Domain Industry News

Andrew Allemann Wins 2022 Lonnie Borck Memorial Award

The ICA presented the 2022 Lonnie Borck Memorial Award today during NamesCon. The deserving winner of this year’s award is Andrew Allemann of Domain Name Wire.

I have been reading DNW for many years, and I admire Andrew for his exceptional coverage of the domain name space. Andrew has always provided unparalleled and unbiased coverage of this industry, and I think all domain investors are better off as a result.

I am happy to see Andrew honored with the award that was named after a close industry friend of mine.

Thanks to Fred Kauber for sharing the news.

PayPal Reinstates Sav’s Account

In a blog post on August 18th, Sav reported that its PayPal account had been inexplicably closed by the payment provider. I am sure this would have impacted the registrar’s ability to collect payments from some clients, and importantly, it would have impacted the ability to pay clients proceeds from domain name sales.

This has happened to other domain industry companies in the recent past, and they had to make efforts to get their accounts reinstated. Sav requested that customers reach out to any PayPal connections they may have and to tweet to PayPal in a bid to get their account functioning again.

Yesterday afternoon, Sav reported that its PayPal account access has been restored:

Identity Digital: Donuts & Afilias Unveil Rebrand

At the end of 2020, Donuts acquired Afilias and its registry business. The two companies continued to operate and are now uniting under one brand name called Identity Digital. The rebrand was introduced in a press release this morning.

Identity Digital uses the Identity.Digital domain name for its website. The company also acquired IdentityDigital.com, which forwards to the .Digital domain name. Interestingly, it looks like the company had to privately acquire the Identity.Digital domain name in April or May of this year as it had been owned by a Spanish company, according to the DomainTools Whois History tool.

BrandForce Hiring; Over $15m in Sales YTD

Louis Pickthall, Co-Founder and Vice President at BrandForce announced that the company is looking to hire for several positions at the company. Louis shared the job posting on his LinkedIn page:

Andrew Miller & Hilco Global Form Hilco Digital Assets

On LinkedIn this morning, Andrew Miller announced that his company and Hilco Global have formed a new business venture called Hilco Digital Assets. The business will work with a variety of digital assets, including domain names and NFTs.

Andrew shared the post below on his LinkedIn page:

Was Tile.com Acquired for $1.1 Million?

Towards the end of 2017, I noticed the Tile.com domain name changed hands. The Tile app upgraded to Tile.com, and the domain name continues to forward to the company’s website, TheTileApp.com. The Tile.com domain name had long been owned by Digimedia, and the company has a policy of not reporting sales or commenting about sale prices.

This afternoon, I was looking through some SEC filings, and I may have come across the sale price for the Tile.com domain name. The filing was a SEC Form 10 registration statement from Life360, Inc. Life360 acquired the Tile brand in 2021. The Form 10 filing was made in April of 2022. Notably, a large domain name acquisition was mentioned:

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