DomainTools Blog

I almost lost my domain permanently because I was unaware it was expiring. I got an alert from our new Registrant Alert system on DomainTools and it saved my ass. I am extremely thankful we invented this system. It is nice to have an example I can point to so soon after launching the service. The alert told me that “Registercom” now owned my domain. That was a huge tip off that the registrar was about to delete my domain. I had won the domain in a Snapnames auction in 2007 and it was sitting at Register.com account that Snapnames opened for me because they Register.com was the old registrar. I normally keep at one registrar that has an auto-renew feature and nothing in my account deletes. However I didn’t remember to transfer this domain over to my normal registrar after I won the domain in the auction.

With this Registrant alert I was able to see I had lost the domain, so therefore and was able to quickly act and get the domain back by renewing it. It would have sucked if I had needed to go to auction to get my domain back. When buying domains at multiple registrar I would highly recommend setting an alert on yourself.

Registrant Alert
The system spots strings that are Newly place on a whois record which were not on the previous historical record.? The system now supports the exact opposite too; It will alert you if your strings get removed from a current whois record. I have set a few alerts on public domainers and I see when they buy or sell domains.

Acquisition is a major milestone in Thought Convergence’s strategy of developing a self-sustaining, symbiotic Domain Ecosystem that services the global domain community.

Los Angeles, CA and Seattle, WA, May 6, 2008 — Thought Convergence, the industry-leading provider of domain management, monetization and development tools and technologies for premium domain owners and aggregators of high-quality domain portfolios, announced today that it has completed its acquisition of Name Intelligence, the company behind the highly-acclaimed DomainTools service and the Domain Roundtable conference. The acquisition expands Thought Convergence’s already extensive suite of industry-leading domain tools, services and technologies, and paves the path for management’s vision of a unified Domain Ecosystem.

“We are proud to welcome Jay, Ray and the entire Name Intelligence team into the Thought Convergence family”, said Kevin Vo, Thought Convergence Founder and Chief Executive Officer. “The addition of Name Intelligence further strengthens our industry-leading technology platform and lays the groundwork for the continuing expansion of our comprehensive suite of tools and services for domain professionals. Further commenting on the acquisition, Thought Convergence Director and Chief Operating Officer, Ammar Kubba, added that “Name Intelligence shares our passion and drive to create technology-driven solutions and innovation within the domain industry. By combining our award-winning monetization and development platform, deep industry relationships and extensive resources with Name Intelligence’s unparalleled research, analysis and data aggregation tools, we are putting into place a robust and scalable framework for the creation of a symbiotic Domain Ecosystem.”

In commenting on the close of the transaction, Jay Westerdal, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Name Intelligence, said, “We are incredibly excited to join forces with Thought Convergence and to leverage our core competencies and proprietary technology in order to create the next generation of DomainTools, our auction and marketplace platform, intellectual property protection services, and semantic suggestion technology.” Name Intelligence operations will remain in Seattle, Washington, and will continue to be led by Jay Westerdal and Ray Bero. In addition to their responsibilities at Name Intelligence, both Westerdal and Bero will collaborate with senior management at Thought Convergence to develop and execute on the Company’s long-term strategy.

About Thought Convergence
Founded in 2001, Thought Convergence is an industry-leading service provider of domain information, management, monetization and development tools and technologies for the domain name industry. Widely regarded as a pioneer in the domain industry, Thought Convergence provides its award-winning services and technologies under several brands, including TrafficZ, DomainTools and Idea.Net. By leveraging its comprehensive suite of fully-integrated domain services, tools and technologies, Thought Convergence is pioneering the industry’s first symbiotic Domain Ecosystem and is working to promote the continued evolution, success and sustainability of the domain industry. Thought Convergence is a privately-held company, growing profitably since inception, and headquartered in Los Angeles, California, with offices in Seattle, Washington. For more information, please visit http://www.ThoughtConvergence.com.

Thought Convergence Media Contact:
Ammar Kubba
310.909.7900
PR@ThoughtConvergence.com

Update by Jay: This is the official announcement. However, I thought I would personally comment as well, I know there have been a lot of rumors about this deal and lot of incorrect speculation. I wanted to set the record correct and say, I am extremely proud of the team we are putting together with this deal, the entire Thought Convergence team will number at around 100 strong after the acquisition. We are going to have more resources at our disposal now to focus on bigger projects, the synergies in this deal were awesome. I would not have signed onto the deal unless it allowed DomainTools to better serve the entire Domain Ecosystem. I will be joining the board of Though Convergence and look forward to working with the entire team in both LA and Seattle. The integrity of our DomainTools data is not in jeopardy with this deal and DomainTools website will remain as a trusted third party to everyone regardless of their affiliations.

We are exclusively listing Harmony.com for sale. It is being offered at a $5 Million dollar reserve price. We will consider all creditable offers for the next two weeks. If you would like to place a bid, please contact me at “harmony [at] domaintools.com”. This is a fantastic generic domain with a lot of uses. This domain gets an incredible amount of traffic. This is a private auction. To participate you must apply. Earlier this year, Fund.com sold for $10 Million. I have no doubt this is a bargain deal. The current owner is looking to raise some money for a development project and is willing to let the domain go in our private auction process.

Domain: Harmony.com
Private Reserve Price: $5,000,000.
Contact: harmony[at]domaintools.com
Auction Date: May 12th

About DomainTools.com
DomainTools is the leading source for information on domain names and domain sales. The site has brokered and auctioned Millions of dollars in domain names over the last few months. DomainTools serves millions of customers a month and is ranked as a top 1000 website in the world.

Melbrourne IT just announced to me they purchased the Digital Brand Management Services (DBMS) division from Verisign. This makes it clear that VeriSign is going back to focusing on the more profitable registry business. I talked with William Roper (CEO of Verisign) less then a year ago and he indicated that a leaner more focused business was his goal as the incoming CEO.

Deal specifics
- Consideration: US$50m
- Revenue US$29m
- EBIT of US$4m
- Over 2,000 premium enterprise clients
- More than 300,000 digital brands under management
- 120+ staff
- Experienced management team & staff
- World-class digital brand management portal
- Annualised cost synergies in excess of US$1.5m

We are installing some really neat servers on our network right now. I could not resist taking pictures while the engineers were putting them together. We just purchased 10 servers (and one fail over server) that each take 64GB of ram. This totally takes me down memory lane (no pun intended) to when I had a summer job in High School, my first computer job was selling Memory for Seattle Memory. My job was to sell people an extra 16MB of ram to make people’s Windows 3.11 run faster!

Fast-forward to 2008 and I think these new servers have more memory then the entire Seattle Memory company sold in the 90’s. I can imagine that in another 10 years someone will find this blog article and think I am crazy for being so happy with 64GB in a one box. In the future I can imagine my car’s dashboard will have more random access memory then this.

These 10 servers will allow us to store all of our most valuable information in random access memory, each server will have 10% of the data stripped across them. We are going to be able to cross reference and use information in brand new ways with this cluster. We have the ability to do it right now, but we find that it takes 30 seconds to complete each operation and we have far too many operations to complete right now. This will allow us to complete the same 30 second operation in a few milliseconds. The number of operations we can complete in a day will be jumping 1500X.

Each new server was only about $6,000 per server which is super cheap compared to how much computer we got for our money a few years ago. Our top of the line computer in our arsenal back in 2001 held 4GB of ram. When Domain Tasting started we moved to 16GB of ram for our one top end processing boxes. These new servers will be configured and process information before the end of May.

This is what will process the information behind DomainTools for the next 3 years.

We are very excited about the live auction on Monday, April 21. There are excellent domains on the list with a broad appeal. The auction will start at 11:00am PDT and ends at 4:00pm PDT. If you are in San Francisco, please come join us for the live event at Palace Hotel the auction day is FREE to attend. You can find the details at: www.domainroundtable.com/2008/venue. It is also available on line at: www.domaintools.com/live-auction/bid.html

We had to make some tough decisions at DomainTools about the Live Auction. Reviewing the submissions to determine value and strength of a name is both interesting and challenging. With over 35,000 domain submissions, we identified roughly 350 domains that we would like to have in the auction.

With the top names selected, we then worked with a domain consulting team to review the auction list. The group, Domain Consultant is a collection of top domainers in the community. Their experience in the industry and knowledge of domains is impressive as you can see from the list of appraisers. With their input, adjustments were made to the list of onsite Live Auction versus those in the Extended Live Auction. We appreciate their perspective and input on the final auction list. And, believe working with this team will prove beneficial to buyers and sellers in this auction.

Recognizing auction fatigue occurs, we have continued to trim the list. Also, we have a hard close time of 4:00pm PDT of the onsite Live Auction. However, we have an Extended Live Auction for additional domains submitted that were identified as potential for Live. The names that sell in the Live Auction will immediately close. Any domain not sold will remain open for 1 week following the live in the extended online auction. In addition, those names that we originally acknowledged as potential listed domains for the Live Auction are going to be available in the Extended Live Auction. That auction closes on Monday, April 28^th at 1:00PDT.

Do not wait for the last minute to figure out if you can bid. Visit the bidding page and look in the second yellow box. If the auctioneer is telling you that you are not eligible go through the wizard and become eligible. If you have ever purchased ANYTHING on domaintools then you are eligible, just sign the contract. If you have never shared your credit card with us and we do not know who you are, we ask that you purchase a $1 verification item prior to the auction so that we can verify your identity and make sure you are a real person.

The latest list of domains in full auction are available at: www.domaintools.com/live-auction/bid.html

LIVE AUCTION: starts at 11:00am and the last lot will be called at 4:00pmPDT. Anything not sold or called out in Live Auction will go to the extended Live Auction.

EXTENDED LIVE AUCTION: Monday, April 28^th at 1:00PDT.

Looks like the domains with zero dollar reserves have little mini bidding wars going on several days before the auction closes. It is sort of fun to watch. One example is the combined two domain lot of SecretCode.com & SecretCodes.com. We let this Lot into the auction with a zero dollar reserve and people are aggressively bidding on it. Typically everyone waits for the last 15 minutes of the auction and then they try to snipe it with all the other like-minded snipper people. But once you see one bidder it is safe to say there will be a battle. The DomainTools auction system allows people to bid ahead of time because unlike other live events we broadcast to the Internet and let remote bidders participate just like they are in the room. Thanks to AJAX (and not some windows download) we are able to open up the bidding up to everyone that has a modern web browser.

For the pre-bidders, the current winner can set a proxy bid and defend their position while not even attending the auction. No one can see the proxy bid price including the Auctioneer. This means a leader of an auction can successfully defend against auction snippers while sitting on a beach without Internet access.

Testing the bidding system
If anyone wants to test the bidding system, we have setup a test spot on lot 1. The domain is called “Xx–Practice-Domain.com“. Anyone is free to bid on this domain, the current price is $1,500,000. This is the only domain in the auction that is for testing the interface and getting used to our controls. The domain is currently not registered, so hopefully no one goes out and registers it and tries to claim $1,500,000.00 from us. Once again, the domain is xx–practice-domain.com, please do not register it.

Are you eligible to bid?
Don’t wait for the last minute to figure out if you can bid. Visit the bidding page and look in the second yellow box. If the auctioneer is telling you that you are not eligable go threw the wizard and become eligible. If you have ever purchased ANYTHING on domaintools then you are eligible, just sign the contract. If you have never shared your credit card with us and we don’t know who you are, we ask that you purchase a $1 verification item prior to the auction so that we can verify your identity and make sure you are a real person.

Domain Roundtable
The conference begins today and I am extremely excited, I get on the plane this morning and hope to see everyone soon. I am looking forward to hearing all the speakers and moderators. I want to personally thank, Susan Prosser, she has done a fabulous job selecting speakers and coordinating the whole event. The Domain Roundtable would not be possible without her and the rest of the wonderful team. As the founder of the conference people look to me, however she is the one that truly deserves the respect for putting on such a great show. When you see us, be sure to thank her, I am more of just an observer.

Secret Announcements
We have so many cool things to share with everyone. We have not officially announced this one yet, but I will let you readers in on a small secret. We quietly launched Thumbnail History this week (The service is still in beta, don’t try it in IE8!). It allows people to see what domains looked like years ago. Sort of like Archive.org except we take thumbnail images and not just HTML copies. The thumbnails have been taking by us with Internet Explorer over the years, so they have Flash and the other things that archive.org doesn’t seem to capture. We have hundreds of millions of these thumbnails, several Terabytes actually. More on the thumbnail system later… There are a lot of details I can tell you about it but I will use a dedicated blog post after the conference to really tell you the ins and outs of the service.

Super premium domain the Illusionist.com is for sale at the Domain Roundtable Live auction event on April 21st. The Illusionist.com is for a company that wants amuse an audience. The brand is perfect because it is used by some many people around the world. Everything from TV shows to Movies have used the generic description, there is really no way around talking about an Illusionist without using the proper name.

The Reserve on Illusionist.com is $280,000.

Bidding is available online at the DomainTools.com or live in person at the Domain Roundtable in San Francisco. Bidding is now open and will close Monday at 11am PST.

The live auction event will be broadcast on DomainTools and the Bidding page.

Here is a complete list of what is available during the auction.

This is an excellent reserve price, the domain has been owned by the same person for 11 years.

Some of the best Presidential domains are going to auction as a bundle. All 6 domains are being offered for $150,000 on Monday at the Domain Roundtable Auction. Bidding for the live auction is also available online at DomainTools.com.

WASHINGTON, DC — April 15, 2008 — The 2008 presidential election has generated a flurry of news and commentary, and, as has been the case in the last two elections, is sure to continue to generate interest beyond November. With more and more people turning to the web for their information, the value of targeted political domain names is at an all-time high.

Domain Market, a WashingtonVC company possessing one of the premier domain asset portfolios in the world, has today announced the inclusion of six highly-valued targeted political domain names into the Domain Roundtable conference live auction to be held on April 21, 2008 in San Francisco, CA. The domains are: presidentialcampaign.com, presidentialdebates.com, presidentialprimaries.com, presidentialrace.com, presidentialrace.org and presidentialaddress.com.

Generic domain names, like those being offered by Domain Market, have seen prices skyrocket as the market’s awareness of their value has escalated. In the past 6 months alone, there have been notable sales of such premium domain names as iReport.com to CNN for $750,000 in January, Fund.com for $10 million, DataRecovery.com for $1.7 million, SkiResorts.com for $850,000, and Pizza.com for $2.6m dollars.

“Media companies are increasingly looking for opportunities to drive their audience to destination sites with highly focused content, particularly during major events such as elections,” says WashingtonVC Chairman Mike Mann, who believes that this opportunity is indicative of the greater market trend towards wrapping business models around prime Internet real estate. “Whoever owns these domain names will have significant influence over the US political process on the Internet forever.”

Interested parties have the ability to attend the auction live or participate from anywhere in the world via computer to bid in the auction in real time. Auction registration can be completed through Domain Roundtable’s website, http://www.domainroundtable.com. For additional information or to request an interview, please visit WashingtonVC at
http://www.washingtonvc.com or by email at media@washingtonvc.com.

About WashingtonVC:
WashingtonVC is an early stage fund and incubator that grows companies through the exchange of complementary technologies and marketing services. Our portfolio of interlocking companies share resources, talent and technology to deliver innovative products and services across a broad range of industries.

Our investment focus is in online media and marketing, software technologies, telecommunications services, domain name services and consumer Internet services. We seek out and fund world-class teams and products with the potential to be leaders in their markets, and back their companies with premium, highly relevant Internet domain names (i.e. phone.com, software.com).

A significant percentage of our investment returns go toward supporting and financing our nonprofit organizations, Grassroots.org and MakeChange! Trust.

For those of you that want to preview the auction list…..

http://www.domaintools.com/live-auction/sanfrancisco2008.html

We are still moving things around a little, tweaking things here and there. Once the list is finalized we will publish in EVERYWHERE on the DomainTools.com website. Right now it is only being made available to the 15,000 people that read our blog. We will push the list out mid Tuesday morning to the 400,000+ people that visit DomainTools daily.

UPDATE: The entire DomainTools site is now showing the domains going to auction.