Company has murky past.

The battle over Live Current Media’s board is heating up, and with each war of words more of the company’s questionable past comes out into the open.

In Live Current’s Preliminary Proxy Statement for its upcoming meeting, current CEO Geoffrey Hampson said he began to have a falling out with the Jeffs family after Hampson didn’t have Live Current buy the web site Makeup.com.

Confused? Take a look at the players.

David Jeffs – former President of Live Current
Richard Jeffs – David’s father
Geoffrey Hampson – current CEO and Chairman of Board

According to the proxy statement, Richard Jeffs wanted Live Current to purchase Makeup.com, a company that Richard Jeffs said he controlled. Live Current reviewed the idea but ultimately passed. The relationship between Hampson and Jeffs deteriorated from there, at least according to the statement.

Have you heard of Makeup.com before? There are two reasons. First, L’Oreal bought it for seven figures earlier this year.

Second, and more importantly, Live Current used to own Makeup.com back when Live Current was called Communicate.com. Communicate.com sold the domain name to Manhattan Assets Corp along with Automobile.com, Exercise.com, and Call.com. But you know what? Richard Jeffs served as a director at Manhattan Assets Corp.

Come again? Basically members of the Jeffs family purchased Automobile.com, Exercise.com, Call.com and Makeup.com from Communicate.com. Then they “sold” Call.com back to Communicate.com in order to eliminate an ongoing royalty payment provision while Richard’s son was still President of the company. Later, Richard allegedly asked Live Current to also buy Makeup.com back. [Update: I am told that Richard Jeffs was not a director at Manhattan when the original deal was done; he was a director when the sell back of Call.com occurred].

Richard Jeffs was also a party to a settlement with the British Columbia Securities Commission (the “BCSC”) in April 2007. It turns out the Jeffs family is tied to what The Vancouver Sun called a boiler room.

One of the stocks it pushed was Communicate.com.

My thoughts on last week’s conference in Seattle.

I’ve re-written this blog post a couple times as I try to get my head around the Epik Developers Conference last week in Seattle. I’m reflecting on what it means for Epik as well as for the domain community. This is no easy task.

So I’m going to punt and go with a stream-of-conscious. Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way first.

Professionalism – this is something often lacking in the domain name community. But it defined the Epik conference. First class hotel, food, and meeting space. More shocking was that everything started on time. It was like clockwork, never off by more than 10 minutes. That’s rare at a domain conference.

Content -Epik DevCon was a user conference. This means it focuses on giving clients information they need to have a mutually beneficial relationship with the company. About 60% of the content at DevCon was specific to Epik, including how its products are working, how people are getting the most out of Epik, and what’s coming in the future. The other 40% was more general, including SEO and social media.

People – as the first ever user conference for a startup, I guessed about 50-60 people would show up. I was wrong. 88 people registered, and a handful more came to the open events. That’s very strong. But more importantly was the quality of people. They were all open-minded. So energetic about the future. No egos in the room. OK, so I was there. And there was Chris Pirillo (I’m joking, Chris).

I made more new contacts and had more sit down conversations at this event than in most domain conferences. Attendees are still buzzing on the social networking site for the event. It was also great to see GoDaddy sponsoring the event, and I got to meet my GoDaddy account rep. I attend conferences for the people, and I was happy with the results.

Now let’s think about what this event means for the industry.

Epik has some of the right elements of a successful company — a respected leader, funding, strong customer base. Where that leads is hard to tell. I saw some really innovative ideas for web sites at the conference that can be leveraged into full-fledged web properties. And the energy of attendees was much higher than I’m used to seeing at a domain conference.

Some people will call what Epik does “mass development”. In the history of the web there has never been a mass development effort that hasn’t flailed out after a few years. Google killed them all. But I don’t look at Epik as a mass web site developer. Instead, I look at it as a platform. A platform that gives users the ability to create meaningful, user-friendly web sites that add value. Epik can deliver part of the puzzle, but clients need to run with it. Hopefully both pieces of the puzzle will click.

I can say that the attendees at last week’s conference are some of the most open-minded and energetic in the industry. They aren’t looking at the past; they’re looking at the future.

It gives me a lot of hope.

EFF calls bill “misguided gift to a shortsighted industry”.

Electronic Frontier Foundation is weighing in on the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, and it doesn’t like what it sees.

In an analysis EFF posted online, the group says the bill would “break the Internet one domain at a time — by requiring domain registrars/registries, ISPs, DNS providers, and others to block Internet users from reaching certain websites.”

EFF makes several points, some of which echo my take on the bill.

1. This is a censorship bill that runs roughshod over freedom of speech on the Internet.

2. It is designed to undermine basic Internet infrastructure.

3. COICA sends the world the message that the United States approves of unilateral Internet censorship

4. The bill’s imbalances threaten to complicate existing laws and policies.

There’s some good insight in EFF’s analysis. I’m particularly worried about #2 and #3.

Among the issues EFF draws attention to is an internet blacklist of domains not taking down but deemed in violation. EFF says domains will get on the list by a “McCarthy-like procedure of public snitching”.

University loses claim for domain name registered five years prior to its existence.

Bridgepoint Education’s Ashford University has lost a UDRP case for the domain name Ashford.net because it doesn’t understand how dates work.

Bridgepoint bought Franciscan University of the Prairies in 2005 and renamed it Ashford University. It also got the corresponding Ashford.edu.

In this UDRP case the University went after the owner of Ashford.net, but the domain name was registered all the way back in 2000. Yes, the domain name does have pay-per-click ads for education and financial aid. But it’s impossible that the domain name was registered in bad faith five years before Ashford came into existence. That does not compute.

Perhaps Bridgepoint’s lawyers need to take some math classes at Ashford.

Digital.com goes up for sale.

Technology giant HP is offering the domain name Digital.com for sale, but it’s going to cost you.

The domain name has been listed in Moniker’s upcoming live domain name auction taking place in Prague October 6. Reserve price: somewhere between $1 million and $5 million.

HP got the domain name when it acquired Compaq.

Moniker will auction off 80 other domain names during its DOMAINfest conference live domain name auction.

Among the domains are “me too” domains. I call them “me too” because they obviously hope to capitalize on recent big dollar sales.

But in this case the me too domains are good ones. It’s not like they’re trying to sell MyGunsOnline.com because Guns.com sold for $800,000 earlier this year. Instead, it’s Gun.com. Also on the block is SlotMachine.com, trying to capitalize on the $5.5 million sale of Slots.com.

Gun.com has a $750k-$1M reserve, and SlotMachine.com is above $1M. These seem lofty, but you never know.

IdeaLab is also getting in on the action, offering Tools.com for somewhere over $1M.

Here are some of the domains in the auction that I like within the stated reserve range:

ETFs.com $50k-$100k
LiveStock.com $10k-$25k
Megan.com $25k-$50k
PackandShip.com $2.5k-$5k
Retailer.com $25k-$50k – would be good for a magazine or retailers’ consortium
ShortSale.com $50k-$100k – I’d love to see a site with all of the listed house short sales in the area
Shout.com $250k-$500k – I like this at the lower end of the range