Price comparison company buys Top10.com domain name.

A UK price comparison company has purchased the domain name Top10.com from Idealab for $1 million in cash and equity. The deal included $200,000 in cash, and Idealab will take a 7% stake in the privately held company. As part of the deal Idealab founder Bill Gross will join the advisory board of the buyer, now named Top10.com Media Ltd.

Top10.com Media Ltd. runs mobile phone and broadband comparison sites, which have been rebranded to a main portal at Top10.com. The company says its comparison sites attract 1.5 million UK users a month, and generated £9m revenue during financial year 2009. It employs 20 people, and is privately held by its four founders Tom Leathes, Harry Jones, Alex Buttle, and Andrew Cartland.

Idealab founded GoTo.com in the late 90s, and effectively invented the pay-per-click search market that is the foundation of Google and Yahoo. It is also the force behind domain name parking. The company acquired a number of category killer domain names — many of them at the peak of the dot.com boom — that it is now trying to find a home for. A couple representatives of Idealab attended the DOMAINfest conference in Los Angeles earlier this year.

Microsoft picks up Bing domain names through arbitration.

Since launching its new Bing search engine last year, Microsoft has frequently called upon National Arbitration Forum to help it get Bing related domain names registered by cybersquatters. National Arbitration Forum records show that, since December 29, the company has won arbitration cases for at least 40 domain names.

The first batch of domains the company won on December 29, 2009 were typical typos, including wwwbing.com and b8ng.com.

On December 31, the company won a case for 21 domain names registered by Doug Goodman of Kentucky. Among the domains Goodman registered were bingadspace.com, bingvideoclips.com, and bingtutorials.com. According to the dispute, Goodman “created or formulated” the disputed domain names that had been missed by “Microsoft webmasters”. Goodman also told the National Arbitration Forum that the domain names would bring value to Microsoft, so the company should pay for them. Needless to say, that defense didn’t hold up.

The company won the domains bing-wallpaper.com and bingimg.com in January, and then picked up BingNews.org on February 2. (BingNews.com forwards to Bing’s news portal.) Microsoft also won wapbing.net in February.

In March it picked up the Internationalized Domain Name xn--bng-jua.com, which looks like bıng.com. It also won seven domains from another registrant including BingCamera.com and DirectoryBing.

Whenever a mainstream product launches and gets lots of press, unsuspecting speculators try to snatch up related domains. They probably remember the early days of the web when you could get away with this stuff. Based on some of the futile responses to these cases, they really didn’t know any better.

New dirt on Sex.com exposed in court filings.

Documents filed in a bankruptcy case involving Sex.com owner Escom, LLC, provide intriguing details into who actually owns Sex.com and what went wrong with the company.

DOM Partners, a creditor and an investor in Escom, filed the papers in response to an involuntary bankruptcy filing initiated by Mike Mann against Escom to halt the auction of Sex.com.

In a motion to dismiss (pdf) the petition for bankruptcy, DOM alleges that Mann is “operating ESCOM” (the company that owns Sex.com) and “has been unable to repay DOM’s outstanding secured debt of $4,313,276.16″.

DOM Partners loaned $4.5 million to Escom in 2006, and also made an equity investment of $1 million. $1.5 million of the loan was later paid off by another investor — Nothin’ But Net, LLC — that received an equity stake in Escom. But the remaining $3 million loan became due on January 12, 2009 and was not paid. DOM gave notice of default on the loan the next day. It says it tried to negotiate to settle the debt, including the potential of buying Mann’s companies’ interests in Escom. It deposited $6 million in escrow for such a potential purchase.

When DOM made its initial loan to Escom in 2006, Mann’s Washington Technology Associates loaned Escom $5 million and invested $1 million as well.

Several other investors joined in, according to the filing: “Nuthin’ But Net, LLC”, which paid off $1.5M of DOM’s loan, “I95 Investment Group” invested $400,000 in equity, and iEntertainment has a $2.5 million junior secured loan.

According to the court filing, Escom is required to be managed by its three founding members — DOM, Washington Technology Associates, and Domain Name Acquisition Group — which must unanimously agree to file a voluntary bankruptcy petition. Domain Name Acquisition Group’s managers include Andrew Miller of Internet Real Estate Group and Built to Last, LLC, which is managed by Mike Zapolin, also with Internet Real Estate Group. Domain Name Acquisition Group invested $2,800 and “The Domain Name Rights” in return for 28 class A membership rights in Escom.

DOM claims that Mann’s Washington Technology Associates (WTA) manages Escom. Its CEO Del Anthony reports to WTA’s chairman, Mike Mann.

The filing states that Escom only has the domain name and “some cash” as assets. It has little income and just one employee, and no working capital to finance development of the domain name, according to DOM. In a declaration to the court (pdf), a lawyer representing DOM Partners claims it has been denied access to Escom’s books for the last year. A representative of Escom indicated the company has about $100,000 in cash.

By the time Mann filed the involuntary bankruptcy petition against Escom, several bidders had already been qualified for the Sex.com auction that was to take place the next day, claims DOM. These bidders had deposited $1 million and flown to New York for the auction.

DOM is asking the court to dismiss the “bad faith” bankruptcy filing so an auction can go forward. DOM believes an auction will satisfy at least the secured debt owed by Escom.

Other interesting documents filed with the court:

-Original loan documents for Escom including interest rates and repayment terms

-Notice of default, sent to Andrew Miller, who is known in the industry an investor/founder of Internet Real Estate Group. He is a manager of Domain Name Acquisition Group, which owns part of Escom.

-Escom LLC’s formation/LLC documents part 1 and part 2 with signature lines for Andrew Miller, Mike Zapolin, and Robert Seaman (attorney for DOM Partners)

Kraft awarded domain name for cream cheese brand.

Kraft, maker of Philadelphia cream cheese, has been awarded the domain name Philadelphia.es by an arbitration panel at World Intellectual Property Organization.

Isn’t Philadelphia a generic term, meaning the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania? Perhaps. But the domain owner didn’t respond to the allegations in the case. He could have easily responded to the charges, arguing that he planned to set up a tourism web site for people in Spain (.es country code) planning to visit Philadelphia. After all, it appears he didn’t use the Philadelphia.es domain name to provide information about cream cheese.

Loosely translated from Spanish, the arbitrator wrote:

it is hard to imagine a use of the domain that did not involve violating the provisions of the UDRP, so the expert can only assume as known behavior and assumed by the Respondent at the time of registration and subsequent use of the Domain Name

True, if it were Philadelphia.us it would be much easier to determine a reasonable use other than promoting the Kraft brand of cream cheese. But a couple weeks ago someone paid 65,450 EUR for Pakistan.de. On the surface, that doesn’t make much sense either. Yet many of my readers pointed out that Pakistan.de can be used for tourism, politics, etc. So a discussion of the fact that Philadelphia is a city should have at least been explored by the panelist.

Kraft owns many other Philadelphia country code domains, including Philadelphia.be, .de, .com.mx, and .co.uk.

Kraft hasn’t always lucked out going after its brands in country code domain names though. Last year it lost a case for Oreo.nl.

An old domain name renewal scam that uses the domain name domainrenewalonline.org appears to be kicking into high gear. I received three scam emails from the company yesterday, each from three different sender names.

With subject lines such as “Regarding your domain” and “Information about your domain”, the notices signed by “ISP Renewal” try to get you to submit your credit card information to renew domain names. It appears the scam has been sniffed out by hosting companies, as none of the links in the emails I received over the weekend resolve to working web pages.

There are several clues in the e-mails that they are fake, beyond the fact that a company is trying to get you to renew a domain name at another registrar:

1. Spelling and grammatical errors
2. The domains aren’t actually expiring in 60 days, as the email claims
3. In my case, I no longer own one of the domains

Here is the content of the scam emails:

Customer

This is to remind you that, it is time to renew you domain name NEWLYWEDS.net, the expiry date is 60 days .
Renew your domain automatically with a Domain Renewal. Click to renew your domain name
————> http://WWW.DOMAIN.net.domainrenewalonline.org/

Once the payment has been completed the above mentioned domain name will Automatically be renewed and a conformation will be sent.
__________________________________

Sincerely ISP Renewal
__________________________________

Additional information.
Renewal reminder service has been developed for companies to avoid loss temporary dysfunction of domain names in case of failure of on time renewal. By using this service you will automatically renew your domain name without any additional changes to the whois database. The only change will be the new expiry date. You may also contact your current domain provider in order to perform the extension.
In case of any questions do not hesitate to contact us at
Tel: +44 20 3318 1883
Fax: +44 20 3318 1884