IHOP Got IHOB.com for Burger “Rebrand” (Update)

Elliot Silver
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20

IHOP sort of went viral last week when they announced they would be rebranding as IHOB. IHOP stands for International House of Pancakes, and the company teased the IHOB rebranding a bit, promising to make the big reveal about the “B” today. Well, the company announced that the B apparently stands for Burgers and the chain is now known as International House of Burgers:

I’m not really an IHOP person, but I guess if I was in the mood for some fast(ish) food pancakes and eggs, that would be the place I would probably type into Google Maps to find (no Waffle House around here). I don’t really understand the

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GoDaddy Logo Gets an Update

Elliot Silver
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15

If you visit GoDaddy regularly, you likely noticed a small but relatively major change to the GoDaddy logo. The caricature of a man with orange hair (the GoDaddy Guy as some people have called him) has been removed and the GoDaddy typeface is now green. The .com extension is not shown in the logo either, although that change was made several years ago. From what I can tell, the logo update was made sometime in the last week or so.

The company has been making significant graphic and typeface updates during the last year or so to align with its overall branding update. Regular users have noticed gradual changes throughout the website – from product and service pages to GoDaddy Auctions to the user control panel.

Here’s a look at the evolution of GoDaddy’s header logos over the years since 2005 (the actual logo may have been slightly different than what was shown in the header):

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McHale Performance Upgrades to McHale.com via GoDaddy Auctions

Elliot Silver
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0

GoDaddy Auctions, NameJet, and DropCatch.com are domain name expiry auction platforms that primarily cater to domain investors. These platforms are all open to the public, but I would imagine the vast majority of participants are investors seeking to buy domain names at wholesale prices.

When a domain name expires, most domain registrars place an expiry notice on the top of the landing page to inform visitors of the expired status. The notices typically contain a link to the auction for the domain name should it not be renewed by the registrant in time. These notices can be helpful to companies who may wish to purchase a domain name at auction once it goes through the expiry cycle.

Josh Schoen recently noticed an end user company bought a domain name via GoDaddy Auctions. Via Twitter, Josh mentioned that a company called McHale Performance bought McHale.com at auction for $10,000 (confirmed via NameBio) in early April:

Prior to winning the auction, the company had been using McHale.org and McHalePerformance.com. Both of these are fine domain names and probably served the company well, but

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Some Interesting Coinbase Domain Registrations

Elliot Silver
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3

In my daily DomainTools email, I noticed some interesting Coinbase-related domain name registrations. These domain names were registered via the DNStination privacy proxy service operated by MarkMonitor. Coinbase, Inc. uses Mark Monitor for its Coinbase.com domain name registration, so it seems highly likely that the company registered these domain names as opposed to a third party.

Some of the more interesting domain name registrations I noticed:

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Steve Jurvetson Launches Firm on Future.Ventures

Elliot Silver
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4

Steve Jurvetson is a well-known venture capitalist and was a co-founder of the VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ). Apparently, Jurvetson left DFJ last year, and Recode is reporting that he is starting a new firm called Future Ventures. Interestingly, the company is using the new gTLD domain name, Future.Ventures for its website.

The Future Ventures brand name sounded familiar to me because the exact match .com domain name, FutureVentures.com, was sold on NameJet about 2.5 months ago. I liked the name enough to bid $777 for it, but FutureVentures.com ended up selling for $1,009. There were 37 bidders who participated in the expiry auction.

When I did a Whois search for the domain name, the Registrar Status is listed

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Domain Names Are Relatively Cheap

Elliot Silver
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5

I read an Inc. article about a company called Swag, which uses the exact match Swag.com for its domain name. What grabbed my attention beyond the killer domain name was how they reportedly got the domain name:

“They also observed that no one owned the domain name swag.com, so they quickly grabbed it.”

This stood out to me, and a couple of quick searches proved this to be incorrect (I imagine it is misunderstanding). The Swag.com domain name is registered privately, but Whois records show that it was created in 1995 and owned by someone else for quite some time. A search of my Gmail shows that this domain name had been brokered before – Swag.com was listed for sale for $275,000 in September of 2015 in the Media Options newsletter. In fact, in an interview 4.cn did with Andrew Rosener, he confirmed that his company brokered the sale of Swag.com.

That really is neither here nor there, but seeing Swag.com marketed for sale at $275,000 really emphasizes how relatively inexpensive domain names are.

Just about every business has substantial startup costs. Want to start a local restaurant? A survey on

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