Tag: featured

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Disputes News WIPO

Twittersearch.com turned over to Twitter, after domain dispute filed back in Dec. ’10

Twitter Search

Back in Dec. 2010, Twitter Inc. filed a case against the owner of the domain Twittersearch.com with WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization.  As TechCrunch first reported, the UDRP complaint was the first ever since the company was founded.

The disputed domain is now registered to Twitter Inc, according to the latest Whois information and data provided by DomainTools.  News of the ownership change has not been reported by any other blog or news site.

The web address continues to resolve to a GoDaddy parked page as it had before the UDRP complaint.

The UDRP complaint, case number D2010-2073, is still active with WIPO.  And though no decision has been officially announced by WIPO as of today, the registrant is now Twitter, Inc. 

Will Twitter go after more Twitter domains?

While Twitter hasn’t filed any new cases with WIPO, it’s possible that some degree of precedence has been set on twitter domains. 

Robin Wauters suggested that Twitter-search.com might be the next disputed domain, but my money is on Searchtwitter.com. According to a rough estimate by Compete, Searchtwitter.com receives just as much type-in traffic (often more) than Twittersearch.com. 

And the owner of the domain, even has a For Sale page online suggesting the domain is available for purchase.

Searchtwitter.com Twittersearch.com

Categories
News

Octopus.com, one of the oldest registered .com domains, goes up for sale on Flippa for just $20,000

Octopus.com

Octopus.com, #46 in the top 100 list of oldest registered .com domains, has just been listed for sale at Flippa. 

According to The Next Web’s list of the hundred oldest domain names, Octopus.com was registered on November 17, 1986, the same day as Adobe.com, Amd.com, Das.com, Data-io.com, Portal.com, and Teltone.com.

The auction, which has an oddly low reserve price of only $20,000, ends March 5, 2011.

Flippa has placed a minor warning on the listing because the seller has provided estimates for the claimed financials.  Flippa says, “Estimates can hide many issues, such as fluctuating revenues and inconsistent profitability”.

According to Whois records, the registration is privacy marked.

Registrar: DOTSTER
Domain Name: OCTOPUS.COM
Created on: 17-NOV-86
Expires on: 15-OCT-11
Last Updated on: 30-JAN-11

Why is the owner selling?

According the description on Flippa, “We have purchased this site not so long ago for the value of its domain name alone to start major project. We haven’t been able to proceed with our project and so have recently decided to sell this site. The revenue was never of any concern to us since we bought this site for the value of the domain name. We haven’t actually changed anything since we bought it and we think that the previous owners have also not optimized it for revenue at all. However, it does make some little money in Adsense worth $1200 for the last 12 months”.

Readers, does the reserve price seem low to you?

Updated:  Octopus.com isn’t the only notable domain to go up for sale this week.  As one reader who goes by “Gnanes” pointed out in the comments, Registrar.com has also been put up for auction, with a reserve price of $3MM or buy-it-now of $14MM.

Categories
News Video Games

Breaking: No longer speculation, Zynga launches Rewardville Beta

Zynga Rewardville

Zynga Rewardville

You read it here first.  After days of speculation as to what Zynga’s plans were for the domain name Rewardville.com and even a mention on AOL’s Games.com for confirming the rumor, Zynga minutes ago unveiled its Beta site for Rewardville.

Although no official announcements have been made, Zynga started displaying a web page this morning for its newest venture Rewardville.com, which will be rolled out over the next few weeks according to a message posted on the website.

zPoints and RewardVille FAQ

Information made available on the Zynga customer help site explains more how Rewardville will work.  According to the website, http://zynga.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3273, Rewardville will involve zCoins and zPoints.

What are zPoints?

Zynga writes: zPoints are points you earn for playing Zynga games. You can earn a maximum of 80 points per game per day, with a maximum of 300 points across the entire Zynga network each day. As you earn points you increase your zLevel and earn zCoins. Currently, you can earn zPoints for playing the following games: FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars, Treasure Isle, Zynga Poker

What are zCoins?

“zCoins are awarded when your zLevel increases. zCoins are redeemed in RewardVille for in-game items.”

How do I sign up for zPoints?
 
“You automatically earn zPoints for playing all Zynga games. To redeem zCoins in RewardVille, you must register for a Zynga account.”

News on the launch of Rewardville

Although Zynga hasn’t announced the launch on its own blog or news section and nothing has appeared in the news, expect the big launch of Rewardville to be put out through Facebook to Zynga users in the coming weeks. 

I’ve informed several technology blogs and news sites about the launch of Rewardville Beta, and am hoping that any articles written will attribute the information in their stories to the correct source.

Updated 4:45PM EST:  Thanks to the following news sites for mentioning this story today: TechCrunch, Games.com News, Business Insider, Inside Social Games, and Gamezebo. 

Robin Wauters, was the first in fact, to write me in the wee hours of the morning after I posted my story to let me know the TechCrunch story was online with credit back to Fusible.com.

I also received a statement from Zynga this afternoon while I was away from the computer, hours after my story went online.

“As a company focused on innovation we’re constantly testing new products and features.  When experimenting with new products we take the feedback we receive and apply it to deliver the best possible user experience.  We look forward to hearing how our users like RewardVille.”  -Zynga”

Categories
News Trademarks WIPO

With SocialEngine.net earning $1,000,000 per year, company goes after .com at WIPO

social-engine

After meeting as high school students in 2002, Alex Benzer and Charlotte Genevier, co-founders of Webligo developed and launched Social Engine in 2007.  The product is described as a social-network-in-a-box, a white label social networking application that is growing and now earns nearly $1MM/year according to the Webligo home page.

With dorm room offices and virtually zero operating costs, Webligo’s savings grew quickly. In 2006, Alex and Charlotte began developing a new product – SocialEngine – seeded with their sales and the recent acquisitions of two earlier projects (BlogHoster and IMS Pro). SocialEngine, 100% bootstrapped without any outside investment, was launched in 2007 with great reception. With SocialEngine now earning nearly $1M/year, Alex and Char have built a team of seven developers and designers to grow SocialEngine and explore other opportunities.

The only problem is, Webligo’s founders launched the product using the .net (socialengine.net), instead of the .com.

Now Webligo wants the .com, so the company has filed a WIPO complaint over the domain name SocialEngine.com.

While it’s not known whether Webligo made a previous offer on the .com domain, the company recently filed for a trademark on “Social Engine” in Sept. 2010, three years after launching their product, and nearly 11 years after the domain name socialengine.com was first registered.

The current registrant according to GoDaddy Whois is listed as “Domains for Sale” out of Columbus, OH, with an email address of DomainsForSale -at- Gmail.com.

Here’s a little more information about Social Engine, in a video pitch posted on TechCrunch back in 2008.

 

Categories
News

Calvin Ayre has no comment on whether he’ll bid on Gambling.com

Gambling.com

Calvin Ayre had no comment on whether he’ll bid on the domain name Gambling.com, which sold for nearly $20 million in 2005. 

That’s according to a story published by Steven Stradbrooke on CalvinAyre.com on Wednesday, after a BlackJack Champ story speculated that the billionaire who purchased Slots.com for $5.5 Million in 2010 would own the domain by the end of the month.

It’s not big news that Calvin Ayre could be a potential buyer of Gambling.com  as many could have guessed.  But this is the first time since Gambling.com went up for sale that Calvin Ayre has made some type of public comment on whether he’ll bid.

Here’s what Steven Stradbrooke had to say about the possibility of Bodog Brand buying the name.

The domain’s owners, MediaCorp, have set a reserve bid of $9m. Is L’Atelier about to witness another multi-million deal done with mobile phones in one hand and beers in the other?

Sadly for L’Atelier staff hoping that the Bodog Brand bigwigs would make it rain again, the odds are against it. While Calvin will tell anyone who’ll listen that the Slots.com purchase was the best deal he’d ever made, the best we could get out of him about these gambling.com rumors was ‘no comment’.

Bottom line, none of us here at CalvinAyre.com has, as of yet, received any invitation to L’Atelier on the day of the auction. So, as far as we’re concerned, the whole ‘Bodog Brand to bid for gambling.com domain’ thing just isn’t happening.

Steven injects a bit of humor into the story and sacrcasm saying that when Calvin Ayre said no comment, “at the time he was still hung over from his New Year’s excesses, so while we’re sure we said ‘domain sales,’ he may have thought we said ‘no grain ales’ and he was trying to be ironic or something.”

Yes, Bodog Brand seems like a pretty good bet to be the new owner of Gambling.com.