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AppDetex raises $10 million in Series B

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Company that fights domain registrars over access to Whois data pockets $10 million.

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Brand protection company AppDetex has raised $10 million in a round led by First Analysis. It has raised $17.5 million to date; a prior round was led by EPIC Ventures and Origin Ventures, which also participated this time.

AppDetex is best known in the domain name industry for its complaints about access to redacted Whois data. It tends to request a lot of redacted data just before ICANN meetings and then complains that it didn’t get satisfactory responses.

Its key client for the domain data is Facebook, and the two companies have a close relationship. Facebook acquired a domain name registrar from AppDetex in 2016.

AppDetex is based in Boise, Idaho.

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5 little-known tools for finding great domains

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These linguistic tools will help you brainstorm good domain names.

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Last week I interviewed Anthony Shore of Operative Words to understand how he comes up with names for his clients. He mentioned many tools he uses. I call these little-known because they aren’t domain name tools; they are powerful linguistic and dictionary tools that will help you brainstorm names.

I recommend listening to the full podcast to understand how Anthony uses each tool, but here’s a rundown.

Sketch Engine – This is a very powerful tool but has a learning curve, especially if you don’t have a linguistic background. It’s inexpensive and there’s a free trial so you can try it before you buy it.

OneLook.com – Great thesaurus capabilities and wildcarding.

RhymeZone – Find rhyming words, synonyms, adjectives and other words.

MRC Psycholinguistic Database – Good for substitutions, wildcarding, etc. (Listen to an example in the podcast.)

GoldenDict – A dictionary lookup program that allows you to search multiple dictionaries.

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MMX reports strong start to 2019

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Domain name company touts topline growth to kick off 2019.

MMX LogoTop level domain name company MMX (Minds + Machines) (LSE:MMX) is reporting a strong start to 2019.

In an investor update issued today, the company said that domain registrations are up 38% year-over-year so far this year to 1.84 million registrations. Billings are up 129%. The company credits the first time contribution from ICM Registry domains as well as strong growth in China.

MMX is seeing a 91% renewal rate on .XXX domains, part of the ICM acquisition.

Donuts co-founder Dan Schindler is now a Special Advisor to the company to help it on its premium domains strategy. Schindler left Donuts a while back and recently resurfaced in the industry. Christa Taylor was also formally announced as the company’s Chief Marketing Officer. Taylor had consulted for the company starting last year and became CMO ahead of NamesCon this year.

The company plans to pay off its outstanding debt early this month.

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Public Interest Registry (.Org) hires three new execs

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Song-Marshall, Abley and Vora join PIR executive team.

Pictures of new PIR hires Judy Song-Marshall, Joe Abley, Anand Vora.

L to R: Judy Song-Marshall, Joe Abley, Anand Vora. Photos from LinkedIn.

Public Interest Registry (PIR), the non-profit that runs the .org top level domain name, has hired three domain name industry veterans to join its executive team. It is still searching for a Chief Financial Officer.

The three hires are:

Judy Song-Marshall, Chief of Staff: Judy comes from Neustar, where she was Director of Registry Services. She also ran product marketing for the company for over seven years and spent over 11 years at the company, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Joe Abley, Chief Technology Officer: Joe worked as Infrastructure Scientist at domain registry Afilias for the past year. He previously worked for Dyn and ICANN. Afilias provides the technical registry operations for PIR.

Anand Vora, Vice President of Business Affairs: Anand joins PIR from its new CEO Jon Nevett’s alma mater, Donuts. This is a round trip for Vora, who interned for PIR when he got his MBA at George Washington University and started his career at the company as a product management specialist and then channel manager for Asia.

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Wow: Over 64,000 .Dev domain names registered

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The .Dev top level domain is off to a strong start.

Google launched the .dev top level domain name yesterday and the domain already has over 64,000 registrations.

The zone file for .dev on ICANN’s reporting system currently shows about 15,000, so it’s missing many of the domains. Still, based on my review of the zone file, it looks like last name and first/last name combos are popular; individual developers are buying their name ending in .dev. Development terms and company names are also popular.

While these numbers are slightly behind Google’s early success with .app, they are a lot higher than I expected. Google’s cachet with developers and its PR capabilities are certainly driving registrations.

The company is offering a free .dev domain for one year to applicants for this year’s Google I/O conference but this represents only a small part of the 64,000 registrations.

The entire .dev top level domain name is on the HSTS preload list, so .dev domain names need an SSL certificate in order to resolve. (Learn more about this here.)

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