Archive: September, 2010

It may be a buyers market in this down economy, and to many of us there is the desire is to liquidate our excesses.

This is also true of the domain industry, but obviously the scale is different.

This week, ETF.com, CO2.com, AbdominalTrainer.com, Collision.com, Spoons.com, Complain.com, Haircare.com, Heroine.com, Maid.com, HDProjector.com, Poster.com, WirelessHeadphone.com, SEM.com and WiFi.com go on the auction block, as well as the biggest domain name registrar on the internet, Godaddy.com.

Godaddy.com has over 42 million active domain names under their portfolio,  and when you consider that when Register.com sold earlier this year for $135 million to Web.com, its no surprise the estimated sale of Godaddy.com is predicted to top $1 billion. Godaddy.com’s revenue for 2009 was around $800 million, so at least from an investment standpoint, the sale seems likely.

Along with Godaddy.com, WiFi.com is looking for a new owner.

While not a registrar, wifi.com has become a household word in the last few years; WiFi is the synonym for IEEE 802.11 WLAN technology.

 This is the technology that enables wireless Internet connectivity between access points and your Wifi-enabled devices such as laptops, cell phones, gaming consoles like Xbox 360 and Playstation3, and portable devices like the Apple itouch, even some digital cameras .

Apparently Twitter has been the social media outlet of choice lately, for both stars and hostages.

According to Dustin Curtis, a designer who was quoted recently in the New York Times, there are three things that reliably drive traffic at Twitter: “(a) bashing airlines, (b) bashing Comic Sans, and (c) Justin Bieber,” .

Comedy aside, consider that Justin Bieber makes up 3% of Twitter traffic which translates to roughly 5 million followers on Twitter. This has been equated to “racks of servers, with Justin Bieber’s name on them.”

Twitter also seems to have found its following and is currently in no danger of going away either.

When you factor that there are over 200,000,000 blogs, and 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily, 34% of bloggers post opinions about products about products or brands, its not surprising that social Media is now the number one activity on the web.

The Twitter social media outlet seems to be the outlet that stars use most to communicate with fans.

When professional wrestler Hulk Hogan was hospitalized recently, he updated his fans via Twitter. He made a video from his hospital bed and told his fans that he was “feeling better already.”

Inflection.com who operates Archives, a family history website, and PeopleSmart, its search engine for

people, raised $30 million in its first round of venture capital financing this week.

Inflection.com owns Archives.com, and PeopleSmart.com, which aggregate public records and data from

past and present, and turns those results into useable, and possibly actionable, data.

PeopleSmart.com, the actual engine, combines contact information, public records, and social profiles and

pools that data from hundreds of sources into a search-able, search engine style platform.

This week, venture capital entities got in on the fun as Matrix Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures participated

in the 30 million dollar funding episode.

Matrix Partners have offices in California, Massachusetts, New York, India and China and has previously

invested in firms suchs as; Apple, Sandisk, Veritas, Sycamore Networks, Phone.com, Starent Networks,

JBoss and Gilt Groupe.

Sutter Hill Ventures was founded in 1964, and has invested in; Network Appliance, Legato, Data Domain,

Alteon, Linear Technology, nVidia, BroadVision, Shutterfly and QuinStreet to name a few.

The new Inflection search engine’s stated mission is to transform the public records industry and convince

Minnesota State Fair’s officials asked Michele Bachmann and her running for Congress campaign to desist

using its logo in a television ad that began running this week.  The media will often use corporate logos

and/or trademarks in stories under the assumption that they are protected by “fair use”.

The Minnesota State Fair logo is trademarked and the Minnesota State Fair does not see it as fair use.
Michele Bachmann’s Congress campaign did not ask for permission to use the Minnesota State Fair logo.

The issue is that the State Fair can not endorse any candidate running for political office, so the inference

could be hazardous.

Consider that one of the rights accorded to the owner of a copyright is the right to reproduce or to

authorize others to reproduce the work in copies.

The fair did not give this permission.

This right by the holder is subject to certain limitations found in sections 107 through 118 of the copyright

law (title 17, U. S. Code).  Through much litigation, these sections have come to define “fair use” as it

applies to the law, and this situation.