Super Bowl commercials to feature Pussycat Dolls and new .co girl.

The latest incarnation of the Pussycat Dolls will star in one of GoDaddy.com’s Super Bowl commercials next year. The group will be featured in a commercial dubbed “The Cloud” that will feature many of Go Daddy’s products with a play on its cloud offerings.

“The Cloud” will also feature Go Daddy Girl Danica Patrick.

Patrick and other Go Daddy girl Jillian Michaels will star in a .co commercial along with a new .co girl. The .co girl was (perhaps inadvertently) leaked by Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons in a photo a couple weeks ago, although I have no idea who she is.

An internet-only version of the .co commercial will feature a cameo from .Co Internet CEO Juan Diego Calle.

Planate Management Group guilty of attempting reverse domain name hijacking.

Ari Goldberger’s lawfirm ESQwire has won a reverse domain name hijacking claim on behalf of client Vertical Axis, which is Kevin Ham’s company.

The guilty party is Planate Management Group LLC of Alexandria, Virginia. The company owns Planate.net but wanted to get its hands on Planate.com in this dispute.

Yet Planate didn’t start using the name “planate” until 2008 according to a filed trademark. That’s three years after Vertical Axis registered the domain name. So this was a losing case from the beginning.

According to the panelists’ decision, Planate argued that subsequent renewals of the domain name were done in bad faith.

It also provided exhibits to the panel showing keywords on the Planate.com parked page that competed with the complainant. However, Vertical Axis believes these search results pages were fabricated by using the search box on the parked page.

In finding reverse domain name hijacking, the three person panel wrote:

…In the present case it is self-evident from the facts that the Respondent did not know and could not have known of the Complainant’s rights in the mark PLANATE because they did not come into being until (at least) three years after registration. This fact would be self-evident to the Complainant itself and indeed is acknowledged in the Complaint where it is stated:

“Even if the Respondent registered the ‘www.planate.com’ domain name prior to the Complainant’s first use of the trademark on November 8, 2007 …”

Even in its fallback for contention of bad faith registration based on paragraph 2 of the Policy i.e. assertions as to what the Respondent should have done on renewal, the Complainant specifically allows for the fact that the Respondent did not know of the Complainant or its trademark:

“These renewals notwithstanding, if the Respondent did not specifically know of the Complainant or if its trademark or [of] its trademark rights when it renewed the disputed domain name multiple times, the finding of bad faith registration should still be confirmed under the circumstances of this case by Vertical Access Inc’s willful blindness.

World Intellectual Property Organization just handed down another win for ESQwire and VerticalAxis today as well for Trucco.com.

Web could see a flood of .brand domain names.

There are a lot of new top level domain name service providers out there, and each has its own estimates on how many new TLD applications will be submitted next year.

Here are the numbers from Verisign: 1,000 to 1,500 applications and 2/3rds of them from brand owners.

This isn’t just another wild guess. Verisign runs the .com registry, so you can expect that many potential top level domain applicants have at least talked with the company about new TLDs.

Today I talked with Sarah Langstone, Director of Product Management at Verisign, about these predictions.

Langstone said that the numbers are extrapolated based on conversations the company has had with potential applicants. The company saw an upswing in inquiries as soon as ICANN formalized the date for the application window.

If you do the math on her estimates, we could potentially see 1,000 .brand applications.

Although Langstone isn’t overly surprised by the number of inquiries for .brand domains, she has been surprised by who they’re coming from.

“What I was surprised about were how many traditional bricks and mortar type firms were interested in applying for a new TLD,” she said. Some of the inquiries came from companies that don’t have a large online presence yet.

Langstone said that brands are saying they see marketing benefits in new TLDs: they can be shorter, more intuitive, and easier to remember. Some brands want to use them for partner or affiliate networks as a way to show that the partner is authentic.

However, she concedes that a lot of user education will be required to reap these benefits.

How many of the .brand TLDs will be used right away? Will companies go all in with their .brand? That remains to be seen. Langstone said a number of companies want to test .brand domains for market acceptance before deciding on a final plan of how to use it.

One thing is for sure. If .brand domains are successful, we’ll soon have a web of haves and have nots.

Vistaprint bolsters its small business web site offerings with acquisition.

If you think Vistaprint is just about “free” business cards, you are mistaken.

It’s actually a big competitor in the small business domain registration and web site business. It offers domain names and web sites on a monthly billing basis.

How big is its web site operation? Its nameservers for the product, vpweb.com, host over 333,000 domain names according to DomainTools.

Now the company is getting even bigger with the acquisition of Webs, Inc. The company offers do-it-yourself web site creation along with other tools. It claims 20,000 new users sign up every day for its products. It has about 100,000 paying subscribers.

Can you say “cross sell opportunities”?

Vistaprint is no dummy when it comes to the value of good domain names, either. It forked over $1.25 million for Vista.com back in 2007.

If domain name registrars that cater to small businesses haven’t yet taken notice of VistaPrint, they certainly are now.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons GoDaddy filed a patent application for selling business cards along with a domain name.

You might just catch a bidding foe sleeping.

Is it possible to catch other domainers sleeping?

It’s not easy, but the holidays are your best chance.

With many domainers either traveling or taking time off to be with family, expired and regular domain auctions ending over the next couple weeks present your best opportunity to not face the usual competition.

This is easier said than done. After all, a lot of home grown systems (as well as publicly available ones like Protrada) allow domainers to place bids in advance for auctions. And let’s face it, many domainers never take a minute off work.

Still, the absence of just one bidder in an online auction can mean a difference of thousands of dollars in final sale price.

So keep an eagle eye out this holiday season. You might land a good domain under the tree.