Company files lawsuit against competitor over trademark and domain name.

You know those annoying pop up video spokespeople that walk across your screen on certain web sites? Apparently competition to sell web site publishers a video spokesperson is rather intense.

Live Face On Web, LLC has filed a lawsuit (pdf) in U.S. District Court against WebsiteTalkingHeads.com, a competitor, claiming trademark infringement and cybersquatting.

The defendant allegedly registered LiveFaceWeb.com and forwards it to its main web site WebsiteTalkingHeads.com.

The plaintiff’s web site is LifeFaceonWeb.com.

Interestingly, Life Face on Web, LLC also argues that the defendant registered WebsiteTalkingHeads.com in bad faith and demands that it be transferred to it as well.

Although I understand the argument for LiveFaceWeb.com, the request to transfer the second domain has me scratching my head.

Company forwards domain name after recovering it from cybersquatter.

Apple has started forwarding iPhone4s.com — a domain name it recovered from a cybersquatter that showed porn — to the iPhone page on Apple.com.

The domain name started forwarding to Apple’s web site yesterday.

Earlier this month Apple filed a complaint with World Intellectual Property Forum to get the domain name and six others, all of which forwarded to mobile porn sites. Just before Thanksgiving Apple convinced the owner of the domain names to hand them over. The other domains recovered are:

iphonecamforce.com
iphonecam4s.com
iphoneporn4s.com
iphonesex4s.com
iphonexxxforce.com
porn4iphones.com

But iPhone4s.com continued to forward to a porn site even after the domain was transferred, until yesterday.

Porn fans may be disappointed to find out that the other six domain names no longer resolve to web sites.

Company does its best to keep recall out of the press and out of the search engines.

Last month I wrote about how the company behind Proactiv, the skin care product pitched by Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, had registered multiple domain names hinting at a recall of its product.

Although I couldn’t find information about the recall on Guthy-Renker’s web site, I noticed a steady and increasing stream of web site visitors hitting the article who were searching for “proactiv recall”.

Indeed, it turns out the company is recalling product. But it’s being rather quiet about it.

It isn’t using any of the straight forward domain names I discovered, such as ProactivRecall.com. That page doesn’t resolve. Instead you’ll find information at PAbottlereplacement.com.

It gets better. The web site has “no index” in its robots.txt file, meaning the company doesn’t want it to show up in search engines. The title tag doesn’t include the name “Proactiv” either.

So if you do a Google search for the term, odds are you won’t find any official information.

But the domain names gave it away.

Google Analytics real time is nice feature but no replacement for dedicated services.

Remember when people used to pay six figures to get web site analytics like what Google now offers for free? That shook up the industry.

Now Google’s real time analytics threatens to destroy a couple startups including ChartBeat and Woopra.

Google just rolled out real-time analytics to the masses and I played around with it a bit last week.

My conclusion: tt’s a nice addition to Google Analytics but it isn’t a replacement for Chartbeat or Woopra.

Woopra is my favorite real time analytics tool. I like how I can quickly see who’s on my site, where they came from, and what they’re doing.

Google’s real time has a great dashboard but doesn’t have the same visitor-by-visitor view that I’ve come to enjoy.

That doesn’t mean that it is far behind, though. I’d be concerned if I were in the real time analytics business.

Company blames domain name registrar that received proceeds of transaction in its bank account.

National A-1, a large buyer of premium domain names, is fighting in court to recover $35,000 it paid to buy the Walk.com domain name. After it paid for the domain name it found out the name was stolen.

According to National A-1′s complaint, it was contacted by the supposed owner of the domain name in April of this year. It struck a deal to purchase the domain for $35,000 and used Escrow.com to handle the transaction.

After the domain was transferred and the funds released, the “real” owner of the domain contacted National A-1 and informed it that the domain had been stolen.

Walk.com’s owner said the domain was hijacked out of his GoDaddy account and transferred to an account at Melbourne IT, where it was subsequently transferred to National A-1.

National A-1 later found out that the account that received the funds from Escrow.com was registered in the name of OnlineNIC, a domain registrar that has faced heavyweight cybersquatting battles from Microsoft and Verizon.

For its part, OnlineNIC says that an “unknown perpetrator” caused the money to be transferred to OnlineNIC’s account.

This case will be interesting to watch.