In May 2011, the United States Navy SEALs drew a lot of news coverage on the web following the killing of Osama bin Laden. But the SEALs weren’t the only story on Fusible that attracted readers.
Zynga hinted at plans of developing the next top iPhone game with the registration of hangmanwithfriends.com, the Navy won the battle over the SEAL Team 6 trademark and filed its own marks, Sony Pictures got rights to Kathryn Bigelow’s film about killing Osama bin Laden, former TechCrunch writer Duncan Riley sold The Inquisitr on Flippa for $330,000, and UberMedia gave up its domain claim on Twitteripad.com.
Hangman with Friends– There hasn’t been any news regarding Zynga’s plans for “Hangman with Friends”, other than the company registering the domain name hangmanwithfriends.com. Considering one of the first word games kids learn to play is hangman, you can bet if Zynga does launch a hangman game on the iPad or iPhone, it could very well be the next top ranking iOS game.
UberMedia and Twitter– After my story about UberMedia purchasing the domain name twitteripad.com was posted, the company deleted the domain from its portfolio. The good news: the company avoided another possible trademark dispute with Twitter like the one it encountered over UberTwitter. The bad news: someone in China registered the domain and is now redirecting users to a fake Apple survey page. These types of websites often lead to scams or other problems for people, like computer viruses. Either way, it looks like UberMedia made a smart play by dropping the name. The company just raised another $5.6 million and its entire business revolves around Twitter.
The Inquistr — The Inquisitr (inquisitr.com) founded by former TechCrunch writer and b5media co-founder Duncan Riley in May 2008, sold for $330,000 USD on Flippa. Two days after my story was published, The Inquisitr ran its own story “Duncan dishes on Inquisitr sale, future plans” that said the sale was complete and the site had changed hands. “With everything said and done, Duncan has disclosed some facts and figures about the sale of the site. Final sale price was 10% over the reserve of $300,000, at $330,000. Keeping in with the threes trend, it went for 30x the monthly net after writers’ expenses” wrote Kim LaCapria.
Navy’s SEAL Team trademark battle — I was the first to report (before any other news site or blog) that the Department of Navy filed a trademark for “SEAL Team” following Disney’s trademark filings on SEAL Team 6. The story got immediately picked up by MediaPost who attributed their story here, but other major media outlets that reported on the news shortly thereafter, failed to give credit. It can be frustrating as a blogger to see so many news sites and blogs not attribute the sources of their articles. Ultimately, Disney abandoned their trademark filings.
Sony Pictures — Deadline.com reported that Sony Pictures Entertainment acquired the rights to Kathryn Bigelow’s film about killing Osama bin Laden. Originally called “killing bin laden”, Kathryn Bigelow had apparently decided to change the film’s title. Regardless, Sony Pictures registered nearly a dozen domain names including thekillingofbinladenmovie.com. As of today, the film remains untitled, but the domain names have started forwarding to sonypictures.com.