Pinky Brand Leaves Afilas / DotMobi

Domain industry veteran Pinkard Alan Brand, better known as “Pinky”, has left Afilias / DotMobi. Brand was with .mobi from before their launch and in recently had been focussing on the GoMobi product. With Pinky’s deep industry knowledge and experience I’d expect to see him being snapped up fairly quickly! Related articles DotPro Registry Migrating [...]

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Host Europe Acquires Mesh Digital

Host Europe has acquired Mesh Digital, which includes the two registrar brands DomainMonster (retail) and Domainbox (wholesale). Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. More info here

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Irish Politicians Screw Up With XXX

An article in yesterday’s Sunday Times (Irish edition) by Harry Leech covers .xxx and Irish politicians and political parties. It’s obvious that they didn’t do anything about protecting their “brand” in XXX: Endakenny.xxx and finegael. xxx were both registered in December 2011, as were the addresses sinnfein.xxx and fiannafail.xxx Needless to say the domains were [...]

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Big News Chez GoDaddy

This evening has seen a couple of pretty big stories coming out of GoDaddy. First off GoDaddy CEO told reporters that the company was applying for 3 domain extensions (TLDs) including .godaddy (their .brand). He wouldn’t say what the other two strings were, but it’s safe to assume that they are more generic. The other [...]

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Bob Recstrum Speaks On New TLDs

So while Rod Beckstrom may not have been saying much about the TAS outage his parody alter-ego Bob Recstrum has been having fun (at his expense) Today, following the announcement of a date for TAS re-opening:   #Newgtlds update: I am pleased to announce a new Reveal Day. On 30 June, I will reveal what [...]

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.Be Registry Offering Registrants Certificates

DNS.be, the organisation that runs the .be registry, recently upgraded their software backend to add some new features. While most upgrades usually only impact registrars, the latest update includes an interesting new feature for registrants – registration certificates. While this isn’t a completely novel idea (a number of other ccTLDs offer it) it’s a nice [...]

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New TLD Application System To Come Back Online At End of Month?

ICANN’s latest update has set a date of May 22 for the re-opening of the application system. What that means in terms of the “big reveal” is unclear at this juncture, though some skeptics are positing that it won’t happen until the public meeting in Prague. I wonder if we can persuade Paddy Power to [...]

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A “Glitch” Does Not Last This Long

ICANN has been consistently referring to the issues with the new TLD application system as a “glitch”. That’s a serious misnomer. As a native English speaker I’d consider a “glitch” to be something small and inconsequential. When the software and systems that you are using to process millions of dollars of domain applications is forced [...]

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SIDN Get .Amsterdam Contract

SIDN, the organisation that runs .nl, has been awarded the contract to provide registry backend services for .amsterdam. The company that will be running the .amsterdam registry has already launched a public site where they’re accepting pre-registrations. While I’d normally question anyone offering pre-registrations at this stage a .city TLD is a lot less likely [...]

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ICANN Reveals A Lot About New TLD Applications

ICANN’s latest update on the new TLD application system downtime contains a few interesting titbits of information that have all the domain bloggers speculating about how many new TLDs there will be. According to the latest update ICANN has: 2091 pending new TLD applications 214 additional applications that haven’t been paid for yet Pulled in [...]

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UK Domain Names Now Available For 1 to 10 Year Registration and Renewal

Nominet turned on multi-year registrations and renewals today, so now UK domain names can be registered or renewed for periods from 1 to 10 years. With this move Nominet brings itself into line with gTLDs and a lot of other ccTLDs, where the 1 to 10 year registration period has been available for some time. [...]

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ICANN Shortens Public Meetings

At the last ICANN public meeting in Costa Rica the traditional Friday board meeting was incredibly short. For many people sitting in the room there were looks of surprise at how quickly the board was able to get through its agenda. Now ICANN has made it clear officially that Costa Rica was a precursor of [...]

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Nic MX's registrar division is now known as Akky

Nic MX Rebrands Registrar Division

The .mx registry, Nic MX, has rebranded its registrar division as “Akky” and sports a new logo and corporate image. They’ve adopted the hare as their new image stating that it symbolises agility, speed and warmth (or maybe I messed up the translation!) The new site doesn’t have any additional information on what exactly they’re [...]

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ICANN TAS Outage Parody

I guess it was inevitable that someone would do this at some point, so here it is.  

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TLD Timeline Knock On Effects?

Today is April 28th. At this stage ICANN should have already announced the new TLD applicants or been in a position to do so within a couple of days. Unfortunately they aren’t going to be able to make any announcement and when they’ll be able to do so is still unclear. The new TLD application [...]

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