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…)

ICANN sent a notice of breach [PDF, 81K] to ICANN-accredited registrar Red Register, Inc. based on Red Register, Inc.’s failure to comply with the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (”UDRP”). Specifically, Red Register failed to comply with UDRP Rule 16(a) and paragraph 4(k) of the UDRP despite repeated requests by ICANN and the National Arbitration Forum (“NAF”). These rules require registrars to communicate plans to implement UDRP Provider decisions and implement those decisions.

Consistent with the breach provisions of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (”RAA”), ICANN requested that Red Register, Inc. act within 15 days to cure the cited breaches. If Red Register, Inc. fails to cure the breaches cited in ICANN’s notice of breach, ICANN will pursue all remedies available under the terms of the RAA, including termination. (more…)

Jpost, the top israeli newspaper, published an article on the upcoming Israel.com auction at moniker

You would think Israel.com would be an exciting, detailed Web site on the Jewish state, designed to attract tourists from abroad. But when the Web address is punched in to your Internet browser, all you get is a simple page with an Israeli flag smack in the middle.

In contrast, Australia.com has a virtual tour video where a young man from down under guides you through the complex and fun site, and Mexico.com helps Net surfers plan their entire vacation in “just one click.”

But come May 23, Israel.com should be on its way to becoming exciting and informative. The domain name will be auctioned off to the highest bidder on the Moniker.com live auction site. The physical auction will take place at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C East Conference in Orlando, Florida. (more…)

CBS is making a bigger push on the Internet. The broadcast company said Thursday it would acquire CNet for $11.50 a share, or $1.8 billion, in a deal that will make CBS one of the top 10 Internet companies in the United States. The deal offers CNet shareholders a 44% premium to Wednesday’s closing price and comes as CBS has been struggling to gain traction with investors.

“There are very few opportunities to acquire a profitable, growing, well-managed Internet company like CNet Networks,” said CEO Les Moonves. “CBS stands for premium content and unparalleled reach, and CNet Networks will add a tremendous platform to extend our complementary entertainment, news, sports, music and information content to a whole new global audience.” (more…)

Winner.com Ended at $225K on Sedo

Decent sale for a great domain. I think both the buyer and seller got a good deal here.

This could be the best domain for a Gambling portal, or casino and that is the most lucrative business online.

There is an ongoing discussion about the sale on DNF

There are 1,426,613 .ru domains registered in total and 60,491 .su
.ru stands for Russia and .su is the obsolete extension of Soviet Union, which is still being used.

But the shocker is all 3 character .ru domains are registered! I could hardly believe that the first time I heard about it mentioned on NP, but a bunch of random checks show that this is true, most appear to be registered by one company: LEGATO LLC and were taken a month ago.

Personally I think the buyout is quite premature, there is hardly enough reseller interest to sustain market values above reg fee for these and it’s highly probably that they will all be dropped in a year, in a same way as it happened to LLLL.com around year 2000, when one company bought about half of them and dropped them a year later realizing it was a bad idea.

One thing is clear though - this should help push the LLL.ru domains prices up on the market. The current prices for these seem to be around $250 and up.

For comparison LLL.ca domains sell for a minimum of $100 now. Canadian tld recently passed 1 million registrations. LLL.co.uk names sell for $1k and up, there are currently about 7 million of them registered.

According to the recently published stats by hitwise (first posted here), Google accounted for 67.90 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending April 26, 2008. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 20.28, 6.26 and 4.17 percent respectively. The remaining 45 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.40 percent of U.S. searches.

Hitwise data is based on the sample of 10 million US Internet users.  christianity (more…)

Ask.com acquires Dictionary.com, other Internet reference sites in search of better answers

Ask.com has bought a stable of Internet reference sites that includes Dictionary.com in its latest effort to distinguish itself from online search leader Google Inc. and other much larger rivals.

Besides Dictionary.com, Ask is picking up Thesaurus.com and Reference.com in its acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group LLC. Terms of the deal, set to be announced Thursday, aren’t being disclosed. (more…)

DomainNameWire reports about a very interesting patent filled by Frank Schilling with the help of domain attorney John Berryhill:

 On April 24, 2006, domain name portfolio owner Frank Schilling filed a patent application for “Generic top-level domain re-routing system” with the help of attorney John Berryhill. This patent, if granted, could end up being very important to the domain name industry.

Patent application 20060265516 describes a system for redirecting typos of domain names, such as a typo of the .com portion or the actual name:

…Because mis-typed TLDs in Internet domain names will not resolve to a valid address, valuable web site visitors and e-mail (more…)