.ME Registry Announces the Winners of the .ME Loyalty Program Grand Prize
.ME Registry, the company behind .ME extension , announced the winners of the .ME Loyalty Program Grand Prize .
Josh Murdock and Michele Price are the winners of the .ME Loyalty Program Grand Prize.
You can read the press release after the jump :
“The .ME Registry, operator of the most personal domain extension available, is proud to announce that Josh Murdock and Michele Price are the winners of the .ME Loyalty Program Grand Prize. They have been selected at random from a pool of participants, and awarded the prize package that includes an entry badge for the conference in Austin, accommodation from March 7-11, and a $500 AMEX gift card for travel and entertainment.
The .ME Loyalty Program is an initiative launched by the .ME domain to connect bloggers, tech savvies and startups fond of personal branding into one community and award them for their loyalty. Participants are encouraged to share and tweet their thoughts on .ME domains and in return they get points that can be redeemed for t-shirts, cups, 16 GB USB drives, or discount on various software. Although the Grand Prize is gone, the .ME Loyalty Program is active until March 31 and all .ME fans may sign up here.
“As a blogger and social media geek, I believe that reward programs can be a great incentive to help pass along products you like to others who can benefit from them”, says Josh Murdock, a Grand Prize Winner. “As a professor of social networking, I am always talking about personal branding. Building a ‘Your Name Here’.ME site is a great way to create a personal branding and establish an online presence beyond just social networks to showoff your portfolio, projects, and more”, adds Murdock.
Michele Price, a digital strategist and the other winner of the trip to Austin, shares her view of the .ME Loyalty Program: “It allows startups and small businesses to be rewarded for sharing their use of .ME domains with colleagues. Brands like .ME that find unique ways to reward their customers are able to do what people in business today appreciate. Every customer likes being rewarded.”
“Early spring is the time of the year when Austin becomes the world capital of music, film and technology and we are excited to learn that the conference it hosts is a perfect fit for the Grand Prize winners”, says Predrag Lesic, the CEO of the .ME Registry. “There is nothing better for entrepreneurs and new media managers than mingling with like-minded people at one of the biggest events in the USA”.
To learn more about the .ME Registry, developing a .ME business idea and many clever uses of the .ME domain or to simply find out how to register a .ME domain name, please visit http://domain.me/.”
Check out EuroDNS here to register your .ME domain name.
ICANN Adds 37 More new TLD Registry Agreements : Toys, .Bio, .Vet, .Fan etc.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has added 37 more new TLD Registry Agreements, including .Bio, .Care and .Toys.
Here are the 37 new TLD Registry Agreements :
.airforce
.army
.associates
.bio
.capital
.care
.cash
.degree
.digital
.discount
.engineer
.engineering
.exchange
.fail
.fan
.financial
.fitness
.gives
.gripe
.hiphop
.lease
.limited
.market
.media
.navy
.ngo
.ong
.pictures
.rehab
.reisen
.schule
.town
.toys
.university
.vet
.wtf
.政府
Cabinets.com Domain Name Now Up For Sale
Domain Broker Media Options announced today that it is the exclusive broker of Cabinets.com .
You can read the press release after the jump:
“Can you imagine carefully selecting a new automobile, paying for it and driving it every day, before knowing if it’s a BMW or a Hyundai? Well, along with cars and homes, cabinets are among the top five most expensive purchases made in a one’s lifetime; yet a whopping 85% of cabinet owners do not know (or often care) what brand name stands behind them! Whether building new or remodeling, consumers simply prefer to search for “cabinets” …And after paying an average of $18,000 – $40,000 for quality, functionality, and design, they typically forget the brand name soon after purchase. This makes cabinets and ideal product for selling and marketing online- and the playing field is level, except for the one player who owns the most important domain name, Cabinets.com!
Word of mouth and online search supply the two primary sources for consumer purchasing information in the cabinet industry. In a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, the domain name Cabinets.com is now for sale via domain brokerage firm Media Options.
CEO Andrew Rosener commented, “The Cabinets.com domain is one of the best- if not the best- ecommerce domain names that has come to market in my recent memory. When you look at the fact the company Blinds.com reportedly just sold to Home Depot this year for over a Billion Dollars[1] and did over $100 million per year in annual revenue, you can easily use your imagination to see the potential behind Cabinets.com. Cabinets cost a multitude more than blinds and are in every single household; whereas blinds could be replaced by curtains or often left without any window treatment. We expect Cabinets.com to sell quickly.”
Some entities build their primary site on a domain name that is not their brand name,[2] and the cabinet industry is an ideal candidate for this type of online strategy since brand name is not as important or recognized by consumers. As a 2012 Microsoft study[3][4] shows, domains with exact keywords like Cabinets.com not only maximize search engine ranking performance, but also increase click through and conversion rates in ecommerce.[5] Utilizing a “category killer” domain like this is often recommended as a savvy proactive move, establishing the owner as the definitive resource in that field. But Cabinets.com is not just a category killer domain, it’s a billion dollar brand being sold at a fraction of its true value.
Cabinets.com owner, Steve Krengel, says, “From our research, we’re seeing companies in the online cabinet space selling more than 100,000 cabinets a year with better revenues than 90% of the traditional manufacturers and twice the profit per sale. Owning Cabinets.com provides immediately credibility and we believe will serve as a launching pad for any company looking to dominate the online space in this $10 Billion – $20 Billion industry.”
Cabinet consumers conduct heavy online research when making a decision about their cabinets and increasingly make their final purchase online. With the already fierce competition in the cabinet industry plus the huge 25-50% or even greater margins, the Cabinets.com owner will be positioned very strongly and will no doubt benefit from immense growth.
According to Kitchen & Bath Business, or K&BB, [6] about 25,000 US firms specialize in kitchen and bath design and installation, so competition is indeed fierce. In 2008, $16.2 billion was spent in the US specifically on wood kitchen cabinets, according to Dun and Bradstreet’s 2009 Industry Reports. [7] Dealers like Lowe’s sell the majority of cabinets, paying Google and other search engines each month to advertise to consumers searching “cabinets.” Home centers and distributers sell about 20% each of total market share, also competing for clients via search engines and other marketing. Despite the 25-50% profit margin on cabinet sales, almost all sellers capture additional revenue by offering design services as well.
Custom cabinet-makers often sell cabinets for custom homes where the cabinets alone can cost $350,000 or more. With these staggering sales numbers, however, they face a difficult challenge: consumer marketing. Custom cabinet makers hit a wall as consumers often assume they’re a product that can only be purchased locally. Custom cabinets can indeed be delivered and installed far away by a full service custom cabinet-maker like Arizona-based Distinctive Custom Cabinetry, which has even provided custom cabinets internationally to Canada. A domain name like Cabinets.com immediately conveys this availability- and credibility- to the consumer regardless of location or distance.
Cabinet sales stay strong in an up or down market, because they are sold for remodels and renovations as well as for new construction. The cabinet industry has seen 4.1% annual growth in the last 5 years, and according to IBISWorld [8] is expected to continue growing at the same rate or higher.”
ICANN Releases New gTLD Contracting Statistics To 7 March
Below are the key Contracting statistics, as of 07 March 2014:
- 1092 applicants have been invited to Contracting
- 494 applicants have responded to their Contracting Information Request invitation
- 397 contracts have been sent out for signature
- 327 Registry Agreements have been signed
- All signed Registry Agreements can be viewed here: www.icann.org/en/about/agreements/registries
View Contracting Statistics From Previous Weeks »
This ICANN announcement was sourced from:
newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and-media/announcement-2-07mar14-en
Warner Bros Wins Gauntlet.com Domain Name in Arbitration
An arbitrator with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has recently awarded the domain name Gauntlet.com to Warner Bros.
According to whois records, the domain name was first registered in 1995.The respondent, NetIncome Ventures Inc, has owned the domain name since at least 2005 , according to whois records.
The domain has an Estibot.com valuation of $84,000 . Gauntlet is a type of glove and also the name of many video games, according to Wikipedia.
The respondent handed the domain name to Warner Bros,but it is not clear yet if it was a payment involved.
