Domain Roundtable enters final day in Washington, D.C.

The Domain Roundtable conference in Washington, D.C. concludes this evening with a party hosted by Thought Convergence and Parked.com. But there will be a lot of action between now and then.

Let’s start by recapping yesterday.

The day started with a panel about market and technology trends and how they will affect domain names in the short and long term. The panel included myself, Hal Bailey from Google, Nico Zeifang, and Simonetta Batteiger from Sedo. The discussion included what changes we’ll see in how people access the internet, both from an experience and technology perspective.

The second panel included a couple new faces to domain events, but very experienced in the domain world. Titled “Unique Opportunities to Increase Your Domain’s Value”, the panel included BuyDomains founder Mike Mann, investor and Epik founder Rob Monster, Brian Taff (formerly of Name Media), Jay Chapman from DigiMedia, and David and Michael Castello.

Jonathan Zuck of Association for Competitive Technology gave a keynote after lunch, and then the final session covered policy. Internet Commerce Association counsel Phil Corwin was on the panel, and then jumped on a plane this morning to head to the ICANN meeting in Sydney.

The evening concluded with a cocktail hour. One comment I keep hearing over and over is the quality of food at the conference. It really is fantastic.

Today’s activity includes a couple more panels, and then the Aftermarket.com auction at 4 PM EDT. The conference concludes with a party at Josephine, a hot club in D.C.

Today’s Aftermarket.com auction includes 10 domains to benefit ICA.

Today’s Aftermarket.com domain name auction at Domain Roundtable includes ten domain names that will benefit Internet Commerce Association. Bidding on these domains is a great way to support the ICA and get something back immediately in return.

These aren’t throw away domains: domains up for auction include Castaway.com and Deployed.com, among others.

In addition to the Internet Commerce Association domains, the live auction includes over 70 high quality domain names. There will also be an extended online auction that includes an additional 100 plus domains. Over 30 domains already have advance online bids including Schizophrenic.com at $5,000, 3GPhones.com at $3,500, and Exhaustion.com at $4,500.

Bidding will start at 4 PM EDT today at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C. Online bidding is available at www.Aftermarket.com.

Five registrars terminated for financial reasons.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has sent termination notices to five domain name registrars for failure to pay fees. Of the five to be de-accredited, only one has registered domains under management: Maxim Internet Inc.

ICANN is seeking a registrar to take over about 5,000 domains registered at Maxim Internet. It warns that contact data for the registrants is in an inconsistent format.

ICANN sent a breach notice to Maxim on March 30. Since that time the company has notified customers it was shutting down. In ICANN’s termination letter to Maxim, Director of Contractual Compliance Stacy Burnette wrote:

Using the primary contact information provided by Maxim, ICANN staff transmitted an e-mail message to you and left telephone messages for you inquiring about Maxim’s intentions to remain an ICANN-accredited registrar. After failed attempts to reach you, observing that Maxim’s website was no longer operational on 1 June 2009, receiving an electronic mail message from a person claiming to represent Maxim in its “close down” on 3 June 2009 and receipt of other electronic mail correspondence from you referring to the “closing” of Maxim, ICANN concluded that Maxim is insolvent.

Maxim owes ICANN over $150,000.

Other terminated registrars include AfterGen, Inc. dba JumpingDot, Hi Yi Global Information Resources, Sundance Group, Inc, and Clertech.com Inc.

ICANN also sent a notice of breach to Lead Networks Domains Pvt. Ltd for failure to comply with UDRP decisions. Lead Networks was recently named in a lawsuit that alleges it failed to transfer a domain that a customer lost in a UDRP.

Epik could provide compelling domain monetization strategy — and may spur more direct navigation.

When Rob Monster announced he was closing his venture capital shop, he wrote that he was working on a new company that could change domaining:

We are building a Web 3.0 platform that will be among the first to drive a network effect across domain properties, in part enabled by single sign-on, portable identity, portable reputation, and user-aware content management. Domainers have a huge opportunity to define the future of the web, much in the way a new city gets planned from the ground up. In essence, that is what Epik is about.

The first iteration of Epik launched last night, and today I sat down with Monster at Domain Roundtable in Washington D.C. to take Epik for a test drive.

Epik enables domainers to build content-based sites in seconds. Utilizing a semantic web ontology of two million people, places, and things, Epik automatically sets up a five page web site on your domains. Epik has an exclusive license (for use on domains) for content from semantic web company Evri.

Epik is based on EVO Media Group’s DevHub technology. Monster was the first investor in EVO Media.

Domain owners can sign up at Epik.com and begin submitting domains. On Friday at 5 pm PDT, registered users who have already submitted domains through the system will get access to a list of all domains that map to Epik’s content nodes. This list will be a treasure trove for domainers, as it includes a list of domains that can be hand registered to quickly create web sites.

If your domains don’t currently match one of Epik’s unique and available nodes, the company will inform you if it becomes available in the future. One example I just created is brookhaven.us.

Monster thinks you’ll be impressed with the existing results, but says Epik will roll out new features quickly that encompass the components he described above.

Beyond just making money for domain owners, Monster says his company could swing the pendulum back to direct navigation. When people who search with direct navigation find what they want, they’re more inclined to use direct navigation in the future.

Monster believes domainers could be the largest beneficiary of the move to the semantic web. Hopefully Epik is the key to get there.

Company upgrades to intuitive domain name.

At Mike Mann’s party yesterday I met serial entrepreneur Clarence Wooten, Jr., CEO of CollectiveX. When I first met him, my natural question was “what the heck is CollectiveX”. Wooten explained that it was a social platform for groups, which makes perfect sense. But the name didn’t make sense until Wooten explained it to me.

Wooten had some exciting news to share, though: on Monday he was rebranding his company as GroupSite.com. That’s a much more intuitive domain. He said they were rebranding because “group site” explains its business and because of the search volume for “group sites”. Wooten bought the domains over a year ago.

My next question was if he bought the plural version GroupSites.com. The answer: yes.

No wonder this guy was at Mann’s party.