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News

Google was buyer of Wallet.com domain

Wallet.com Whois

Back in June 2011, DotWeekly editor Jamie Zoch spotted a change in the Whois records of the domain name Wallet.com.  Jamie speculated that either Zynga or Google was the buyer of the domain, which was privately registered making it difficult to know the owner’s identity.

As of today, the buyer is no longer a secret, thanks to another change in the Whois records

Whois Privacy was removed this week from Wallet.com revealing Google Inc. as the official owner, who paid an undisclosed amount of money for the name.

When you type wallet.com into your browser, you are taken to google.com. 

In May 2011, Google announced Google Wallet, a mobile app that allows users to make their phone a virtual wallet.  The web address for the site is <www.google.com/wallet>.

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Disputes News WIPO

Columbia Pictures files dispute over FantasyIsland.com [UPDATED]

Fantasy Island

Last summer DotWeekly wrote about the domain name FantasyIsland.com selling in a Go Daddy expired domain auction for $22,005 USD. 

The first comment made by a reader of the article was that the purchase was a waste of money.

“What a waste of money IMO.  That purchase makes no sense unless you own the rights to the show Fantasy Island. If not, what the hell can one do with it? A titty bar? “Boss boss, de UDRP, de UDRP,”” wrote Mike.

Well, now Columbia Pictures Industries, which has owned the Fantasy Island trademark since the early 1980s, has filed a domain dispute (Case Number: D2012-0043) over FantasyIsland.com with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the current owner is going to have to think about what to do.

What makes this case interesting is that the current owner Howard Guessner, has owned the domain name dating back to 2004 all the way up through today, according to Whois historical records.  So it appears Guessner may have renewed the domain in time and never paid $22K to Go Daddy to purchase it in an expiring auction.  

I’ve reached out to Guessner via e-mail to learn more and will update this post if I hear back.

[Updated on February 29, 2012:. The name has been ordered transferred to Columbia Pictures Industries.  The decision was issued on February 19, 2012.  Full details of the decision can be read here.]

Categories
News Video Games

MilitaryGamer: After losing out on “Game of the Year”, Activision doesn’t renew domains: gameoftheyear.com [More]

Call of Duty Black Ops

Dotweekly Editor Jamie Zoch wrote an interesting article this week about spying on company domain names using DomainTools.  The story got me thinking about looking at the name servers of companies like Activision so I could post an article on my other blog, militarygamer.com.

I found something interesting, while doing some research on activision.com.  The company has let several of its domain names expire: gameoftheyear.com, thegameoftheyear.com, computergameoftheyear.com, pcgameoftheyear.com, and game-of-the-year.com.

As I pointed out on MilitaryGamer, gameoftheyear.com was first registered in 1999, and now the domain name appears over on the Pending Deletes List provided by Pool.com.  Thegameoftheyear.com is still registered to Activision, but the status of the domain is set to ”Redemption Period”, meaning the name has about 30 days before its released by the registrar and either available for public registration or sent to one of the drop-catching services like Pool.

Activision has yet to win a Spike VGA Game of the Year award. 

And while one has nothing to do with the other necessarily, had Activision won “Game of the Year”, renewing the domain probably wouldn’t have been overlooked.

According to a rough estimate provided by Compete, the domain gameoftheyear.com does receive a few hundred visitors per month in the latter part of the year.

A look at Archive.org, shows that gameoftheyear.com had a fully developed website online at one point, that was operated by Vivendi Universal Games, which eventually merged with Activision.

You can read more over at the MilitaryGamer blog post.

Anyone who wants to learn more tips and tricks, should pay a visit to DotWeekly.  Jamie Zoch the Editor, has been in the domain industry since 2004 and writes helpful guides on domain names.

Categories
News

Owners of domain names seized by ICE, using Twitter to communicate with users

Domain names seized by ICE - Homeland Security investigations

TechCrunch is reporting that many of the owners of the domain names seized by Homeland Security earlier this week because of copyright infringement are now moving their web sites to alternate domain names. 

And the owners are using Twitter to get the word out about the “move”.

Some have already started to migrate to other domains, though it’s likely choices like .net won’t be any safer. Torrent-Finder owner Waleed Gad El Kareem said he switched his site over to Torrent-Finder.info the moment he saw the ICE message on Torrent-Finder.com, posting the new site’s address on Twitter.

As TechCrunch points out, some web sites have switched from .com to .net, as well as .com to .info.   Jamie Zoch, of DotWeekly, has a full rundown of all the domain names seized.

RapGodfathers.info, one of the sites that had its .com seized, registered the .info on Nov. 25th (see Whois Record below).  The .net and .org were already registered.

rapgodfathers.info whois record

Read more about Sites With Government Seized Domains Are Moving On, On Twitter.

What do you think? Should the owners have gone with .info, a different extension, a .com with hyphens, or something entirely different?