Tag: featured

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Calvin Ayre: ‘Slots.com purchase is one of the best deals I’ve ever made’

calvin ayre

Billionaires have been known to blog, but it’s quite rare that billionaires blog as often as Calvin Ayre who averages about 3 to 4 stories per month on his online gambling news site at CalvinAyre.com. 

What’s even more rare, is for billionaires to blog about domain names.  But that’s just what Calvin Ayre did this week in a story entitled: Slots.com purchase is one of the best deals I’ve ever made.

Have you been wondering whether Calvin Ayre regrets paying $5.5 million earlier this year for the Slots.com domain name?

Not a chance, Calvin writes: “I’m sure a lot of people thought I was off my rocker when they first heard that Bodog Brand had purchased the Slots.com domain at auction for $5.5m in May of this year. After they learned the deal had gone down while I was enjoying a drink at London’s L’Atelier restaurant, they probably thought I was wasted, too. And while I might have been enjoying a bevvie or two (or three, etc.) at the moment I pulled the trigger, I have yet to experience a single shred of ‘morning after’ regret.”

Read more about Calvin Ayre’s thoughts on the Slots.com purchase.

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News Video Games

Tiny Speck continues private alpha testing of Glitch.com (for at least four more months)

glitch

I broke the story this past February about the domain name Glitch.com being purchased by the co-founders of Flickr.  Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake had resigned from the company to launch Tiny Speck.   If you’re not familiar with Tiny Speck, the company was founded in early 2009 by four of the original members of the Flickr team.  

At that time of my story, the Glitch.com web site had nothing more than a picture of an animated pig on the home page. 

 The domain had sold for $19,000 on Sedo giving the seller a nice profit.  According to DomainTools sales records, the seller paid only $3,000 in 2007 on Afternic.

Working on a hunch that something big was going to be unveiled, I contacted TechCrunch and other news sites – and a day later TechCrunch announced the news.   Though TechCrunch didn’t give us a mention, it was not all for naught: The Guardian backlinked to our story about the sales price.

Private Alpha Testing

I haven’t been following the story of Glitch since earlier in the year, until yesterday when I received an email about alpha testing from the Tiny Speck team.  Alpha testing has been taking place for several weeks already.

I tried it out with my kids and was amazed at how much they liked the game.  It runs in the browser and the quality is something I would expect to see on an Xbox 360 or Playstation.

Because of the terms of the alpha testing, I can’t post details about the game (from screen captures and movies to details about game mechanics and styles) until Tiny Speck is further along in development.  The screen shot above is from the Glitch.com public site.

According to the email I received from Tiny Speck: ‘We are still very early in development and have only recently switched our focus from the underlying technology platform and tools to the actual game design and play. Much will be changing in each testing
cycle. Testing will last for at least the next four months.’

One thing I have noticed about the game as I have played – is the amount of new terms throughout the game that I could see becoming popular with users once the game goes public.  Terms such as ‘glitchling’ – which isn’t registered at the time of this story.

You can follow @isglitchopen on Twitter to be notified when the game opens and closes for testing.

Glitch’s main Twitter account is here: http://twitter.com/playglitch

Stewart Butterfield also has a YouTube channel, where he occassionally shares videos demonstrating some of the ins and outs of the game and development.  The latest video is about the game’s avatars:
 

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News

Twitter domain names and websites see strong sales on Flippa

increase my followers

Flippa, a marketplace for selling websites and domain names, is helping owners of Twitter-related domain names and websites see strong sales.  Flippa sellers have access to a huge crowd of buyers.  In October 2010, traffic to Flippa was nearly 250,000 unique visitors according to Compete. 

For sellers looking to be quickly rewarded for registering a Twitter domain or established web site, the figures are strong – especially compared to other recently ended sales reported by Flippa.

The sales today include:

Thetweetmaster.com won for $80
Twitterfollowersnow.net won for $100
Increasemyfollowers.com won for $1,750
Twitterfollowing.info won for $100

In March 2010, Flippa was credited with selling Retweet.com at public auction for $250,000 – it’s biggest sale since the site launched in 2009.  The company even published a case study about the sale entitled:  How Retweet.com was built then sold for $250K.

Tell us about the Retweet website sale.
We’ve only sold Retweet.com through Flippa. We originally planned to sell the website through a private broker, but later decided a competitive public auction was our best route for this domain.

We acquired (purchased) the domain during the explosion in the popularity of the Twitter.com platform.

Mesiab Labs had been building marketing software for Twitter for nearly 6 months when we saw the growing market demand for real time news and how Twitter was an essential tool in making this possible ( Hudson plane crash ).  Now since news spreads through Twitter by users retweet’ing stories, we figured retweet.com was the most appropriate name for such a service.

After the domain name was acquired we spent the next couple of months building it up as a side project. We worked with crowd-sourced designers (ed: 99designs.com ) and a few highly-skilled outsourced programmers to help complete the project while we focused on our ( Mesiab Labs ) bottom line.

The website began to grow organically after online blogs and other press announced the release of Retweet.com, the popular name created much buzz around the web ( positive and negative ).

What inspired you to sell Retweet?
The website eventually got to a point where we realized it obviously shouldn’t be a side project ( rather someone’s main focus ).  Since our expertise is in marketing software platforms, we felt that we had taken retweet.com as far as we could. This combined with our new focus on our latest startup company Jounce, Inc., we decided to sell.

The full case study can be read online at Flippa.

You can expect the Twitter sales to continue as Twitter continues to grow in numbers.

A few Twitter facts (updated September 14, 2010 on Twitter’s web site)
Twitter has 175 million registered users.
95M tweets are written per day.

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News

Ticket.com has been a parked domain for a long time, that’s soon to change

ticket

‘Ticket.com has been a parked domain for a long time. We have an ambition to turn it into a major destination for the discovery of entertainment events and purchasing tickets.’ 

That’s straight from the lips of Ticket.com. 

Ticket Commercial Limited, which operates Ticket.com, is hiring, developing, and working to bring the site live, soon.  A four-page web site is now online and the company is looking to hire a team of professionals who can execute fast.

On October 16, 2009, the domain name Ticket.com sold for $1,525,000 through Afternic.

Sure, Tickets.com would be a better name to own and operate, but keep in mind, Ticket.com is a subsidiary of Braganza AS, a Norwegian investment company with investments in the airline industry and tourism industry.

The company also knows a thing or two about web sites.  Stay.com, is 70% owned by Braganza AS, which was nominated by TIME Magazine in 2010 as one of the 50 Best Websites worldwide.

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News

A peek at some of the domain names owned by Twitter

twitter

I took a peek at some of the domain names owned by Twitter whose original name for their service was twttr, a name it still owns to this day.  Twttr.com, like many of Twitter’s domain holdings re-directs to Twitter.com.

These days alot of individuals and companies are hoping to start the next big Twitter third-party application or web site and many like to use relevant domains with the word ‘tweet’ or ‘twit’. 

But what about Twitter?  The company seems to miss out on a lot of domain names related to their offerings, such as PromotedTweets.com. 

So what are some of the domain names the company actually owns?

According to DomainTools, Twitter Inc owns about 144 other domains besides Twitter.com ranging from twttr.com to otweet.com to TwitterHosting.com.  Here’s a look at a handful of names currently registered to Twitter, Inc.

Twimg.com
Apparently Twitter is using this domain to host images.  Go to Google and type site:twimg.com in the search box, and you’ll come across hundreds of high resolution Twitter images such as logos.

MostPopularTweets.com, MostTweets.com
Twitter doesn’t own PopularTweets.com or TopTweets.com, but in early May 2009, Twitter registered the domain names mostpopulartweets.com and mosttweets.com.  Both re-direct to Twitter.com.

MultipleTweets.com
Twitter appears to have registered several domains on May 8, 2009.  MultipleTweets.com is another name in the batch.

TwitterTrafficMachine.com
Run by Bill Crosby, the Twitter Traffic Machine was one of many online courses that promised to show Twitter users how to make money from Twitter. Suspected by many to be a scam system, it appears Bill Crosby turned over the domain name to Twitter in early 2010.

Sumize.com
In 2008 Twitter acquired the Summize search and also hired 5 of the company’s employees.  I can confirm that Twitter owns Sumize.com, but the search engine’s orginal domain summize.com, currently doesn’t resolve and is privacy marked.

wwwtwitter.com
Twitter finally owns the mysterious www domain that had been re-directing to TechCrunch for months.  The web address now redirects to Twitter.com.

Twt.tl
One of the more notable domain names Twitter is currently building for its URL shortening service is T.co – but the company doens’t own the name, yet.  Twitter was granted rights to the name as part of the .CO Founders Program, and once Twitter meets all the requirements, the name should eventually change over from the .CO Founders Program to Twitter.  Other Twitter domains the company owns and re-directs to T.co include Twt.tl.