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Revamped team to give Topcoin a go

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With a full-time staff, Topcoin is ready for new life.

Picture of phone with Topcoin cryptocurrency logoA new team is taking a stab at Topcoin, the cryptocurrency-based customer loyalty program for digital goods.

While some of these people have been involved for a while, the company officially announced that Josh Metnick, Michael Blend, Ammar Kubba and John Detjen are part of the team working on relaunching Topcoin. Detjen is the CEO.

Uniregistry announced last month that it was dropping support for Topcoin. It was the biggest company issuing and redeeming Topcoin, so it was a big blow to the business.

Now Topcoin is doubling down.

“Topcoin has never, until now, had a full-time staff,” Detjen explained. “It has always been a part-time endeavor with no resources. Now we have six people working on it, with five devs.”

The company will launch a wallet app at NamesCon. It will also have five people on site to reach out to merchant partners.

In theory, Topcoin’s 21,000+ wallet holders could be a boon to companies that accept Topcoin. But they’ll need to offer meaningful redemption of the cryptocurrency.

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NameBio adds 5 new features and paid accounts

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Power tools available with paid memberships.

List of NameBio membership rates

Domain sales database NameBio added new features under paid memberships.

Domain names sales database Namebio has added the five most-requested features to its system under new paid tiers. The added features are:

1. Search sales history in bulk – run a list of domains through the bulk search to find out if they have sold before and for how much.

2. Save searches – get notifications when a domain name meeting your requirements sells.

3. Search sales under $100 – NameBio only shows sales results of $100 or more. Paid members will be able to see sub-$100 sales, which are typically expired domain auction sales.

4. Export search results – export results into Excel.

5. More results per search – paid tiers include up to unlimited results per search instead of the 100 for guest users and 150 for registered users.

The paid tiers are $10, $25 and $100 per month. The $25 Domainer tier is required to export search results and see domains under $100. This plan and the $100 plan also remove banner ads from the site. All plans also include discounts for listing featured domains on the site to get more exposure for them.

The new tools are compelling and I believe easily justified for the price.

NameBio published details and use cases in a blog post today.

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Registry websites for former FFM top level domains are all down

by — Services 5 Comments

Registry sites with contact information have gone dark.

[Update: I heard back from the court-appointed administrator. The problem has been fixed.]

The registry websites for top level domain names that were formerly owned by Famous Four Media are all down.

Famous Four Media’s domains are now part of a portfolio owned by Global Registry Services (GRS) Ltd after some sort of investor revolt, as outlined at Domain Incite. GRS is being managed by a court-appointed administrator who works at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

With a low-price strategy, these domains have over 4 million domains second level domains. .Loan has 2.2 million domains in the zone file. Other top domains include .win, .men and .stream.

But for about the past week, DNW readers report they have been unable to visit any of the nic.TLD sites such as nic.loan. These sites include abuse contacts for the domains.

I have reached out to the court-appointed administrator for comment.

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Why DreamHost is holding off on WordPress 5.0 updates

by — Services 3 Comments

Hosting company will delay auto-updates until after Christmas as a precaution.

Earlier this week I wrote about how GoDaddy auto-updated its managed WordPress customers to WordPress 5.0 shortly after it came out and why I thought this was a bad idea. This week I also interviewed Mika Epstein, a WordPress engineer at DreamHost, for an upcoming podcast and asked her how DreamHost was handling the update.

“In this case, because 5.0 was such a major update, we actually haven’t begun running our auto updates yet for customers,” Epstein said.

DreamHost usually pushes out updates quickly but made an exception for WordPress 5.0.

“If it’s a security update, we’re absolutely going to push it out immediately and run upgrades on everyone, but in this case, because it’s the change that involves the new WordPress blog editor, formerly known as Gutenberg, and because it is such a dramatic change to so many things, we opted to wait until after the holiday season.”

While most sites can handle the 5.0 update without a problem, the company didn’t want to risk an update that breaks a site (especially an ecommerce site) during this busy time of the year.

“It’s really a gamble,” Epstein said. “I’d love to say that the majority of sites are going to be fine with 5.0 and this is true. That said, the people that are going to break are our high profile customers, are our customers who have e-commerce stores who maybe haven’t been keeping up with all their plugins and their theme updates like they should.”

DreamHost will notify all customers about the update and give them a chance to opt-out before pushing out automatic updates.

Epstein noted that each hosting service will make an auto-update decision based on its user base.

 

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Escrow.com adds regulatory compliance officer

by — Services 3 Comments

Fereba Ashufta

Escrow company popular in the domain industry hires compliance officer from HSBC.

Escrow.com has hired a compliance offer to handle its Anti Money Laundering Compliance Program and other regulatory issues.

Fereba Ashufta joins Escrow.com from HSBC, where she was a Regional Regulatory Compliance Officer.

Escrow.com is a popular escrow service for many types of transactions but much of its business is with domain names. It has amped up its know your customer (KYC) processes in recent years, requiring both buyers and sellers to provide proof of identification.

The company says Ashufta will be in charge of its Anti Money Laundering Compliance Program as well as the company’s regulatory relationships and obligations.

“As a market-leading escrow service provider across the United States and further afield, regulatory oversight plays an essential role in our business and the assurance we continue to offer to our customers and marketplace partners,” said Jackson Elsegood, General Manager of Escrow.com

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