Trade Show Update

Elliot Silver
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Gift Show

This is a tradeshow update, but it’s not THE tradeshow update from Domain Fest that I plan to post tomorrow. My parents are in town for the New York International Gift Fair, which takes place a couple of times a year at the Javitz Center. How does this relate to domain names?

This afternoon while walking around the massive Javitz Center floor, I found a number of companies that sold unique dog-related products. I mentioned my Dog Walker website, and all of them said they would drop ship products for me. In addition, they could send me catalog quality photographs of their products to display on my website, and all but one would be willing to give me an opening order break (most companies require a large opening order to open an account).

Selling product (without touching it) is one other way to drive revenue, as I can sell dog bags, collars, leashes, and other things that dog walkers and owners would want. I will need to find an easy to implement e-commerce solution or contact one of the companies to see if they are able to assist with the shopping cart functionality. If that is expensive or time consuming to set-up, the incremental revenue probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.

Right now, I am looking through the show’s huge catalog, filled with a couple hundred pages of information. To me, the most valuable bit of information is contained on the category listing pages.   There are hundreds of different categories of product lines listed, and I am using this list to search for potentially valuable .com category domain names.

Although most of the categories listed (like soap and bath) are well-known, the list is a way to get fresh domain ideas. It’s also a way to see how many companies have products in these categories. If you own a category-type domain name, I recommend that you try to go to one of the industry tradeshows where you can network with people in that industry or vertical. It’s a way to learn about the industry, meet contacts, and maybe even sell a domain name.

iPad.com: New Millionaire About to be Minted Courtesy of Apple?

Elliot Silver
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Apple iPadAfter considerable speculation and discussion, Steve Jobs introduced the new Apple iPad today in a press conference that received much fanfare. The iPad is a device that is a new category of computing systems that bridges the gap between the iPhone smartphone and the Macbook laptop.

If history is an indication of the current situation, Apple is going to want the iPad.com domain name, just as they own iPhone.com and iPod.com.   iPhone.com was also privately held before Apple paid a great sum of money for it, and iPod.com has been owned by Apple for quite some time (since at least 2001 according to a Whois history search).

iPad.com has been a privately owned domain name since 1997. The current registrant (Administrative Contact) is a person with a New Jersey address named Martine Bejasa. They don’t have much on the front side of the website, although it’s quite possible there is information for clients of the owner, as there is a client log in on the home page. The owners will probably get a ton of traffic, which will be expensive for server maintenance.

If I were to advise   Martine Bejasa, I would recommend selling the domain name for the million dollar plus offer that will be sure to come from Apple. The name probably can’t be monetized by the current owner enough to justify passing on an offer in this range. In addition, there is no guarantee that the iPad is going to be a huge success, just as Apple TV has not taken off. If that’s the case, the domain name will probably be worth much less than its peak value today.

Now is   the best time to sell iPad.com, and I hope the owners and Apple are able to come to terms in the best interest of both parties.

Update:

As Bill Hartzer points out in the comments below, the domain name is registered to a company called Enero 6 Corp, translated to January 6 Corp.   Apple and Jobs always seem to have announcements right around that time, so it’s conceivable that the domain name was already acquired by the company.

Learning Annex Shortcut To Internet Riches Includes Domain Name Seminar

Elliot Silver
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Learning AnnexOn March 10, 2010 at New York City’s Marriott Marquis, the Learning Annex will be hosting its Internet Expo, billed as the “Shortcut To Internet Riches!” As part of the full day session, you will have a chance to learn from one of the most well known domain investors, Marc Ostrofsky,.

As you may know, Ostrofsky was one of the founders of Internet Reit, a large domain investment company in Texas. On the Expo’s page Ostrofsky session is described as follows:

The easiest way to earn a dollar online is simply buying and selling domains. And that’s exactly what Marc Ostrofsky does as the president of Internet REIT, which currently holds approximately 400,000 domains. Find out how he does it… how he sold business.com for a world record $7.5 million…and how can you do the same.

There are a total of 25 Internet experts who will be participating/leading the seminar during the day.   Topics include building a business online, growing a business online, Internet marketing, SEO strategy, the domain session, and many other topics.

The cost of a full day pass is $99.95, and it begins at 9am. I am not attending the conference, but found it interesting that the topic of domain names is being covered as an investment tool rather than as a SEO/business development strategy, which may be more appropriate.

Reason #1 a Domain Name is Better than Facebook URL: You Control It

Elliot Silver
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A few weeks ago, a reader emailed me with a question, “I’m asking myself if businesses are abandoning their websites for a facebook page. Maybe not for an ecommerce site but for a small and medium “brochure” type website, why not just go with facebook? ” As I was about to write an article to discuss this, Mike Berkens had a post that touched on this topic.

It seems that many companies have been using and actively promoting Facebook and Twitter accounts with vanity urls that contain their brand names. I personally never liked the idea of ceding control of your url, which has been done by companies like Best Buy with their Twitter Twelpforce and TGI Friday’s with their Facebook FanWoody campaign.

Today, I read an article on TechCrunch about Facebook revoking the vanity url, http://www.facebook.com/harmon, used by one of its users, Harmon Bajwa. The company allegedly sold it to another company named Harman International, who wanted it for a campaign, supposedly in conjunction with the Grammy Awards.

Imagine that your small company shares its name with a Fortune 500 company – or even shares a name with a F500 company’s brand. It doesn’t appear that there would be anything to stop Facebook or maybe even Twitter from taking your url and selling or giving it to another company.

With a domain name, another company could still try to get it by filing a UDRP dispute (or lawsuit), but there are mechanisms in place to prevent a person or company from simply having the domain name taken from them.

This looks really bad for Facebook, and it’s a good reason why smaller companies and individuals should really think about whether they want to give up control of their address online.

Our Story: Aliasing and Times Square

Elliot Silver
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Starting backwards, you’d be stupid to put your name on a company and in a global press release if you didn’t believe in the concept.   When we took out an IDNTools ad on the iconic Reuters billboard in Times Square it was a sign of our confidence in what is to come.   Similarly, when we issued an international press release (link here) briefly explaining why IDNs will be the next big opportunity, we did so proudly with facts to back up our assertions.

So what are the facts?   IDNs are any Internationalized Domain Names that require the use of foreign characters, such as 溧阳.com.   The billion plus population in China actually prefers to speak Chinese, type Chinese and read Chinese. Now that they can register Chinese domain names, aka IDNs, they have been taking advantage of the opportunity and will continue to do so.   The same is true for Japan, Russia, and many other countries.   Unfortunately, IDNs became available after the domain rush was well underway, and as such many domainers and businesses still don’t realize that IDN.com’s can be registered.

But why would you want to register a URL that starts in one language and ends in English (i.e. 溧阳.com)?   This is certainly not fluid to jump from one language to another.   The retort is twofold.   First, Chuck Gomes of Verisign announced that IDN.com will essentially be “aliased” to   IDN.IDN.   This means that the owner of (Chinese).com will also be the owner of (Chinese).(com-in-Chinese).   There is much value in having an IDN on both sides of the dot.

Even in the interim, before aliasing, IDN.com domains are precious.   After all, .com is a worldwide brand and it is easy for natives to switch between a native language (for the IDN domain) and English (for the .com extension).   In addition, the search volume for an IDN, as measured by the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, is many multiples of the traffic can be bought for a similarly priced ASCII (aka English .com) domain.   For instance, shorts.com in IDN can likely be bought for the price of (insert adjective)shorts.com in ASCII (English .com), and the IDN would be a wiser purchase in terms of having higher search volume and less competition.

If you wonder, why others aren’t buying yet?   They are.   The volume of public weekly sales on IDNForums continues to increase exponentially, and if you keep a close watch on the whois, you’ll see many top tier terms have changed ownership over the last few months, indicating stealth acquisitions. Interest in dropping domains is also taking off as highlighted by the steep increase in subscribers to our IDNDroplist.

No doubt this is a complex niche, and a new reader must have many questions.   So ask them.   Ask them in the comments, email us or Elliot, and we’ll address them in the next post.

Next post: IDN Q&A

Aaron Krawitz of IDNBlog and Gary Males of IDNDemystified, are guest authors of this IDN series on ElliotsBlog.   Aaron and Gary co-own   IDNDroplist, IDNTools and IDNNewsletter.

Snoop Around and Access Someone’s WordPress Dashboard Panel

Elliot Silver
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While doing some testing on one of my websites that uses WordPress, I registered as a subscriber.   Later on, while still logged in as the subscriber, I typed in the URL that I would have used as the admin, forgetting that I wasn’t logged in as the admin. Surprisingly, I was still taken to the back-end dashboard of the website, although I didn’t have the same level of access or ability to make changes.

Although there isn’t much (if anything) that can be done in the Dashboard as a subscriber, there is still a treasure trove of information that can be found. A subscriber can see the publisher’s post count, comment count, spam count, recent incoming links, and possibly most importantly, the WordPress version that is running on the website.

The reason it’s important to shield others from seeing the WordPress version you are running is because many WP updates have security components due to known exploits. If someone is behind on their upgrade, a hacker may be able to do something malicious with one of the known exploits. There are other ways to find out what version of WP someone is running (footer or source code), but many people prevent the display of this info by using a special plugin or coding to have it removed.

There is a way to prevent access to your dashboard, and it’s something I implemented already (see screenshot above). Under Settings in the Dashboard, there is a link for General settings. On this page, make sure the “Anyone can Register” check box is not checked and people won’t be able to register. If you do allow people to register, make sure the default is Subscriber so they don’t have other privileges.

Even if you don’t have a link displayed for people to register, they can use the standard registration url used by all WordPress blogs and websites (just substituting your domain name). It’s not terrible if someone gains access to your Dashboard, but I don’t think it’s helpful either.

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