A Chinese investment fund manager won the chance to have lunch with billionaire Warren Buffett by bidding 2.1 million dollars (£1.05m) in the most expensive charity auction ever held on eBay.

Zhao Danyang of the Hong Kong-based Pureheart China Growth Investment Fund won the auction, which ended Friday evening with a bid of 2,110,100 dollars.

A spokeswoman for the Glide Foundation, which receives all the proceeds from the auction, identified the winner yesterday.

It appears that Zhao and Buffett share a similar investment philosophy.

The auction will provide a significant boost to Glide, which provides social services to the poor and homeless in San Francisco. The foundation operates on a 12 million dollar (£6m) annual budget, spokeswoman Denise Lamott said.

“It almost feels like a miracle,” Glide’s founder Reverend Cecil Williams said in a statement. “We are amazed and ready to continue our work of breaking the cycles of poverty.”

Last year’s lunch brought in 650,100 dollars (£325,000). (more…)

The silent auction which ended recently netted $99k, according to the domains reports:

The silent auction from the Paris Domainers show just concluded and a total of 64 domains were sold for $99K

sprints.com                                $35,300.00
asj.com                                    $15,300.00
jpv.com                                     $8,240.00
WorkFromHome.info                           $5,000.00
travelplus.com                              $3,530.00
MKF.NET                   $1,770.00 (more…)

Dot Asia released a press release about their successful auction

.Asia Auctions Fetches Over US$3 Million

.Asia Hot-or-Not Contest First Weekly Prize Winning Domain: resorts.asia
GMA2008.Asia Attracts Millions of Hits, Drives .Asia Adoption

Hong Kong, 16 June 2008 – DotAsia Organisation announced today total registration for .Asia
domains are expected to exceed a quarter of a million by the end of the first quarter after its public
launch . Proceeds from the .Asia Sunrise and Landrush auctions have already exceeded US$3M
and rising, demonstrating strong demand and growth value for .Asia domains. (more…)

DomainPulse reports:

China (.cn) has overtaken Germany (.de) to become the world’s largest country code for domain names. With an average of around 400,000 to 500,000 .cn domain names registered each month it would be safe to assume there are more than 12,300,000 names registered compared to 12,098,279 .de names registered at the time of writing.

The two ccTLDs (country code top level domains) are much larger than any of their competitors with the next ccTLD being .uk (United Kingdom) with 6,880,775 and close to three million .nl (Netherlands) domain names.

Of all TLDs, ccTLDs and gTLDs, only .com is larger than .cn and .de, followed by .net, while .org and .uk are roughly equal in fifth position.

The success of Germany’s country code has been due to few restrictions on the eligibility of registrants for .de domain names and a low price. Although France has a similar population, there are currently only 1,153,637 registrations.

These extraordinary registration rates are a result of extremely low reg fees in .cn domains. Regular domainers from all over the world can buy .cn domains for just $0.13 at a variety of sites. A predeposit is usually required.

Bigger resellers can get the domains for even cheaper paying just pennies on the dollar.

My guess is once the reg fees rise there registration counts for .cn will fall dramatically, unless we start seeing some high sales to support the tld growth

Here are the results from recent .asia auctions:

TOP 10 AUCTIONS
sex.asia $83,334
sexshop.asia $53,607
sushi.asia $22,500
cooking.asia $21,500
ace.asia $20,501
water.asia $19,388
outdoor.asia $19,019
promotion.asia $17,600
arts.asia $15,500
sales.asia $13,500

(more…)

DomainNameNews reports:

MacRumors.com is reporting a rumor that Apple is the new owner of the domain name Me.com. It’s unclear why the company purchased the domain name, but rumors center around it possibly being used as a rebranding of the popular .mac services. The speculation was first started by John Gruber at DaringFireball.net when he noticed that the domain name was using MarkMonitor services. MarkMonitor.com is a company that many large corporations, including Apple, use to manage their domain names. The initial rumor was shortly followed up by a MacRumors reader who pointed out that the Netcraft page lists, Kenneth Eddings, an Apple employee as the DNS administrator.

The domain name was previously being used as a social network site by a company that re-branded in December 2007 under the new name Snappville. The domain name whois records reflects the change in ownership to MarkMonitor around that same time. If Apple purchased the domain, it was likely for a sizeable amount, as a 2 letter dictionary word .com is extremely rare. One would think that the proceeds of the sale would have provided enough funds for the seller to create a better brand name, other than Snappville (which has a ton of likely typos). (more…)

Moniker confirmed that the sale didn’t occur! The haaretz article about the sale was based on false info,

With America.com in the low reaching only $1.7M, Israel.com sold for $5.88MM today through moniker, hitting it’s $5.5 MM reserve. While it will top the annually sales chart the domain is priceless to any Jewish person and holds a high sentimental value. With Israel’s 60 years of independence celebrations two weeks ago now was a good time to sell the name.

The internet domain name “Israel.com” was sold over the weekend for $5.88 million. The buyer’s identity has not been revealed.

At the beginning of May, the internet domain registrar Moniker announced that the domain name “Israel.com” will be auctioned at a starting price of $5.5 million. The auction began on May 23 and ended six days later.

Today, the domain holds a generic Website providing general and tourist information about Israel and its heritage. It is yet unclear what the new content will be following the sale of the domain. (more…)

TOA.com - Sells for $35,300 on NameJet, a little higher than I’ve expected, bt a fair price indeed.

This domain initiated a long discussion over at namepros about its value

More namejet sales this week:

clash.com $30,500

iart.com $16,694

mkc.com $11,000

ewomen.com $8,901 (more…)

NASA successful landing on Mars should draw more attention to the Red Planet and it’s a good time to grab some decent Mars related domains if you haven’t yet..

Despite the success of NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity missions, directors remained anxious Sunday over the first-ever landing of a probe near Mars’ north pole to find signs of life.

“I do not feel confident. But in my heart I’m an optimist, and I think this is going to be a very successful mission,” said principal investigator Peter Smith, an optical scientist with the University of Arizona. “The thrill of victory is so much more exciting than the agony of defeat.”  Forex brokers

The Mars Phoenix Lander was wrapping up its 296-day, 422 million-mile journey Sunday, with about a 50-50 chance of a successful touchdown on the arctic plains of the Red Planet, NASA officials said. (more…)

The recent live auction at the TRAFFIC show netted only $2,555,00, which is a big downtime from last action. The most lively domain of the day was one we picked out last week, postalcodes.com, which rode all the way from a $1,000 reserve, to a $42,000 selling price. Reportedly there were only 75 people in attendance at the start of the auction and another 75 online, which is quite different from previous shows when there were several hundred people in live audience. The highest price recorded was $225,000 which was a tie between, GasPrices.com and InsuranceRates.com.

As expected .mobi is losing its popularity fast: computers.mobi and men.mobi sold for $9,500 and $10,000 respectively. The highest .mobi of the day was mortgage.mobi which sold for $18,000.

Only 105 of the domains sold. Here is the full list of all domains that sold :

$225,000 gasprices.com
$225,000 insurancerates.com
$170,000 rainbow.com
$122,000 athlete.com
$120,000 ow.com
$120,000 ringtones.org (more…)