Live Current Media sale of Leisure.com may be in the works.

The whois information for Leisure.com has changed, signaling a possible sale by Live Current Media (livc.ob). The whois record for the domain name on December 22 showed Live Current Media; on December 30 the record changed to GoDaddy’s Domains by Proxy. The nameservers also changed from SedoParking.com to GoDaddy nameservers and the web site has a placeholder now.

This follows the pattern of previous sales by the company, where buyers wished to remain anonymous.

Live Current had a busy year selling domain names to raise capital. It sold Call.com for $1.1 million, Cricket.com, Brazil.com for $500,000, and Mouse.com and Keyboard.com, to name a few.

After exiting the cricket web site business, the company’s premier property right now is Perfume.com.

Domain name registrar shuts down, exposing a host of unknown problems.

It wasn’t quite RegisterFly, but the fall of domain name registrar Parava this year was a stark reminder that the domain registration business remains poorly regulated with lax compliance.

ICANN sent a breach notice to Parava on February 27th, notifying it of major infractions including not paying accreditation fees, failing to escrow whois data, and failing to take action in response to invalid whois complaints. Heck, the company’s own domain name had an incorrect whois record.

The registrar was small, managing only 36,000 domains. But it included some doozies, including Marc Ostrofsky’s MutualFunds.com.

After failing to cure the breach, ICANN terminated Parava in April. Parava stopped operating, effectively cutting domain owners off from managing their domain names — even making DNS changes.

ICANN selected Tucows as the new registrar for the domains and the domains started transitioning there in May. As soon as the transition started, registrants realized something was wrong. People who had renewed for 5 or 10 years found that their domains expired this year. It turns out Parava was taking customer payments for multi-year renewals and only renewing a year at a time.

With every hardship is a lesson. Here are six signs your domain registrar is going defunct.

Better late than never, here’s a 2008 Domain Dunce Award.

What do you mean today is Wednesday?

This week I’ve run a series of posts with Domain Dunce Awards for 2009. But there was one I missed last year that is worth giving a retroactive award for.

This one goes out to John Berryhill, the well known domain name attorney. What could a domain name lawyer due to earn this not-so-prestigious award? It’s more what he didn’t do: renew his domain name Berryhill.net. When it expired last year, one of his own clients picked it up in the drop.

How could a domain attorney make such a critical domain name mistake? For all his prowess at responding to UDRPs, he appears to have difficulty with dates. Scheduled to speak at Traffic Down Under 2008 on a Tuesday, Berryhill showed up on Wednesday, having forgotten that Australia is on the other side of the International Date Line. Word is he’s still sending invoices from 2007 and will be wearing a “Happy New Year 2005″ hat tomorrow evening.

So, for his failure to renew his domain name, we give him a 2008 Domain Dunce Award. He probably won’t notice the date, anyway.

(By the way, you can still find John on the web at JohnBerryhill.com. That domain doesn’t expire until October 2010, and hopefully is set up for auto renewal.)

“Who do you want to meet” campaign successful.

As you heard on DNW Radio, networking is the biggest reason people go to domain name conferences. With that knowledge, Rick Latona’s team came up with an ingenious advertising campaign for TRAFFIC Las Vegas. Through banner ads, people were able to enter the names of people they’d like to meet at TRAFFIC, and the organizers would try to make it happen:

So far, 250 people have taken TRAFFIC up on its offer, Latona told Domain Name Wire.

“The number one request was for Santa Claus but after many attempts I’m sad to say I wasn’t able to get him to commit,” joked Latona. “Between you and I, I think he’s scared of Las Vegas.”

Latona said that no one stands out as the “most requested” introduction. “We’ve received a wide variety of requests and have thus far been able to match nearly every one of them,” said Latona.

He said the successful campaign is only the starting point of a focus on networking at TRAFFIC.

“TRAFFIC needs to be about networking first and foremost and throughout 2010 it’ll be my focus when developing the schedules and events.”

TRAFFIC Las Vegas takes places January 21-23 at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. The first day focuses on networking. Tickets are still available.

A controversial “relaunch” goes awry.

.CM, the country code top level domain name for The Republic of Cameroon, has a storied history amongst domainers. Kevin Ham struck a deal to wildcard the domain name, sending lots of typo traffic of .com domain names his way. Ham, including his deal with Cameroon, was the subject of a cover story in the late Business 2.0 magazine.

This year Cameroon decided to open up .cm and offer it to individual registrants, and opted to auction off the best names, such as Sex.cm. What followed was an unqualified disaster.

First, it took longer than expected to get the registry set up due to a host of technical problems. As the go-live date neared, Council of Country Code Administrators Incorporated (CoCCA), which was to run the registry for .cm, continued to be concerned with .cm’s DNS. The DNS was to be run by Cameroon’s telecom company rather than an established player. Without CoCCA’s blessing to go live, Cameroon decided to run its own copy of the registry software.

Then the auctions occurred on NameJet. It looked like a big success as Sex.cm auctioned for $51,300 and Free.cm for $17,800. But then the bottom fell out. Bidders got cold feet as they lost confidence in .cm typo traffic as well as the registry as a whole. They backed out of their bids. Sex.cm ended up trading hands for only $21,700 (see comments, it actually sold for less) and Free.cm went for a dismal $310. Ouch.

With the delays and auction behind it, how’s .cm looking? I’m not confident. Your confidence erodes when a registry neglects to backup important billing files.