DomainBinge

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with my new iPhone over the last week. The overall user experience is great, making the device a joy to use.
Not sure if you heard or not, but Apple touted several aspects of the phone as revolutionary, and managed to generate a bit of hype about the iPhone before its launch.

Even the keyboard garnered some attention. In the official Apple video on the iPhone keyboard - which describes its intelligence and elegance - the company tells us that the keyboard adjusts itself for the task at hand. When you browse the web, for example, “the space bar…has been replaced by special keys relevant to a web-based application…because you don’t use spaces in a URL.”

Interesting…and smart. But what are the “special keys” that magically appear when you go web surfing? Sadly, there is nothing revolutionary here. The company threw in a “dot” key (a period by another name), a forward slash key, and a “dot com” key.

Ho hum. Not extremely innovative…and quite disappointing, in my opinion.

I honestly expected more from Apple. I had hoped that the new keyboard would open new doors to mobile users, but, alas…we got the lowly “dot com” key. The company really missed the boat here.

It’s not to late, though. Apple could make a couple of simple changes to the iPhone keyboard that truly change the mobile computing experience.

How?

Technorati Tags: Apple, domain names, iPhone

SEDO is currently listing panoramio.info in its Recent Sales panel. The domain name apparently sold for $2k.
But to whom?

Here’s some interesting facts:

• Panoramio is a web-based, geo-tagged-image storage company that agreed to be acquired by Google on May 31st of this year.
• The whois record for the domain was updated yesterday and now reflects an acquisition company as the registrant.
• Where I sit in the world, the domain redirects to this site. That might change as a DNS change propagates, but we’ll see….

Anyone want to give odds on whether Google bought the domain?

All good and great markets have one thing in common - a reliable flow of relevant information. Without it, a market suffers from an inconsistency and unpredictability that tends to keep serious new investors at a safe distance in all but the frothiest of times. Information is an absolutely critical element for a nascent market to mature into a stable and liquid one.

Want evidence? Watch Wall Street during any given earnings season. Information flow is at its peak during the months in which most companies report quarterly earnings…and the market makes significant adjustments to stock prices during these months.

Apple waited until the last minute to acquire the iphone.com domain. While the actual price paid to Michael Kovatch, who secured the domain in 1995, has not been made public, several reports have put the figure north of $1M USD (note: all reports seem to flow back to this excellent post about the domain sale on DomainTools Blog).

Seems cheap to me, considering the company just launched a revolution on the shoulders of the iPhone brand.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone

I’ve been in a bit of a political mood lately, so I decided to use the first official BingeReview post to get comments on a recent binge I made on political domain names.

There’s a bit of a background to this binge….My primary domain investing strategy is to speculate on domains that I believe will become generic at some point in the future. This strategy offers the advantage of being relatively cheap - most of the domains I identify are still available for registration. But, the risk is significant - there is no guarantee that the names will actually become generic (or even well-known).

A few weeks back, I decided I wanted a few political domains before the 2008 US presidential election. I figured that “all the good names were taken” and made a decision to throw my speculative strategy out the window. I started searching the aftermarket to see if any good names were available.

I found very few that interested me, and got a bit frustrated. Then, on a whim, really, I decided to do a bit of brainstorming and see if I could find some good names there will still available for registration.

To my surprise, I found - and grabbed - some decent names. I didn’t realize it until after I binged, but my speculative strategy actually played two roles here:

1. The value of these domains, clearly, depends on the outcome of the 2008 Presidential election;
2. Some of the best domains from this binge (in my eyes) are .us domains…the value of which is still largely unproven

With that as background, here’s my binge on political domain names. In each group, I’ve put the domain(s) at the top that I think has the most potential.

Technorati Tags: 2008 election, domain names

Not long ago, I wrote about the principles I’m using to guide my early domaining efforts. In that post, I noted that my investment strategy is more like that of Warren Buffett than of a day-trader: buy and hold for the long term.

Yesterday, though, that strategy was tested. I received an offer to buy a speculative domain that I’ve been holding for less than a year. The initial offer would have given me nearly a 100X profit (and would have paid the renewal fees on my portfolio for a long time).

I have to admit, it was a tough decision despite my commitment to the buy and hold strategy. I’ve set up my domaining business as a pure sideline - I pay for all of it with ‘extra’ money and don’t need it to generate any cash. But the temptation to realize a 100X profit was incredibly strong. Only a crazy person would walk away from that, right?

Wrong. I ultimately decided that only a crazy person would flip this domain at this time.

How did I make the decision? This was the hard part - I hadn’t received an offer like this before, so I had no frame of reference or rules to go by. I had no idea how to assign a value to the domain and, therefore, had no meaningful way to analyze the offer (other than “hey, that looks like a bunch of money”).

I thought about it for a bit, and ultimately scratched the following questions on a notepad:

Later this week, I’ll be launching a new feature on DomainBinge, called BingeReviews.

Here’s the idea -

A lot of domain buying seems to happen in binges - short bursts of high buying levels. It happens in new registrations and aftermarket buys alike and seems to afflict most of us in the domaining game.

I binge on new registrations quite often. It’s a natural result of one of my strategies - registering domains that I expect to become hot generics tomorrow. This strategy requires that I closely follow the news in a few selected topics, and often puts me in a ‘race to the registrar’ with other speculators out there (you know who you are). When I win the race (or at least part of the race), a binge usually follows.

I’ve written before about localized generic domains and the potential upside they provide for a new business:

“I like to think of these little gems as ‘instabrands.’ Imagine you’re a an entrepreneur opening a relatively modest local business…say, a tree care company in Toledo, OH. … You head on over to GoDaddy and start hunting for a great domain name.

Here’s where the savvy and not-so-savvy entrepreneurs part ways. The not-so will immediately think of (and probably be able to register) a unique domain based on his chosen company domain. Think “MadHatterTreeService.com.” He’ll rejoice in the fact that he was able to get the domain for 8 bucks and happily move on to setting up his website. What he won’t realize - probably for several years - is that the use of that brand-oriented domain will greatly increase the work he needs to do to educate his customers - and potential customers - about his services, and indeed about his existence.

The savvy entrepreneur, however, gladly seeks out a localized generic domain that accurately describes his business and the geographic area in which he operates. ToledoTreeCare.com is born and he’ll probably be rewarded with high localized search results.” (from the original instabrands post)

Just a couple of short weeks after writing that post, I came across a great example that illustrates my instabrand point: