Ukranian geo domain tops sales chart.

Kiev.com, a domain for the capital of Ukraine, has sold for $88,000 at Sedo. The domain represents the top completed sale at the sales venue over the past two weeks. Russia.eu (European Union country code domain) sold for $24,000. Sedo sold Russia.com for $1.5 million last month.

Here are other notable sales from the past two weeks:

.COM
swype.com 25,000 USD
6m.com 16,055 USD
computerspeakers.com 14,500 USD
shepperton.com 13,225 GBP
singlecity.com 12,950 USD
bedstar.com 12,000 EUR
privy.com 12,000 USD
lifedash.com 10,500 USD
tbk.com 10,000 USD
g66g3e.com 10,000 USD
tbk.com 10,000 USD
thinkspot.com 9,999 USD
ifeed.com 9,900 USD
catholicsoulmates.com 8,995 USD
bookee.com 8,000 USD
supermoving.com 7,500 USD
bmarkets.com 7,500 USD
quarz.com 7,400 EUR
finke.com 7,200 USD
eiv.com 7,101 USD
reviewsites.com 6,500 USD
daj.com 6,350 USD
zite.com 6,200 EUR
zite.com 6,200 EUR
isomatch.com 6,000 USD
xiangshui.com 6,000 USD
longchicken.com 6,000 USD
oddbet.com 5,999 USD
bigcasino.com 5,725 USD
sply.com 5,700 USD
decoo.com 5,600 USD
asiaclassified.com 5,500 USD
cargonet.com 5,500 USD
biovantage.com 5,250 USD

ccTLDs
bedroomfurniture.co.uk 57,500 USD
apuestas.com.es 39,000 EUR
ab.de 25,000 EUR
russia.eu 24,000 EUR
aethiopien.de 17,850 EUR
u.to 13,000 USD
singlecity.co.uk 10,000 GBP
h2.de 8,100 EUR
airport.es 8,000 EUR
arenal.es 7,500 EUR
points.co.uk 6,808 GBP
reprisemedia.fr 5,950 EUR
hb.de 5,100 EUR
customink.co.uk 5,000 USD
taxes.co.uk 5,000 USD
joghurtmitderbuttermilch.de 5,000 EUR
news.com.gr 5,000 USD
taxes.co.uk 5,000 USD
vodka.in 5,000 EUR

Other
registerednurse.org 10,000 USD
the.org 9,999 USD
autoinsurancecomparison.net 6,750 USD
christmascards.org 6,350 USD
wohngebaeudeversicherung.net 5,550 EUR
wohngebaeudeversicherung.net 5,550 EUR
bambini.net 5,150 USD
maturedating.net 5,000 USD

A look back at the year in domain news.

As 2009 draws to a close, here’s a look at the top 10 stories on Domain Name Wire this year, as measured by traffic. Of course, traffic doesn’t equal importance…

10. Toys.com, Birthdays.com, Hobbies.com Sold at Auction – Domain Name Wire’s story about a quiet bankruptcy auction started a big ripple. A DNW reader petitioned the court to set aside the sale of Toys.com. That resulted in a re-auction and a decidedly higher take: Toys.com ended up selling for $5.1 million compared to $1.25 million in the original auction. Also see #5 and #1.

9. SusanBoyle.com Getting 1,800 Visits an Hour – Will the real Susan Boyle please stand up? Susan Boyle (the singer) was an instant internet sensation this year, but the domain name was owned by a different kind of artist. I tracked down Susan Boyle, the painter, who lives in the Texas Hill Country town of Kerville. Her SusanBoyle.com web site was getting 1,800 hits an hour during the height of the Susan Boyle viral mania.

8. GoDaddy Disses .TV and What it Says About the Echo Chamber – DNW sets the record straight on what technically happens to a country code domain name if a country no longer exists.

7. Yahoo Buys OMG.com Domain Name for $80,000 – OMG! Yahoo buys three character domain name for its popular celebrity news site.

6. Book Review: The Sex.com Chronicles – um, what? This is a top story? Well, this is a lesson in the power of generic domain names. For a while, this story was ranked in the top five on Google for the term “sex.com”. So many people type in a keyword followed by .com into the search box that this sent a lot of traffic.

5. Will Toys ‘R’ Us Flub $5.1M Toys.com Purchase? – Answer: yes (see #1), but it got a reprieve.

4. Go Daddy Files Patents for Enhanced Whois and DNS Records – note to self: the tech community hates software/process patents, especially those dealing with web technology.

3. Glenn Beck Loses Domain Dispute Over Meme Site – Apparently Mr. Beck is a polarizing figure.

2. After Winning Case, Man Hands Domain Name to Glenn Beck – or, “Man makes Glenn Beck look like an ass”.

1. Toys.com Loses Google Ranking – Toys ‘R’ Us spends $5.1 million on a domain name with great search rankings, only to lose the rankings when it forwards the domain. But ultimately it got a reprieve — Toys.com is currently ranked #3 on Google for “Toys”. Between ToysRUs.com, eToys.com (purchased during the same bankruptcy auction) and Toys.com, the retailer has locked up the top three positions on Google.

Domain records show Apple connection to iGuide.com unlikely.

If you’re one of the many Apple bloggers out there, your holiday season has been filled with speculation about Apple’s upcoming tablet. The consensus is that will be called iSlate, since Apple has acquired the iSlate.com domain name.

But another possibility is iGuide. MacRumors points to an Apple trademark application for iGuide. Robin Wauters over at TechCrunch did some investigating and comes to a similar conclusion as MacRumors — if anything, iGuide would likely be some sort of related service, not the name of the actual device.

When I saw the rumors about iGuide, I immediately recalled that the domain name iGuide.com had sold recently. Digging through the Domain Name Wire archives, I found this story about iGuide.com selling for $100,000. The whois record at the time showed Beverly Hills based Baroda Ventures LLC as the buyer. (It’s now protected by whois privacy.) I don’t see any connection to Apple, and the current use of the domain name leads me to believe there is none. It forwards to OVGuide.com, another domain owned by a Beverly Hills company at the same address as Baroda Ventures.

If Apple bought the domain name through a shell company, it certainly wouldn’t be forwarding it to an online video guide site.

It’s possible Apple has a product or service planned with the name iGuide, but it doesn’t own iGuide.com.

Due diligence in expired domain company acquisition missed a couple big problems.

Mergers and Acquisitions due diligence is thankless work. You have to learn everything about a company, including things about it that its current owners don’t know, in a short period of time. If you get everything right, no one remembers to thank you a couple years later. If you mess up, everyone knows about it.

And that’s exactly the case with SnapNames. The due diligence team at Oversee.net messed up when studying the company, and now everyone knows about it.

First, SnapNames lost Network Solutions after Oversee.net acquired it. This may have been identified as a risk by the due diligence team, but someone at Oversee.net didn’t deem it a severe risk. Oops.

But then there was the insider bidding, in which a SnapNames employee was bidding on auctions for four years. He was a prolific bidder, and certainly one of Snap’s biggest “customers” in terms of bidding activity.

Should the due diligence team have uncovered it? Of course. But it’s easier said than done. A friend of mine sold his software company for $16 million last year. He said that it was the toughest due diligence he has ever experienced. The acquiring company called literally every single one of his 30 customers. That may be overkill. But I would think you’d at least investigate the top 20 bidders or so of an online auction house to see if there’s any revenue risk.

The SnapNames bidding scandal sucked for a lot of people. Especially Oversee.net, which has to pay back money from before it acquired the company.

Company files case against owner of marijuana domain names.

Altria Group, the parent company of tobacco company Philip Morris USA, has filed an arbitration proceeding to get the domain names AltriaMarijuana.com and AltriaCannabis.com.

Is the company getting ready for the day pot becomes legal? Perhaps, but the company is probably more concerned about the content on the web sites. Both sites invite visitors to “Fight Against the Legalization of Marijuana” and ridicule tobacco companies as beneficiaries of legalization of the drug. After explaining a number of bills that have been passed or introduced to legalize marijuana, the sites proclaim:

Greater than the sum of all these fears is the premonition that, when made legal, “big business,” especially those “big businesses” that profit from poisoning our society and the destroying our youth with tobacco and alcohol, will engage in and ultimately control this “multi-billion dollar” industry, furthering the decline and destruction of America at a unfathomable rate. Thus it is the mission of this website to fight the legalization and usage of marijuana/cannabis and all other intoxicating, addicting, and illicit substances.

The domain names are registered to a person in Washington, D.C., but the contact email address is for an IT/hosting company. The web sites do not identify who is behind them.