Green Names Sustain Themselves

Green names and green name websites have been springing from everywhere from Poland to Australia. Domain green names with hybrids or eco friendly keywords in the domain names are created every day. Career domainers are holding onto their names.

Missing from the drop lists are key names because domain name pros are watching the auctions. Even Toyotahybrids.com sold big, a clear TM violation. China stands to have the forefront of green energy and eco-friendly technological standards at some point, while domainers stand poised to reap the benefit from the enthusiasm sustainable living mavens have.

TM Squat Sedo Style

A rumble of remarks was traded amongst domainers as SEDO annoucned it $20K sale of domain ToyotaHybrid.com. But conscientious and confused domainers doubted the veracity of the sale and the announcement. With reports of Toyota pacing its TM squatters faster than a Google bot can find a broken site plan, the dubious future of such a name hangs in the balance.

Pooling Pool for July 2009

Pool activity for July has shown a brisk pace, saying “nay” to naysayers earlier in the year casting aspersions on the internet’s ability to support a thriving domaining industry. If the dropping and deleting domains activity is anything to go by, the domain name game is still well afoot.

The sale of woodpellets.com for $115,000 and the featuring of many green names signals a sea change for these names. Whereas heretofore sustainable names have been long term babysitting assignments, the penalty flag on many eco-friendly domain names is up and domainers are back in the game.

Yahoo and MSN Get in Bed

Searching for traffic in all the right places, Internet behemoths Yahoo and MSN have decided to pool resources and roll out a competitor to the famed Google titan of the search waves. Domainers looking to gain traffic must contentd with a new analytic powerhouse ruling the clicks online.

Under the 10-year deal, Yahoo.com and Bing.com will maintain their own branding but search results on Yahoo.com will say “powered by Bing.” Yahoo, in turn, will be responsible for attracting premium advertisers.

Microsoft will pay Yahoo 88% of the revenue it gains from searches on Yahoo’s sites. Microsoft will also have the rights to integrate Yahoo’s search technology into its own existing MSN hosted sites and platform portals. The deal is expected to close in early 2010.

African Internet Boom

Africa is finally getting up to speed with cable Internet connectivity, a sigh of relief from expensive satellite connections. Faster than you can say dense division wave multiplexing, an undersea cable will connect continental Africans with global e-commerce and the information superhighway. The cable links southern Africa to Europe and Asia.

Provider SEACOM lit its 17,000 kilometer submarine cable, capable of 1.28 terabytes per second, allowing the region true connectivity. Gone will be the lines around the block for an hour to load a Youtube. New business will ’springbok” from the region, domainers anticipate.

SEACOM, privately funded/75% African-owned, will provide retail carriers with open source access to inexpensive bandwidth. The 3 year project, providing landing stations at South Africa, Kenya, Madagascar and other points along the east coast of Africa, has had Africans holding their breath for connectivity with the rest of the world.

All minisites are not alike

All minisites are not alike. So sayeth some industry watchers cynically assessing the market adaptibility to the minsite trend. Steve Higashi, of Toronto, Canada, (promoter for www.ShoppingCartForum.com), clucked over the tendency of many domainers and domain webmasters to accept ‘cookie cutter” quality minisites.

“Our services provide custom design attributes that separates our website product from the template driven minisite item on sight.” Higashi is betting on forum driven attraction to the checkout engine portal and putting his faith in word of mouth and interested site programmers checking back, rather than stray type-in traffic and casual browsing.

Domainers, start your mini-site engines

 

Global Domain Frenzy

Of concern to many domainers is the consolidation of sizeable international portfolios of names within certain estimated price ranges.  This kind of acquisition signals serious sea changes for competition within those markets. With the many new country codes and sub-TLD’s being launched by ICANN recently, domainers continue to watch the domain spaces around the world closely.

 

Chinese Name Checkers

Domainers continue to coalesce around the Chinese name market as well as they can. As much as international domainers and global speculators are focusing on China, a limited participation offering may not yet have fully emerged solidly. Despite visible State support, the offering seems not quite yet navigable.

Complex entry into the Chinese domain name market may spell competition and obstacles. Currently, Internet Explorer 6 is in use in China is at around the 68% mark. Chinese residents and internet users also must participate in a cultural content block, which may limite certain domain topics and website offerings to a vast extent, such as the adult market.

ICANN Chief Speaketh…

A new era has dawned for Icann. The new age has started in the Internet domain space, echoing the new blood in the White House and elsewhere. What significant changes will domainers see? The opening remarks for the new agenda by the new internet czar has domainers talking…

“First, let me say that I am thrilled to be on board as ICANN’s CEO and President. The moment I joined this exciting organization I found it working on an incredible range of activities involving an array of constituencies.

Without doubt, ICANN is the most complex organization I have ever come across, necessarily, at least in part, because we must navigate through a sea of stakeholder groups, some of which have been formalized in our bylaws, and all of which have an interest in global Internet names, addressing and parameters.

To ensure each address is unique, ICANN must take on the difficult role of bringing about clarity among these same stakeholders. In the end, every single name must be unique and only one party can own it.

This is no small task, with nearly 200 million unique names registered and for many of these names there are many different parties who would like to own or control them. What I find impressive is that, despite the many competing pressures in this environment, ICANN has been able to fulfill its core functions in the 11 years since its inception, and has emerged as a strong, stakeholder driven group.

My vision as we move forward is to support a globally unified Internet on which addressing remains unique to ensure interoperability. In this Internet world, a merchant in Bali can effortlessly send an email to a businesswoman in Tokyo. Anyone anywhere will be able to interact with anyone else anywhere else in the world, so long as they both can access the Internet. ICANN is already taking steps toward enhancing this functionality.

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