With all the crappy news these days, it’s nice to see something positive for a change, especially because it’s related to someone I have known for almost ten years.

Darren Cleveland is CEO of City Advertising, a company that operates businesses on keyword domain names like PoolCleaning.com, PropertyAppraisers.com, FuneralHomes.com, and many others.  For the last two years, City Advertising has been named to the prestigious Inc. 5000 list. The company was ranked 587 in 2012 and 189 in 2011.

Clearly, the company continues to grow, and it continues to employ a number of people in South Florida.

I just learned that Darren Cleveland was one of eleven company CEOs that was given the Florida Governor’s Innovators Under 40 Award. This new award was created and given to “Florida residents under 40 who own or lead a Florida company with annual revenue of $1M or more and who have created at least 10 jobs since January 2011.”

Darren has always been willing to give advice when needed, and he’s often at domain industry conferences. The award is well deserved.

If you attend a domain conference, one of the people you will want to meet is Roy Flanders. He is one of the original domain investors, and he owns some fantastic domain names.

I don’t know him well, but Roy seems like a private individual, so I won’t mention his domain names, although you’ve probably seen his name more than once while using DomainTools to look up domain names, and you’ve also seen it in  DNJournal.

Recently, Roy made local news in his hometown of Nantucket, Massachusetts by issuing a matching donation challenge to the Nantucket Cottage Hospital. If the Hospital is able to raise $250,000 from new donors, Roy will match that so the Hospital receives half a million dollars total.

You can read about the challenge on the Mahon About Town Nantucket Arts and Social Newsletter, and I am sure they would appreciate your donations to help reach the goal. You can also make a donation on the hospital website if you’d like to help.

If you aren’t interested in making a donation but you do want to learn more about Roy, the newsletters has some interesting information about his background. He’s an interesting guy, knows just about everyone that makes waves in the domain space, and he’s using his financial resources to help a local hospital.

It’s nice to see domain investors giving back and doing good things.

Jamie Zoch blogged at Dot Weekly for quite some time, but apparently his blog’s database was accidentally deleted during a hosting change. It’s unfortunate because I enjoyed reading Jamie’s insight and I miss Dot Weekly.

A while back, Jamie announced the launch of Zearn.com, “a  real-time domain name auction format that is solely dedicated to GoDaddy Auctions with a totally new way to watch, find and bid on domain name auctions.” I’ve never tried it before, but I can see how it would be helpful.

This evening, Jamie announced (via Facebook) that the platform’s name was changing from Zearn to  Drop Alert. Based on his announcement, it would seem that someone acquired the Zearn.com domain name from him, and that was the impetus for the rebranding.

Whatever the case may be, I personally like the move because Drop Alert sounds more appropriate than Zearn, especially because it’s a new brand with limited marketing spend.

I hope all is well with Jamie and wish him well with this new branding.

DomainSherpa’s Michael Cyger has acquired the category defining domain name,  SixSigma.com, bolstering his presence in the Six Sigma space. The terms of the private transaction were not disclosed due to a non-disclosure agreement, although the seller is  an injection molding and fastener company.

In case you aren’t familiar with Six Sigma, it is defined by iSixSigma.com  as “a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects (driving toward six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit) in any process – from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service.” Six Sigma, as a process improvement methodology, is used by  about 53 percent of Fortune 500 companies – and that figure rises to 82 percent when you look at just the Fortune 100.

If you know about Michael’s background, you know that he was the original developer of iSixSigma.com, which is known as one of the leading websites for information about Six Sigma. After he developed the business, he sold  iSixSigma.com to Schofield Media in 2008 before buying it back in 2011.

According to Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool,  there are 49,500 exact match local searches each month at an average CPC of $6.22. The website on SixSigma.com has been up and running since 1996.  Owning this website on the category defining domain name will certainly bolster Cyger’s presence in the competitive space.

One other reason for owning the exact match domain name in addition to the “i” version is because of the possibility of confusion for visitors. Michael shared a funny story with me about this domain name. “At  one point we ran a marketing campaign for our print magazine and mistakenly forgot the “i” off of iSixSigma.com in one of the promotional URLs. The previous owner was kind enough to put a link on his web site back to our site.”

Congratulations to Michael on this solid acquisition.

At the end of August of 2011, Jeff Kupietzky left his role as CEO of Oversee.net after five years with the company. While Kupietzky was CEO, Oversee.net experienced considerable growth and then some contraction, especially in the PPC and domain auction spaces.

Several months after Kupietzky departed from Oversee, he  was named CEO of a company called ActivePath,  the “inventor of a unique, actionable and secure email platform for businesses and consumers to interact directly within existing email messages.”

Recently, ActivePath merged with  PowerInbox, a company that offered a similar product. According to an article today in TechCrunch, the combined company raised $10 million in funding from several private equity companies. ActivePath had previously raised $10 million in funding prior to Kupietzky’s arrival.

The article noted that  Kupietzky will be the CEO of the new company, while the founders of PowerInbox will work in other management roles within the company.

Congratulations to  Kupietzky on his successes.