And here’s the news of the day, possibly of the year. Oversee.net, the parent company of DomainSponsor has purchased Snapnames today for an undisclosed sum. Big news, even a bit bigger because of the eNom (owned by Demand Media) deal reported on earlier.What’s next? Will they go public next year, or even later this year?

According to Frank Schilling, the rumour on the street is that the price was $25 or $50 Million USD.

As predicted, consolidation is and remains a major topic for the year - let’s see what the rest of the year brings. And the effects of this sale are going to be interesting as well - especially since Oversee.net owns it’s own domain portfolio. So will this affect which names go to auction and which ones don’t? At this point we can just wait and see.

Congratulations to both companies.

[via email/Seven Mile/DomainTools Blog]

The DomainRoundTable conference hosted in Seattle from August 13th to August15, 2007 has just opened their conference registration at a ticket price of $1495 USD. If you provide some additional data during the registration process, you can save $50 dollars if you fill out a survey. Also the first 100 registrants will receive a eNom reseller account with a credit of $100 USD.

One feature (as a matter of fact not too many other details have been published so far) of the conference that looks very neat are the high tech nametags.

According to a reader of Frank Schilling’s blog, eNom and SnapNames have partnered in order to make expired names from eNom customers available in the SnapNames auctions. This validates SnapNames as the biggest de-facto marketplace for expiring domains and from a business perspective this partnership just makes sense. SnapNames reaches the biggest buyer audience out there and takes a lot of hassle out of managing the expiry of names.

Of course I would imagine that eNom will not provide all of the expiring names to SnapNames and continue to add some of the names to their own portfolio. It would not come as a surprise that after Melbourne IT, eNom there will be additional registrars to partner with SnapNames.

Also it’s important to note that it appears (at least at the moment) that eNom will keep on operating it’s ClubDrop website in order to grab expiring names with the help of their plentiful number of registrar accreditations hosted on their platform.

From a registrant perspective a registrar’s partnership with SnapNames can reduce the grace period the original registrant has to renew their name. While the maximum time frame for a renewal and/or redemption of a name can last up to 75 days, in some cases it can be as short as 10 days. Make sure you renew your names early and in time.

[via SevenMile]

It seems that the registry realized that they would lose out on a lot of money if they were to let today’s .info drop happen normally. Hence they decided to hold the drop. Now we just need to wait for the registry announcement about the premium .info auctions, .mobi style.

From an email from Pool.com:

As you may know, today’s .INFO drop was expected to be quite large with great domains becoming available for public registration. Please be informed that the .INFO registry, Afilias, has placed a hold on selected domains. Consequently, most of the more popular .INFO domains expected to delete today will not be released in today’s drop. Please note we will keep you updated on the status of these domains as we receive new information from Afilias.

[Update]: As it turns out some of the two word domains did drop today and I also I see some in the SnapNames auctions - for example WesternTravel.info.

[Via SevenMile]

Today is going to be a big day for all .info lovers. The drop includes names such as bank.info. If you remember back the .INFO sunrise period where trademark owners were allowed to process early domain registrations related to trademarks they own, you might remember the disaster it turned out to be.

While some registrants filled in invalid trademark registrations, in other cases the registrar took care of providing false information. After 6 years some of the names become available again to the “general public”. Which basically means that they’ll be auctioned off by our favourite drop-catchers.

Here’s a selected list of some of the names - happy bidding.

• airline.info
• americanism.info
• auction.info
• bank.info
• bonds.info
• briefmarken.info
• coins.info
• cruise.info
• cyberscape.info
• fashion.info
• flight.info
• florida.info
• gifts.info
• healthcare.info
• immigration.info
• investment.info
• investments.info
• legal.info
• medical.info
• nursinghome.info
• orlando.info
• retirement.info
• securities.info
• sehablaespanol.info
• shipping.info
• soccer.info
• stamps.info
• usa.info
• vacation.info

From the Verisign Press Release:

VeriSign, Inc. (Nasdaq: VRSN), […] today announced that its Board of Directors has elected William A. Roper, Jr. as President and Chief Executive Officer. He has served as the Board’s lead independent Director and replaces Stratton D. Sclavos, who resigned from the company. The Board also elected Edward A. Mueller as Chairman of the Board. 

So just like that Mr. Sclavos resigned from the board. There must be more to the story - but no additional information was made public. It’s a big change for a company that influences so many domain owners. Kinda makes you think that this company is even more “public” than just being traded on the stock market. ICANN, are you watching?

[via ValleyWag]

In a surprising email Google told their Adsense for Domains publishers that they are re-allowing Adult Domain Traffic into their network. In April they had announced that all publishers had to remove adult domain names from their portfolios by May 31st. It can only be assumed that this change of mind might be based on the fact that some of the biggest Adsense for Domains publishers have recently switched the adult traffic to other advertising networks. Maybe Google did not realize how big this chunk of business is?

As reported before, the .travel registry might be going bankrupt and here’s one of the reasons: The amount of effort needed in order to review every application. A friend of mine has applied for a .travel domain. Here’s an excerpt of the ensuing email exchange - attention: some humor involved.

From the registry:

I am in the process of reviewing your **.travel **application and need some more information about your business “____” before I can continue with the authentication process. Please provide us with documentation for your business, as well as a clear indication of its travel-related service in the form of a brochure, an annual report, a promotion package, a business license, a registration document, anything that is a public document* *demonstrating the use of whatever domain names for which you are applying. URLs being used as support must be active and display the travel related business with which you are involved.

Additionally, if you are unable to procure these documents because your company is not yet up and running, you may send us a business proposal outlining what you plan to do with your company and how your requested names will function. This is only on the condition that the company is up and running and the names are in full use within 60 days of submitting the proposal to the *.travel *registry.

So my friend sent them a link to a site that is similar to the one he would like to create. The site is a non-English language website.

From the registry:

Can we receive an English version of your site as we are having trouble trying to translate the site so we can see exactly what is on the site. Thank you for you time and patience on this matter.

Now keep in mind that the site is about 200 pages, so my friend responded:

Yes of course, I will hire a translator to translate the 200 pages into English for you.

Please wait a week and don’t go out of business in the meantime. Thanks again.

Response from the registry:

I just need the first page not the whole site.

After the Registerfly disaster, ICANN is now finally starting to look for someone to provide registrar data escrow services. But wait, just as they start thinking about this problem, the next problem appears on the Horizon: According to recent filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission the company behind Tralliance, TheGlobe.com Inc., will run out of cash later this month.

[via DomainNews]

Business 2.0’s latest cover story “Kevin Ham, The man who owns the internet” by Paul Sloan is out today. The article tells the story of how Kevin build his domain empire, now known as Reinvent. Also mentioned are Gary Chernoff, Scott Day, Frank Schilling, Yun Ye and Craig Lovik.

[Update]: Here’s a link to the TLD typo patent application.