O.info latest domain name acquisition by online retailer.

Overstock.com has acquired O.info from domain name registry Afilias, adding to its collection of o.tld names.

The company has gone all in with O.co, and in fact its press release announcing O.info is titled “O.co (aka Overstock.com) Acquires O.info Domain for New Consumer Portal”. It’s clear that the company is moving forward with its rebranding efforts.

It previously picked up O.biz for use as a b2b site.

O.co will use O.info as a “new consumer information website”, if that’s not generic enough for you.

Of course the company ultimately wants to get O.com, but single letter domains are still forbidden in .com.

U.S. government says Full Tilt Poker paid out money to investors that belonged to players.

Earlier this year the U.S. government confiscated Full Tilt Poker’s domain name FullTiltPoker.com. The government later gave the domain name back, but now there’s more bad new for the company — or should I say its players?

Now the U.S. government has basically called it a giant ponzi scheme. The company allegedly didn’t hold onto all of its players’ cash balances and instead distributed much of it, including as profits to the owners.

It sure seems that the best way to control the online gambling industry is to legalize it in the U.S. and then regulate it.

Quidsi follows up Wag.com with YoYo.com.

Today Quidsi, which is owned by Amazon.com, launched its latest store: online toy store YoYo.com.

The choice of domain name follows Quidsi’s pattern of launching vertical stores on great domain names.

It all started with Diapers.com, then moved to Soap.com (toiletries) and Wag.com (pets).

YoYo.com launches with over 20,000 toys, video games, books, and collectibles. Similar to its other stores, YoYo offers free 1-2 day delivery and same day delivery in Manhattan.

Although there are benefits to Amazon owning separate brands and letting them run on their own, this also creates a bit of frustration for consumers. I recently comparison shopped for the same pair of shoes on Amazon.com, Zappos, and Endless.com. All three are owned by Amazon but had different prices and different stock. At some point this must become inefficient.

Austin company buys another killer domain name.

Austin, Texas online savings company Vertive has acquired the domain name CouponCodes.com for an undisclosed sum.

Vertive is now stranger to the power of domain names. It operates Offers.com (it also owns Offer.com) and company founder Steve Schaffer sometimes attends domain name conferences.

According to an article in The Austin American-Statesman, Schaffer has been pursuing the domain name for several years. The seller finally held a “mini-auction” for the domain name:

“Coupon codes are what people are looking for now when they’re shopping online, so we see this as a premium domain,” said Steve Schaffer, Vertive founder and CEO. Schaffer said it’s unclear who owned the name previously.

“Buying domain names is a complex process because you often don’t know who owns them, so trying to make contact and have a discussion takes time,” Schaffer said. “In this case, the owners decided to run a mini-auction, and we got it.”

Although the domain name has been protected by whois privacy for many years, historical whois records show a whois entry on September 13 with a registration name of Dolesco LLC and Doug Isenberg of GigaLaw Firm as the contact. Isenberg is a panelist for World Intellectual Property Forum and has written about domain names and whois privacy in the past.

ICANN releases yet another — but not necessarily final — applicant guidebook for new gTLDs.

As I promised in a post yesterday, ICANN has released another version of the new top level domain name guidebook today.

Although many will look at this is the final guidelines, there’s still room for changes. ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom writes:

ICANN will provide further refinements to the Guidebook as warranted. In addition, information will be given on the process for providing assistance for potential applicants from developing countries. Details are currently under development by the Joint Applicant Support Working Group, staffed by independent stakeholders.

Here’s a link to the guidebook.