PY.com Wins Weekly Sales List at $358,000
PY.com,sold for $358,000,topped Domain Name Journal sales list of reported domain names for the week,ending July 20,2014.
Sedo had a great week in the sales chart,taking 12 of the top 20 positions .Correspondingly, Heritage Auctions took 2 of the top 20 positions .
.COM dominated once again the list,with 15 of the top 20 positions.
Here are the top 20 positions for the two weeks ending July 20,2014 :
1. PY.com $358,000
2. Dots.com $325,000
3. HY.com $320,000
4. Statement.com $140,000
5. GCA.com $90,000
6. Logics.com $50,000
7. MakeSomeNoise.com $40,000
8. OAR.com $28,500
9. PDN.com $27,900
10. Open.tv $25,000
11. Online-Autoboerse.de $20,250
12. AZU.com $18,000
13. VivaMedia.com $17,000
14. Mortgages.info $14,095
15. GHealth.com $10,000
16. DocHub.com $9,985
17. Football.de $8,235
18. Klara.com $8,100
19. Matrix.org $7,999
20. TheFinalWhistle.com $7,500
DNS Belgium : Not Every “G” Means the Same Thing!
DNS Belgium released recently an article, explaining that even though abbreviations are hany, they can sometimes cause confusion. For example,not everybody knows what the “g” from “gTLDs” mean.
You can read the article after the jump:
“Abbreviations are handy, but they can sometimes cause confusion. For example, with the new domain name extensions currently being released, we talk about the new “gTLDs”. In this case, the “g” does not make it mean “geographic top-level domain”, as many people might think, but “generic top-level domain”.
We have been using gTLDs for a long time now. The best known of these are the domain name extensions used most frequently on the Internet today, such as .com, .info, .net or .org. The extensions that refer to countries officially recognised by the UN are called ccTLDs. ccTLD stands for “country code top-level domain”, such as .be. All ccTLDs are made up of two letters and, in fact, ccTLDs are also the only extensions that are allowed to consist of two letters. That’s why having .vl as an extension for Flanders (Flanders) was not possible.
However, some of the new gTLDs – 66 of them, to be precise – do come under the “geographical” category. Sometimes they are cities (such as .barcelona or .brussels) and sometimes they are parts of countries (such as .wales or .vlaanderen). But they can also be regions that want to position themselves more clearly as being distinctive (such as .acquitaine or .ruhr, for example). There’s also .africa, an extension that covers a whole continent, with around a billion potential users. Some cities and regions have made a conscious choice to use their full name as an extension (such as .amsterdam or .vlaanderen), while others have gone for an abbreviation (such as .nyc or .frl).
Berlin, which has 3.5 million potential users, was one of the first cities with its own domain name extension. There are now already more than 135,000 .berlin domain names registered. In addition, .ruhr (with around five million potential users) is currently in what is known as the General Availability phase. In this case, General Availability means that anyone can apply for domain names with the .ruhr extension. At the moment, the registration meter for .ruhr has ticked past 4,600 registered domain names.
You’ll find many other new geographical gTLDs in Germany: .bayern (with 12.4 million potential users), .hamburg (1.7 million), .koeln and its international variant .cologne (with approximately one million potential users), .nrw (North-Rhine Westphalia, a region representing almost eighteen million potential users) and .saarland (another million or so).
Like Cologne, there are plenty more “geo’s” that are opting for a dual extension, often for commercial reasons. Take Wales, for example, where you can choose between .wales and .cymru (which is Welsh for Wales). This choice will be defined mainly by the audience that applicants for domain names want to reach. With .cymru, you would be aiming at the local population, whereas .wales would be a better choice if you are a Welsh organisation or business seeking a profile with an international audience. The city of Moscow has also applied to have 2 extensions, one in the international language of English and one in Russian : .moscow and .москва. “
So, when you look over the border at other countries, you might find yourself inspired to apply for a domain name with a .vlaanderen or .brussels extension.
Heritage Auction Third Domain Name Auction Results
Heritage Auctions third domain name auction ended with 14 domain name sold for a total of over $770,000.
The auction featured 81 domain names ,out of which only 14 sold.
Here are the results :
Digital.com $373,750
Cute.com $230,000
DEC.com $230,000
Bristol.com $40,250
FRR.com $32,200
SFD.com $27,600
Baby.club $5,750
CoinSource.com $2,300
ForeclosureSales.com $1,207.50
RareTimepieces.com $920
CoinStores.com $920
BasketballCollector.com $862.50
DiscountVinyl.com $402.50
CapCollection.com $15
ICANN :China’s 21Vianet Contributes to Stable and Resilient Internet with L-Root Instance
A new instance of L-Root has been installed in China, increasing the Domain Name System’s (DNS) overall fault tolerance and its resilience against certain types of cyber threats, such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
The launch of the server node is a joint operation between ICANN and China’s 21Vianet Group, Inc (NASDAQ:VNET). As China’s largest carrier-neutral Internet data center with more than 80 data centers in over 40 cities in China, 21Vianet supplied the equipment necessary for the installation of the new L-Root node.
“We have selected Beijing as the initial site as Beijing is one of the largest Chinese cities, with one of the highest Internet penetration rates in the country,” said Frank Meng, President of 21Vianet Group, Inc (NASDAQ:VNET). “But we will deploy in other major cities very shortly as part of our DNS Open Network program”. DNS Open Network is a program by 21Vianet to build a trusted and robust DNS infrastructure that provide open peering with any ISPs and ICPs in China.
This cooperation between both organizations is an effort to provide security, stability and resiliency to Chinese Internet users and reduce the response time they experience when making Domain Name System (DNS) queries.
“The stability and resiliency of the global Internet continues to be strengthened with 21Vianet installation of the L-Root instances,” said ICANN President and CEO Fadi Chehadé.
“ICANN is working with other Chinese partners to bring in more L-Root instances into the country,” said Kuek Yu-Chuang, ICANN’s Vice President and Managing Director for ICANN Asia Pacific Hub.
There are 13 “root,” or fully authoritative, DNS servers, identified by alphabetic letters A through M — the “L” root being one. Computers locate one another on a network by using numeric addresses, while humans find it easier to use and remember names (for instance, users typically remember the domain name “ICANN.org” more easily than the Internet Protocol address, 2620:0:2d0:200::7). The Domain Name System (DNS) matches domain names with numeric addresses, in much the same way a phone book matches names to phone numbers.
Spreading root information out geographically by duplicating the root servers leads to a resilient, dispersed system that cannot be taken offline by a problem at any single instance of a given DNS root server.
This announcement was sourced from :
https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2014-07-24-en
Verisign Healthy Financials Show .COM/.NET Demand Slowing
Registrations of new .com and .net domain names increased by 420,000 net during the second quarter, meaning there were 128.9 million active domain names across both TLDs, an increase of 3.7 percent, Verisign Registry Services reported in their results for the second quarter of 2014 [pdf]. This compares to a 4.9 percent increase for the same period 12 months ago.
In the second quarter, Verisign processed 8.5 million new domain name registrations for .com and .net as compared to 8.7 million for the same period in 2013 and 8.4 million for the same period in 2012. It’s possible the decline could be attributed to the slowly declining number of available .com and .net domains, increased competition from the slew of new gTLDs available and/or the global economy.
There was also a decline in the final .com and .net renewal rates. For the first quarter of 2014 the renewal rate was 72.6 percent compared with 73.2 percent for the same quarter in 2013. Renewal rates are not fully measurable until 45 days after the end of the quarter.
There is also an increase in the annual fee for a .net domain coming, with the fee paid by registrars to Verisign increasing from $6.18 to $6.79, effective 1 February, 2015, as per Verisign’s agreement with ICANN.
“Our results are in keeping with our goal of creating long-term shareholder value by providing secure and stable critical internet infrastructure services and efficiently managing the business. Additionally, in keeping with our commitment to return value to our shareholders, we repurchased $300 million of Verisign shares during the quarter,” commented Jim Bidzos, executive chairman, president and chief executive officer.
Financially things appear to be in good health, although there was a decline in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities as well as cash flow.
In second quarter GAAP financial results, revenue of $250 million was reported for the second quarter of 2014, up 4.6 percent from the same quarter in 2013. Verisign reported net income of $100 million and diluted earnings per share (EPS) of $0.71 for the second quarter of 2014, compared to net income of $87 million and diluted EPS of $0.55 in the same quarter in 2013. The operating margin was 57.2 percent for the second quarter of 2014 compared to 55.2 percent for the same quarter in 2013.
In Non-GAAP Financial Results Verisign reported, on a non-GAAP basis, net income of $96 million and diluted EPS of $0.68 for the second quarter of 2014, compared to net income of $92 million and diluted EPS of $0.58 for the same quarter in 2013.
Verisign ended the second quarter with cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities of $1.5 billion, a decrease of $178 million as compared with year-end 2013.
Cash flow from operations was $121 million for the second quarter compared with $147 million for the same quarter in 2013.
