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News

Toby Clements prepares to launch site

Toby Clements is working on the launch of his website tobyclements.com, to complement his domain newsletter and database of more than 15,000 subscribers.

In early April, Rick Latona who recently posted on his blog that he was entering a three-year program at Harvard Business School, announced that he cut a deal with Toby Clements to divide up his company.  As a result, Toby got 100% ownership of the popular domain newsletter.

Currently, the tobyclements.com website is still undergoing changes, but there is a lot of content available — including information on the newsletter subscription, financing, domain submissions, and more.

According to the bio page on the website, the domain newsletter has done well into the eight figures with sales and acquisitions since 2007. 

Although the site just went online this week, the newsletter under the Toby Clements brand went live earlier this month.

Categories
News Trademarks

Will Facebook get its hands on BuywithFriends.com? It’s expired.

Facebook Buy with Friends

In January, Facebook Commerce Product Marketing announced the coming launch of “Buy with Friends”.  A feature that allow users to share that they’ve made an in-app purchase to their stream, writes Inside Facebook.  Developers can use the “buy with friends” feature to make their promotions or deals more effective, says Facebook.

Not that Facebook needs the domain name buywithfriends.com, but it has expired.

According to GoDaddy, the domain name expired on 05/02/2011 and is pending renewal or deletion.

In 2008, Resort Owners Group abandoned its trademark on “buy with friends”.  The company also looks to be abandoning its domain name: buywithfriends.com.  It’s the current registrant, but maybe not for long.

Registrant:
   Resort Owners Group
   219 Dufferin Street
   Suite 100B
   Toronto, Ontario M6K 3J1
   Canada

   Domain Name: BUYWITHFRIENDS.COM
      Created on: 02-May-08
      Expires on: 02-May-11

Though Resort Owners Group might be giving up on “buy with friends”, another company besides Facebook isn’t.  Two days after Facebook announced its “buy with friends” feature, a company called Tazle applied for a trademark for buying clubs.

Facebook also recently launched Facebook Deals, and as Andrew Allemann of Domain Name Wire pointed out in a story about someone else owning the domain besides the company: “the domain name could be used in a way that damages Facebook’s brand, such as an online sweepstakes that looks like it’s part of Facebook. Or a phishing attempt.”

Categories
News Video Games

ModernWarfare3.com: Cashing in on the buzz of top-selling videogame franchise

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 concept art Sandman

Some companies just don’t get it when it comes to domain names.

Back in January I wrote about Activision missing out on Modern Warfare domain names.  Though the company does own ModernWarfare2.com, the company doesn’t own ModernWarfare.com and it missed out on a slew of other domain names early on. 

Not owning the exact match domain names hasn’t hurt sales, but it has certainly helped a few fans and domain owners cash in one way or another on the popularity of the first-person shooter game.   

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 Buzz

This week information and dates were leaked on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 to online gaming magazine, Kotaku.  Now, everyone is talking about Modern Warfare 3.  Though the buzz has been going on for several months, one might think Activision would buy the matching web address now that the cat is out of the bag.  Not likely.  

Even threats of killing a clown can’t change Activision’s mind as seen with ModernWarfare4.com – a controversy that made headlines. 

It doesn’t appear Activision has bothered registering any related domain names recently.  Besides, most have already been taken by other people- modernwarfarethree.com, codmodernwarfare3.com, callofdutymodernwarfare3.com and more, making it unlikely the company could find an easy-to-remember domain name specifically for Modern Warfare 3.

Then there’s callofdutymodernwarfare.com… 

The domain name is currently in a RedemptionPeriod status, meaning, the domain name expired, and the registry is waiting for 30 days as a precautionary measure before releasing it. 

But that doesn’t necessarily mean Activision will land the name.  You can bet hardcore Call of Duty fans are already eyeing it.  Since the beginning of May, several Modern Warfare domain names have been registered by individuals and organizations.  Here’s a sample: Call-of-Duty-Modern-Warfare-3.com, ModernWarfare3Fan.com, Modern-Warfare3.org, PlayModernWarfare3.com, NextModernWarfare.com, FreeCallofDutyModernWarfare3.com and ModernWarfarethree.com.

Categories
News

Reinvent’s Beat powers SoapOpera.com

Soap Opera

I reported back in early April that Kevin Ham’s Reinvent Inc had launched a new social media venture called Beat (http://www.beat.com/) shortly after announcing the shutdown of GoodNews.com, it’s group-buying service.

The idea behind Beat is to tell you how people feel about any topic, person, place or thing.   For example, what are your thoughts on what you can learn from soap operas?  One person commented that, “when you die…you don’t really. You can always come back as an evil twin.” 

If soap operas aren’t your thing though, there is plenty of other stuff to discuss on the site.  The current list of topics includes celebrities, do it yourself, music, secrets, self help, and over a dozen more.  

And Reinvent isn’t completely relying on visitors to click on the link from beat.com to leave their thoughts on soap operas, the company is using direct navigation.  Users who happen to type in soapopera.com, a URL that receives thousands of unique visitors per month according to Compete, will land on the beat.com soap opera web page [screenshot above].

With hundreds of thousands of category-killer domains at its disposal, Reinvent could rapidly grow traffic to Beat as it did with GoodNews.  At this point though, it appears Reinvent’s parked domains such as backpacks.com aren’t displaying any type of advertising for Beat.com.

While Reinvent works on developing Beat, the company has also been busy working on one of it’s more public acquisitions — ThreeWords.me.

Categories
News

Former SEAL operator lets several names expire like NavySEALTeam6.com

Navy Seal Team 6

According to his bio on the LinkedIn website, Mark Matzeldelaflor, was a SEAL operator with SEAL Team 5.  His skills include unconventional warfare, mobility operations, surveillance & reconnaissance, demolition, counter terrorism, wilderness survival and other military expertise. 

But along with his impressive military resume, are other interests like networking, business development, joint ventures, and other adrenaline inducing activities as he puts it.  

Mark Matz domain names

Although it’s not listed on his LinkedIn website, domain names appear to be another one of Mark’s interests, at a time when the popular Navy SEALs are getting a lot of attention from all over the world after Navy SEAL Team 6 killed the world’s number one terrorist, Osama bin Laden.

And it just so happens that Mark (who re-directs MarkMatz.com to his LinkedIn site) owns several Navy SEAL domain names, but the funny thing is, many of them have expired and are now pending renewal or deletion.

The SEAL domain names that expired on April 16, 2011 include: navysealteam6.com, ussealteam.com, sealteam4.com, navysealteamfour.com and even navysealteam5.com, the same team Mark served with up until 2009.

SEAL Team 6 is a hot property

I can’t imagine how a person could overlook renewing domain names like these, especially when news of the Navy SEALs has been on the front page of every website. 

But I’ll take a guess that they will be renewed before it’s too late.

I’ve reached out to Mark for comment and will update this post if I hear back.

Here’s a snippet of the Whois information of NavySEALTeam6.com,

Domain Name: NAVYSEALTEAM6.COM
      Created on: 16-Apr-08
      Expires on: 16-Apr-11
      Last Updated on: 17-Feb-11