you think produced the most PPC revenue last year between Dec 1, 2010 and January 16, 2011. Then select 25 of your 35 domains to put on your In-Play game roster. That roster's cumulative 12/1/10 to current-date-last-year PPC revenue will determine your overall ranking.

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