New TLD applicant plans big launch party and live auction in Macau.
It’s going to be really difficult for new top level domain backers to get much attention for their launches in an environment where multiple TLDs are launching every week.
But TLD Registry, which is launching Chinese equivalents of online (.在线) and website (.中文网) is going all in with a two day celebration and live domain name auction.
The event is scheduled for March 20-21 at the Galaxy Macau, a five star resort in the tourist and gambling destination. It is timed to precede the ICANN meeting taking place in Singapore.
(Speaking of timing, all of the key dates of the domains’ launch, including sunrise, landrush and general availability, are planned to land on “lucky days” in the Chinese culture.)
The event will also include a live domain name auction that will have online bidding via Sedo.
Details about the event are here in English and here in Chinese.
Thanks for posting news of our Macau event, Andrew! We’ve put six months of planning into the 2-day agenda — you’re right, we’re going all-in. DNW isn’t the forum for promoting the traction we’ve achieved to date, aside from noting that our management team and investors are quite satisfied so far. Hope to see you in Macau in March!
Glad to hear it’s going well. Keep me posted on any developments.
All the while Verisign is CHOKING on IDN.com implementation. Sad, sad company. Lucky for everyone else in the idn.whatever world.
I’d lay the blame at the feet of ICANN and the IPC, rather than Verisign. EPICFAIL for ICANN’s IDN staff’s inability to forward-plan, considering the thousands of existing registrants still unable to properly use their domains.
Thanks for the clarification Drewbert. You guys are the pros when it comes to the details about implementation and idn’s in general. I am just amazed that something as powerful as idn.com is still waiting to be implemented??? I mean they have given the idn.cctld’s a huge head start which wasn’t supposed to happen.
Also I have almost all of my idn.com names parked at dns. Everytime I check more and more traffic is hitting these idn.com names. The revenue while not huge cash consistently beats my English.com and .cctld names. There is REAL traffic and eyeballs visiting idn.com’s in all languages. I am assuming any idn.whatever will BLEED bad to the .com equivalent. Seems logical after Overstock had the kahuna’s to admit the o.co bleed of over 60%.
“The event will also include a live domain name auction that will have online bidding via Sedo.”
Would that be the Sedo with whom you cannot park, sell, or buy a domain with Chinese characters to the right of of the dot?
Hi Wot – I’m happy to report that Sedo’s platform does support IDNs. We have a long history of being a global provider of domain services – our website is available for people to trade domains in 7 languages, we have a support staff of domain professionals that speak 25 languages, and we’ve supported non-English characters to the left of the dot for some time. Since our platform already supports non-English characters, extending to IDNs in Chinese or other languages to the right of the dot – as we’re seeing with some new TLDs – was a natural extension. Sedo users will be able to buy, park and sell IDNs as soon as our partners like “Dot Chines Online” and “Dot Chinese Website” launch on the platform. As a global player with the widest reach in the industry, we’re excited about the possibilities these TLDs bring to the market. I hope that set’s the record straight and clarifies any confusion.
SEDO has always had problems with IDN’s. It appears they’re slowly getting the hang of Unicode, but it’s still not quite there.
If I search (selecting “contains”) for 中文, the site returns 84 results. If I search for 中 I get 634 results. If I search for 文 I only get 12 results.
Does not compute.
Thanks for the detailed example, Drewbert. We’ll definitely have our marketplace team look into it.
And if you search for .中国 or this .香港 you get this: “You have entered an invalid character. Domain names may only contain letters, numbers and hyphens (-). All other special characters are not available in a domain name.”
.中国 (.China) .香港 (.Hong Kong) , these extensions,and others, have been around for a long time particularly in the case of .中国. Sedo have been asked on many occasions what they doing about it and it was simply ongoing procrastination with never a definitive answer.
I even know of one Chinese registrar who put off an alliance with Sedo because of this.
Seems like a meeting with VeriSign, ICANN, and representatives from the IPC could result in common sense policies, agreements and IP protections that would satisfy all parties and allow IDN.com to move towards implementation. This is a sad stall, mostly created by the IPC blindsiding the IDN community at the 11th hour when the solutions and ‘fixes’ could be easily agreed among the parties in the years leading up release of the new gTLDs. VeriSign never changed its plans, and they have been upfront and open with communication all the way.