Month: April 2011

Categories
News

Six-figure domain name expires, lakehavasu.com is pending renewal or deletion

LakeHavasu.com

The screenshot you’re looking at is actually a screenshot of the lakehavasu.com home page, taken from 2008 and was captured by DomainTools Screenshot History.  Up until April 11, 2011, the domain name had been registered to a Brenda Thornburg. 

That’s all changed.

Today, lakehavasu.com is nothing more than a Network Solutions parked page – along with a message at the top that reads, “lakehavasu.com expired on 04/09/2011 and is pending renewal or deletion.”

And Brenda Thornburg (the original owner) is no longer listed as the registrant, “Pending Renewal or Deletion” is.

Lakehavasu.com Whois

At the time of this post, the domain name lakehavasu.com is up for auction at NameJet as a Pre-Release name. 

According to Valuate.com, lakehavasu.com appraises for $106,000.  

Readers, if lakehavasu.com makes it to auction without being renewed by its original owner, how much do you think it will sell for?

In 2007, lakehavasucity.com sold for over $12,000 on SnapNames.

[UPDATE Apr. 20th, 2011:  The original registrant has renewed the name, and as a result, the domain name will no longer head to auction at NameJet.]

Categories
News

Flippa’s biggest officially reported sale ever at $400,000, back up for sale at auction site

s9

s9.com which sold for a reported $400,000 in 2010 and became Flippa’s biggest-ever sale at the time, is back up for auction on the website/domain marketplace and drawing skeptical comments from users. 

“You have bought the website for more than 400K, and now the bid starts at 150K ?”, commented one user.

According to the seller, “The current owners have not had the time to develop this site.”

Now the site is back up for sale.

In November, Flippa officially announced that s9.com, an online biographical dictionary, had set a new sales record for the company.  s9, was one of many sales that the company claims helped it pass the $50MM sales mark in less than 2 years, according to a recent press release published on BusinessWire.

Anything and everything at Flippa

While there’s no reason to doubt the sale of s9.com ever took place in 2010, Flippa lists anything and everything that meets its reserve or buy-it-now price as a sale, even though it doesn’t act as an Escrow service.  As a result, it’s impossible to know whether both parties ever complete a deal.

s9’s seller isn’t hoping to take a loss on the website/domain.  Although the starting bid is set to start at $150,000, the buy-it-now price is $550,000. 

But s9 is no longer the biggest-ever sale for Flippa.  According to sales history and as reported by Domain blogger Morgan Linton, an established ClickBank webiste (URL hidden) sold for a reported $1,160,000 this past week.

However, the deal hasn’t been officially reported by Flippa as of yet.  As seen with previous high dollar sales, the company normally writes a post on its blog.

Categories
News Trademarks Video Games

Zynga applies for a trademark on the word: Patentville

patentville

If you thought Zynga’s trademark application for ville was the last of Zynga’s interesting European trademark applications, think again.

This week the gaming company filed for a trademark on the word “Patentville”, with the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM), the official trade marks and designs office of the European Union. 

According to the application, the trademark was filed to cover the following goods and services:

Leather and imitations of leather, and goods made of these materials and not included in other classes; animal skins, hides; trunks and travelling bags; umbrellas, parasols and walking sticks; whips, harness and saddler; bags.

Clothing, footwear, headgear; clothing, namely, t-shirts, sweatshirts, socks, jackets, button down shirts, polo shirts, dresses, skirts, jeans, shorts, sweatpants, aprons and headwear.

Education; providing of training; entertainment; sporting and cultural activities; entertainment services, namely, incentive award programs designed to reward program participants who create new inventions or engage in the creation of patentable ideas; entertainment services, namely, providing online computer and electronic games, enhancements within online computer and electronic games, and game applications within online computer and electronic games; entertainment reviews of computer games and information relating to computer games; entertainment services provided via virtual environments in which users can interact through social games for recreational, leisure or entertainment purposes.

patentville trademark application

What about the domain name: Patentville.com?

What’s strange about this trademark application by Zynga, is that the gaming company doesn’t own the domain name, patentville.com. 

Does not owning the dot com web address mean Zynga has nothing planned online for patentville? 

It wouldn’t be the first time Zynga didn’t own the web address for one of its properties, as seen by its Fishville game which allows you to create your own aquarium on Facebook.  The gaming company uses fishville.net, instead of fishville.com.

So who owns the patentville.com domain name? 

The Law Office of Michael P. Eddy owns the domain, which is currently parked for sale at Sedo.  Michael P. Eddy is also the owner of  patent.org.

Categories
News

Black Friday 2011: Frank Schilling’s NAMedia versus Kevin Ham’s Reinvent

Black Friday Sales

The competition for Black Friday is heating up between Kevin Ham and Frank Schilling, and there’s still more than 200 days left before the day that will kick off the 2011 Holiday shopping season.

Yesterday, Frank Schilling’s NAMedia launched Black Friday Sales – blackfridaysales.com – a domain name that Frank Schilling’s company acquired from RegistrarAds, Inc.  The name changed hands a week before Black Friday 2010 on November 19th.  The sale was brokered by Sedo.com for $90,000 USD.   

A message posted on the Black Friday Sales’s Facebook page reads: “BlackFridaySales.com is now live and with 7 months to go until Black Friday 2011 get ready for lots of tips, tricks and deals along the way.”

I’ve written for years about Kevin Ham’s blackfriday.com, from the initial launch to its present day state.  Now with Frank Schilling’s blackfridaysales.com added to the mix, it will be exciting to see how 2011 turns out for the different Black Friday websites.

Blackfridaysales.com, despite being parked this past holiday season, still managed to receive over 30,000 unique visitors in Nov. 2010 according to a rough estimate provided by Compete.

As shopping stores get more crowded each year at Black Friday, it looks like the competition online is also seeing bigger crowds.

Categories
News

Newly registered domain names good enough for The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Daily Deal website

San Diego Union-Tribune's daily deal website

The domain name is 18 characters long, cost around $10, and was created on April 8, 2011, but it’s still good enough for The San Diego Union-Tribune. 

Greatestdailydeals.com was one of many domain names hand-registered this week by The San Diego Union-Tribune, which launched its Daily Deal website last April on the URL: dailydeal.signonsandiego.com.  Surprisingly, among the list of newly created domain names, are hyphenated names like greatest-daily-deals.com and top-daily-deals.com.  

The domain purchases follow the Union-Tribune’s acquisition of the lifestyle website DiscoverSD.com. 

And while some companies are shutting down their group buying ventures in face of fierce competition from GroupOn and Living Social, the Union-Tribune is growing.

According to the Sign On San Diego article about the purchase of DiscoverSD.com, “The deal will allow the Union-Tribune to expand its popular “Daily Deal” program, which is expected to generate $10 million this year in new revenue. The U-T’s “Daily Deal” offers discounts of 50 percent to 90 percent off prices at local restaurants, spas, golf courses and other businesses. The Union-Tribune keeps a share of the sales.”

Oddly enough, Union-Tribune didn’t register other domain names like greatestdailydeal.com – which is available at the time of this story.  BuyDomains currently owns the domain greatdailydeals.com and has it priced to sell for $2,088.

I often write about “group buying” and “domain names”.  Despite sales not being astronomical, a domain like dailybargains.com which sold for $10,500 in 2010 – seems like a “deal”.