Paul Nicks’ inventions related to name spinning and appraisals get patent protection.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office today issued two patents to GoDaddy related to name spinning and appraisal.

U.S. Patent number 8,447,701 is titled “Appraising domain names using comparative data” and 8,447,702 (pdf) is “Domain appraisal algorithm”.

The patents have lots of overlapping material. They cover name spinning to create permutations of domain names as well as multiple aspects of automatically generating a domain name appraisal.

Here’s a summary of some of the aspects of domain valuation that the patent describes:

The appraisal may be accomplished by breaking the valuation of the domain into five logical groupings, possibly including evaluation of “5 P’s” related to the domain name. Evaluation of “precision” may include the number of distinct keywords found, the length of the name and the number of keywords found in the dictionary. Evaluation of “popularity” may include various search engine search result metrics and tracking of words searched per month. Evaluation of “presence” may include the age of the domain, and the rank of the web site according to web ranking services or software. Evaluation of “pattern” may include the number of premium characters, the part of speech (such as noun, plural noun, verb, adjective, etc., possibly considering if the domain is a one word domain), the relationship of vowels and consonants etc. (possibly considering if the domain is a 4-5 character word). Evaluation of Pay-Per-Click, or PPC, may include the maximum number of pay-per-click bids from various advertising tracking services or software, and the number of ads returned within search engine searches. A dynamic multiplier based on registration statistics for each of several top level domains (TLDs) may then be applied to the domain evaluation. This multiplier may be used to give a very accurate measure of domain scarcity to let a user or evaluator know how rare a domain name is.

Paul Nicks, Director of Product Development GoDaddy.com’s Aftermarket, is listed as inventor on both patents.

A mobile friendly website for restaurants that doesn’t have any of my pet peeves.

On Friday I received a press release from GoDaddy about how its website builder had new functionality and specific templates for restaurants.

It was Friday afternoon and I generally don’t care much about small business website builders. The combination of these two led me to click the “delete” button. But then I quickly hit “undo”.

Wait? Did that say specialized websites for restaurants? Did it also mention mobile?

You see, one thing that annoys me to no end is restaurant websites. As a whole, they are horrible.

The key problem is that they aren’t design for mobile. Yet restaurant websites are the one category I primarily browse from a mobile device. You know the experience — you’re out somewhere, want to get something to eat, and start looking for something online. Or you know where you want to eat but would like to call ahead to get your name on the waitlist.

So you search for the restaurant’s website. It comes up.

Then you try to click the phone number on the site to call the restaurant and it doesn’t work. You tap your finger several times before you realize they made the phone number a graphic rather than text, so the phone doesn’t recognize that it’s a phone number. You then have to remember the number, switch to your dialer, and type it in.

Or you find an interesting restaurant in the area and want to see the menu. You click the menu link…and it’s a PDF.

Yes, a PDF. I’d bet 9 our of 10 restaurants have a pdf for their online menu. That’s very annoying when you’re on a mobile device.

OK, now back to the GoDaddy product. I figured I’d check it out and see if it “solved” the problem of restaurant web pages.

The example GoDaddy provided in its press release is Malee’s Thai Bistro in Scottsdale. I visited the site from my Droid, and the screenshot in this post is what I saw.

It was darn near perfect. A button to call. A button to pull up the map. A button to view the menu…and it’s not a PDF. (The menu’s are actually managed by a third party service that let’s restaurants update them easily.)

The site was mobile optimized. A quick scroll and you can see the hours.

The only thing missing was a link to OpenTable to make a reservation, although I don’t know if Malee’s uses OpenTable.

I’m not going to opine on the desktop version. But from a mobile standpoint, I love it.

I’m sure there are other good website builders for restaurants. In fact, if you search for Malee’s you’ll find a website that I assume is an older one they created with another company. It’s not bad, either.

Regardless of which builder a restaurant uses, I wish more would get on the bandwagon.

In another sign of rebranding, The GoDaddy.com Bowl is now the GoDaddy Bowl.

GoDaddy is in the process of rebranding from GoDaddy.com to simply GoDaddy.

With the change, the football game formerly known as the GoDaddy.com Bowl will be called merely the GoDaddy Bowl next year, reports AL.com.

GoDaddy announced plans to change its brand to a group of new top level domain applicants in March. The company will drop the .com from its branding over the coming year and has applied for a trademark for the new logo sans .com. As of right now the logo on its web site still includes .com. Also as part of the rebrand, I’ve noticed that the company is referring to itself as GoDaddy instead of Go Daddy (with a space).

The domain registrar has sponsored the bowl, played in Mobile, Alabama, since 2011. Prior to GoDaddy’s sponsorship it was known as the GMAC Bowl. The game features teams from the Mid-American and Sun Belt conferences.

Tucows reports earnings, says domain investors are proceeding cautiously on domain buys as they assess the impact of new TLDs.

Tucows reported earnings this afternoon, recording its twelfth consecutive quarter of record revenue (year over year).

The company generated $30.0 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2013 and reported a slight profit of $0.1 million for the quarter.

That compares to a $1.7 million profit in the same quarter last year. Most of the difference was due to additional investments of about $1 million during the quarter for the acquisition of new Ting customers. Ting is Tucows’ mobile phone offering. The rest was due primarily to foreign exchange and a one time sale of intangible assets in Q1 2012.

Tucows’ Retail business was its big growth driver this quarter, generating $4.3 million compared to $1.8 million in Q1 2012. The retail segment includes domain registrar Hover.com and Ting.

The company pulled in $2.3 million in Ting mobile device and service sales during the quarter. It finished March with 16,000 Ting subscribers and 26,000 devices under management. That’s 6,000 more subscribers and 11,000 more devices than at the end of 2012.

The portfolio segment, which includes monetizing the company’s domain portfolio through parking and domain sales, generated $1.1 million in the quarter. That compares to $1.9 million in the same quarter last year. $0.5 million of the decrease was due to lower domain sales, which the company says was due to lower sales of “big ticket” domains.

In its quarterly report, Tucows claims that it’s seeing evidence that some domain investors are assessing the impact of new TLDs on their businesses. This is slowing their domain investment purchases.

SEC filing sheds (some) light on relationship for new top level domains.

A lot of fuss has been made about the connection between Demand Media and Donuts and the new TLD program.

What exactly is the relationship between the two companies? Demand Media’s latest 10-Q, filed today, explains the terms of the agreement:

As part of its initiative to pursue the acquisition of gTLD operator rights, the Company has entered into a gTLD acquisition agreement (“gTLD Agreement”) with Donuts Inc. (“Donuts”). The gTLD Agreement provides the Company with rights to acquire the operating and economic rights to certain gTLDs. These rights are shared equally with Donuts and are associated with specific gTLDs (“Covered gTLDs”) for which Donuts is the applicant under the New gTLD Program. The Company has the right, but not the obligation, to make further deposits with Donuts in the pursuit of acquisitions of Covered gTLDs, for example as part of the ICANN auction process. The operating and economic rights for each Covered gTLD will be determined through a process whereby the Company and Donuts each select gTLDs from the pool of Covered gTLDs, with the number of selections available to each party based upon the proportion of the total acquisition price of all Covered gTLDs that they funded. Gains on sale of the Company’s interest in Covered gTLDs will be recognized when realized, while losses will be recognized when deemed probable. Separately, the Company entered into an agreement to provide certain back-end registry services for gTLD operator rights owned by Donuts for a period of five years commencing from the launch of Donut’s first gTLD. Demand Media is not an investor in Donuts nor involved in any joint venture with Donuts or its affiliates.

Note the last line of the explanation, which may have been added to diffuse any suggestions of a tighter relationship between the companies.

So far Demand has made $18.2 million in capital investment in the new TLD program, most of which was paid to Donuts. The company’s $185,000-per-application fee for its 26 own TLD applications represents less than $5 million of the capital investment.

Demand has already incurred formation expenses of $4.3 million through the end of March related to new TLDs. It expects up to spend an additional $5 to $10 million on formation expenses in 2013.

In a somewhat unrelated note regarding to the company’s 10-Q, it appears there’s an error in its filing. The filing refers to the cost of .com domains and Verisign’s latest agreement with ICANN. The note in the 10-Q says the new agreement allows Verisign to hike prices 7% in four of the six years of the contract. That’s not the case; the prices are fixed for the term. I suspect this information was inserted when the contract was agreed to by ICANN but before the Department of Commerce got involved. It was never updated after the final agreement was inked.