Hayward, California domain name given to pool company.

Here’s a domain name dispute that should make geo domain owners’ blood boil.

A three person World Intellectual Property Organization has awarded the domain name Hayward.com to pool company Hayward Industries.

The domain name is owned by Chad Wright, a domain investor known for owning popular California city .coms. Hayward is a city in the San Francisco Bay area.

Hayward Industries convinced the panel that the parked domain name at Hayward.com showed links for the pool company and its competitors. But a look at archived screenshots of the domain doesn’t show anything related to the pool company. Instead, it has links to “airline tickets”, “hotels”, and “employment”.

So how did Hayward Industries get these competing links to show up on the site? Well, you can always perform a search on the domain for “hayward”. You could also do that on any other domain, for that matter.

Worse, the WIPO panel of Douglas M. Isenberg, W. Scott Blackmer and David H. Bernstein, decided how much geo domain names should be worth. Wright bought the domain name for $20,000, and listed it in an auction for $100,000. Apparently this is too much to pay for a city geo domain name based on the city value alone:

Finally, the Panel finds it informative – though not decisive – that, according to documents in the record, Respondent purchased the domain name hayward.com for USD$20,000 and was attempting to sell it for at least USD$100,000. These figures would seem to indicate that Respondent saw some value in this domain name for reasons other than its existence as the name of the city of Hayward, California – with a population of only about 150,000 people, according to the city’s website – and for purposes other than as a PPC parking page (which, in the normal course, would not be expected to earn a return to justify such a rich investment)

Hmm. Palm Springs has a population of less than 50,000. I think I’ll ask the Castello bothers to sell it to me for less than $100,000.

Tags: geo domains

Google launches Buzz. AT&T owns Buzz.com.

Google announced Google Buzz today. Immediately I thought of the domain name Buzz.com.

A couple years ago I was working on a domain acquisition from AT&T and, while searching whois, noticed that the company owned Buzz.com.

The Buzz.com domain name has sat largely underutilized. Recently, a landing page for a closed-beta social networking service appeared on the site:

About buzz.com: Want to know the best places to go or businesses to call? Let buzz.com help you tap your social net for business recommendations from the people you trust most – your friends and family.

OK, so a social network for local business recommendations. How’s that working out for you? AT&T shouldn’t be in the business of social networks, and this is going to go nowhere.

So perhaps AT&T should sell the Buzz.com domain name to Google. True, I don’t think Google will pay much for it. After all, people will access Google Buzz through Gmail. And Google hasn’t shown a propensity to buy domain names related to brands.

But at least the domain would go to better use.

Tags: at&t, buzz.com, google buzz

Politicians and instrumental web companies nominated for awards.

As part of a year long celebration of the 25th anniversary of .com, domain registry VeriSign today announced nominees for its “.com 25″. There are 75 nominees; a panel of judges will whittle it down to the “.com 25″. The public is invited to show support for nominees to help the judges.

Winners will be announced at a gala in San Francisco this May, hosted by comedian Dana Carvey.

Among the nominees are Al Gore, who was instrumental in the commercialization of the web (no joke), Vint Cerf (of ICANN and later Google), Steve Jobs, and James Gosling (creator of Java).

In addition to people, there are a number of companies nominated. Web 2.0 favorites include Digg and Flickr. E-commerce nominees include Amazon.com, Zappos, and Overstock.com. Of course, the web has also transformed dating. So it’s only fitting that Match.com and eHarmony are nominated. Blogs on the list include the Gawker network and celebrity site TMZ. Representing social networks are Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.

You can read more about each nominee and rate them at 25YearsOf.com.

Tags: .com, VeriSign

Two weeks, two great recreational domain sales.

Domain name brokerage NameMedia has sold the domain name Biking.com for $250,000. This comes just a week after selling Boating.com for the same amount. As you might have guessed, the buyer of both names is the same, Stein Holdings. That’s a half million bucks in a couple weeks, instantly putting the buyer on the map for recreational domains.

Thanks to the Biking.com sale, NameMedia sold about $800,000 worth of domains in the past week, a couple hundred thousand over its normal weekly pull. It sold 308 .com domains at a median price of $1,100 and 68 other domains at a median price of $888.

Here are other notable sales by NameMedia for the week:

backpage.net $10,000.00
niederlande.com $9,000.00
leatherware.com $7,395.00
ecotone.com $6,750.00
jiae.com $6,400.00
xtips.com $5,840.00
urbantrends.com $4,500.00
visoka.com $4,254.00
daily-sun.com $4,200.00
filethis.com $4,088.00
ligman.com $4,070.00
univan.com $4,038.00
wsu.net $4,000.00
doctorlist.com $4,000.00
hbpe.com $4,000.00
CyclingOutlet.com $4,000.00
securitycentral.net $3,888.00
communitydoctor.com $3,788.00
weddinglinen.com $3,590.00
ckdonline.com $3,588.00
funbars.com $3,588.00
chipkey.com $3,588.00
lightingcentre.com $3,500.00

Tags: NameMedia

Company releases 2009 market report.

Sedo didn’t turn in any blockbuster domain sales over the past week, but you can forgive the company for a slower-than-normal week. After all, the company just released its 2009 domain market study (pdf), which contains a startling stat: Sedo sold 10,070 domain names last quarter.

That’s more than the company sold in any one quarter for at least the past two years, and maybe more. (I have an inquiry into Sedo to find out if it’s an all-time record.)

But more recently, here are the company’s completed sales from last week:

.Com
downloadtube.com 33000 USD
kulu.com 25000 USD
3p.com 19500 USD
gitana.com 15000 USD
optivo.com 15000 EUR
freecomputers.com 13500 USD
screenprinter.com 12000 USD
gmh.com 10099 USD
energyadvice.com 8500 USD
directfurniture.com 8000 GBP
lacrossesticks.com 7500 USD
designliving.com 7371 EUR
joyus.com 7250 USD
casinospiele.com 5500 EUR
domesticgeneral.com 5500 EUR
vojago.com 5102 USD
remen.com 5050 USD
blabr.com 5010 USD
coupedafrique.com 5000 EUR
geomarketing.com 5000 USD
housefix.com 5000 USD
stayalive.com 5000 EUR
usalotteries.com 5000 USD
geniax.com 5000 USD
anaban.com 5000 USD

ccTLDs
wo.de 20000 EUR
hybrids.de 7950 EUR
better.fr 7500 EUR
site.co.uk 7051 GBP
tuh.co.uk 6500 USD
accelerate.eu 6000 EUR
en.de 6000 EUR
73.de 5000 EUR
wandtatoos.de 5000 EUR

Other
estrazionisuperenalotto.net 4700 EUR
ilmeteo.net 4000 EUR
fff.net 3400 USD
anniversaire.net 3300 EUR
kieferorthopäde.org 3000 EUR

Tags: sedo