Month: May 2010

If you’ve been watching Kevin Ham’s latest “Group Buying” venture in the past few weeks, you’ve probably noticed the landing page and beta site change a few times. While the site is in Beta, there’s a lot of see-sawing between launching the site to the public, in Beta, and posting a “Coming Soon” page while the site tries to attract more subscribers through Reinvent’s network of 400,000+ domain names like Pajamas.com, for example.

Despite being online the past few weeks across 400,000+ domains, GoodNews.com has only managed to get less than 250 subscribers. At the time of this story, 783 more Sign-ups are needed to activate the deal (however, by the time this story was published, the number suddenly changed to only 20 more sign ups).

Is it a glitch? Are people still unfamiliar with group buying?

Hard to tell, but if GoodNews.com is truly advertised across 400,000+ domain names, taking a couple weeks to get 1,000 sign ups would be seriously disappointing results.

But since the site is in beta, there’s a good chance a lot of the kinks are still being ironed out, including the numbers for the launch deal.

The plans for Idealab’s newest domain name acquisition PostUp.com on Sedo for $15K are still under wraps, but the URL now redirects to Idealab’s home page.  Though all the details are under wraps as of now, what we do know is that Bill Gross the businessman responsible for founding Idealab, is also the creator of Sponsored Search Advertising.  

With his creations of search engines that had “free” and “sponsored” results like GoTo.com, Snap.com and his latest venture Tweetup.com – the direction Idealab is headed with PostUp.com as a blog search engine that displays both “free” results from bloggers as well as paid ads – is pretty obvious.

It was only a matter of days between Idealab plucking up the domain Tweetup.com and launching the Twitter search engine, so we may actually see something very soon with PostUp.com.

While the purchase price of the domain name Tweetup.com remains unknown, IdeaLab recently purchased PostUp.com for $14,900 on Sedo.  IdeaLab which launched Tweetup.com in April as the “Adsense for Twitter” looks to have more plans in the works. 

If the Tweetup.com model has been very successful, Idealab might be embracing the same concept with blogs – where the term “post” commonly refers to the text written on a weblog. 

Plans have not been revealed by Idealab as to what’s in store for PostUp.com, but as the story on Fusible.com was the first to uncover the sale of Tweetup.com before any other news site (including TechCrunch), the purchase of PostUp.com leads to only one likely conclusion: that Idealab will implement a similar model as Tweetup.com, only for bloggers.

About the Domain PostUp.com
 
PostUp.com is currently a parked website, but the registrant record points to Idealab who took ownership of the name on May 11, 2010.

Now with the acquisition of the domain name, will Idealab acquire @PostUp, the same way they acquired @Tweetup?

The GreatDomains auctions have been setting up pretty good lineups recently with domain names, though it might have some higher reserves on the best names, Sedo has added many in the bottom reserve range, who have low or no reserve. The list of names currently coming up for auction on May 20 is still under 100 names.

On the higher end of the spectrum, names like Peaches.com and Roaming.com have a reserve range of 50,000 – 99,999 $US. Peaches.com appraises at $147,000 on Valuate.com.

In the 25,000 – 49,999 $US reserve range: Pranks.com and Rage.com are on the block.

Bumping down to the next rung of reserve ranges at 10,000 – 24,999 $US – the list of names includes Blokes.com, Debug.com, Boq.com, and coa.com.

And those on a budget will find plenty of domain names listed with “Low” or “No Reserve”.

Mentorships.com, Nicki.com, Rigor.com, Polygamy.net, Join.net, Guerillas.com, and Stromboli.com.

Names available for hand-registration

For those in search of domains that are available for hand-registration, there are several .net and .org names avaiable at the time of this story, out of the GreatDomains auction list.  Here are just a few with their Valuate appraisal that can be hand-registered, however, the fact that some of these are so easily available might tell you to steer away from the .com counterparts – and even these:

7642.ORG ($870)
BRAGGERS.ORG ($230)
IMMIGRANTLAW.NET ($360)
JAPANIMPORTS.ORG ($120)
SCHOOLYEAR.ORG ($170)
SKISONLINE.NET ($220)
STOCKEXCHANGEQUOTES.ORG ($130)

With hundreds of thousands of names, and an entrepreneurial team, based out of beautiful Vancouver, it seems the development of Kevin Ham’s Gospel Media Network has taken a backseat in the development pipeline.  Although Reinvent has been busy at work launching sites like Vancouver.com, BlackFriday.com, and GoodNews.com, the Gospel Media Network that was conceived in 2000, hasn’t changed in years. 

In 2008, work of developing out the sites in a progressive and integrated manner was said to be taking place according to the site’s About Page.  But things are much the same with the domain names and website.

According to the DNJournal cover story by Ron Jackson in May 2008, “Ham’s initial infatuation with the Internet stemmed from his belief that it would be the ultimate tool for spreading the Gospel. “In 1993, a professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign told me how this new communication tool, email, would be very important in reaching people all over the world and this new browser, Mosaic, would allow people to share their knowledge with the world very easily. He told me that it would be a very powerful tool in the sharing of the Gospel of the Bible. This really made me think that I needed to understand what the World Wide Web, the Internet, was all about,”..

Development Costs Money
 
Ron Jackson also wrote in the cover story, “He also had an even bigger over-riding vision – creating the world’s largest gospel media network – a dream that he knew would also require a lot of money to realize.”

It looks like the Gospel Media Network has got to take a backseat until some of Kevin’s other properties takeoff so that he can fully fund and develop the Gospel Media Network properties.  At this rate though, with what seems like a talented development and entrepreneurial team at Reinvent, his dreams might not be too far away.

If you haven’t checked it out, the Gospel Media Network is made up of some great domain names:

God.com
Messiah.com
Heaven.com
Trinity.com
Christians.com
Rapture.com
GospelMusic.com
Catholicism.com
Jew.com
Baptism.com
Buddhists.com
Christ.net
BibleCollege.com
Religion.com
Satan.com
Armageddon.com
MyBible.com
Muslims.com