.KIWI And .BERLIN Commence Registrations On 18 March
If you live in Berlin or New Zealand you have a choice of a .berlin or .kiwi domain as of 18 March.
For Berliners, the General Availability commenced for .berlin through leading registrars, while a Landrush phase for .kiwi domains commenced allowing New Zealanders to register their very own.
The .berlin gTLD is likely to be one of the more successful of the city TLDs, in part due to there being well over 15 million .de (Germany) domain names, making it a relatively crowded domain name space.
In New Zealand, approximately one thousand domains were sold during the pre-registration period for trademark holders and through early reservation programmes. These domain names are starting to go live and include brands such as www.lotto.kiwi, through to sports celebrities like Bevan Docherty’s www.docherty.kiwi.
Dot Kiwi research indicates there is significant demand and excitement about the .kiwi domain name. To date Dot Kiwi has received registrations of interest for 3,000 domains, not including the number of pre-registrations domain name resellers around the globe have received.
To ensure that all New Zealanders have a fair opportunity to purchase the domain name they want, Dot Kiwi is not operating on a first-come, first-served basis for its initial public launch phase.
The Landrush Period runs until the 30th of April, during this time Dot Kiwi will be taking applications for .kiwi domain names. Domain names with only one applicant will be immediately registered on the 1st of May. If there are multiple applications for the same domain name all parties will be invited to bid for the domain name in an online auction.
Verisign Shares Down 5% in Pre-Market
Verisign shares are currently down over 5% in pre-market activity, according to the company’s latest report.Shares are now trading at just over $52 a share.
Moreover, the company issued a statement on the NTIA’s (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) announcement of its intent to transition key Internet domain functions.
You can read the announcement after the jump:
“The announcement by NTIA on Friday, March 14, 2014, does not affect Verisign’s operation of the .com and .net registries. The announcement does not impact Verisign’s .com or .net domain name business nor impact its .com or .net revenue or those agreements, which have presumptive rights of renewal.
The NTIA announcement involves Internet functions that are entirely different functions from those Verisign performs under its .com and .net agreements. The functions performed by Verisign involved in the NTIA announcement have been performed as a community service spanning three decades without compensation at the request of the Department of Commerce under the Cooperative Agreement”
Sedo’s Spring Auction is Now Underway
Sedo is hosting these days the Spring domain name auction. The auction features 39 domain names and ends on March 20,2014.
At the time of writing this article, only one domain name had bids – LiteLife.com (2 Bids – the highest one of 150 EUR).
Other interesting domain names included in the auction are:
Perfection.net
ConferenceVideo.org
BusinessBloggers.net
ParkandBuy.com
Sity.info
eBooksOnline.org
We.co.uk
Mossmoto.com
BodyWorks.info
Check out the entire inventory and place your bids here .
New gTLD Domain Registrations Reach 250,000 Milestone
There are now over 250,000 new gTLD domain name registrations, according to ntldstats.com. .Guru is the leader, with almost 45,000 registrations.
.Photography is closing in with 28,000 registrations, while .Today and .Tips have 15,000 registrations each.
.Technology – 10,000 registrations
.Director – 10,000 registrations
.Clothing – 9,069
.Bike – 8,961
.Land – 8,660
.Gallery – 8,313
.Estate – 7,598
.Photos – 6,892
.Equipment – 6,268
For more information check out ntldstats.com .
Nominet Celebrates the 25th Birthday of the Internet
Almost half (46%) of Brits say best thing the web has given each of us is an ability to quickly find answers to our questions, according to a new poll from Nominet, the internet company best known for running the .uk internet infrastructure.
The poll* was commissioned as part of a celebration of the web’s birthday today, marking 25 years since Sir Tim Berners-Lee published the paper that served as the blueprint for the modern web.
Results show the other widespread benefits of the web are finding old friends (25%) and help with something that was a cause of worry (24%). For 18-24s, the search for a job is higher up the list, with 28% of them citing “finding a job” as the best thing the web has given them, over double the national average of 11%.
These results are borne out by the websites Brits would choose to keep over all others. When asked to name their ‘Desert Island Clicks’ – Facebook tops the list overall. The social networking site was chosen by (32%) of women, while for men (26%) the BBC website was in the no.1 position.
The top five websites were revealed to be Facebook (24%), BBC (20%), Amazon (9%), Gmail (5%) and Yahoo (5%).
Nominet is inviting web users to add their own milestones and predictions to its online Story of the web, which features the defining moments that have contributed to the web’s success. An accompanying report, authored by technology journalist Jack Schofield, includes expert commentary on how the web will develop in future.
Contributors to the report and website include Sir Nigel Shadbolt, University of Southampton, web entrepreneur, developer and academic Dave Winer, Dr Jeff Jaffe, CEO of the W3C, leading analyst Richard Holway MBE of TechMarketView, Nominet’s CTO Simon McCalla and CEO Lesley Cowley,OBE and Oxford Internet Institute research fellow, Dr Bernie Hogan.
Nominet’s report will launch alongside global celebrations with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, The World Wide Web Foundation and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for the web@25.
Lesley Cowley, CEO of Nominet, which hosts the UK office of the W3C comments: “The web is such as integral part of everyday life that we simply can’t live without it. It has changed to something beyond what even Sir Tim and his colleagues could have imagined 25 years ago, when they were looking for an easier way to share and structure information. The social, political and economic impact of the web makes it a story we are all part of, and to which we all contribute daily, whether that’s finding the answer to a question or connecting with friends and colleagues.”
Join the conversation on Twitter at #storyoftheweb and #webat25.
This press release was sourced from here .
