Rick Latona: “We’ve been working on a secret project”

Elliot Silver
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10

Haven’t heard much from Rick Latona or anyone from his company recently, but it looks like that was quite intentional. This morning I received an email announcing that his company is brokering OE.com. According to Rick, the purchase price is $225,000 but offers will be considered.

More importantly is that he revealed that his company is currently (and has been) operating in stealth mode for the last few months, hence the radio silence on Latonas.com. In today’s email, Rick explained his public absence in this way:

“Now let’s talk about what my company has been working on. Oh wait, I can’t do that. Our domain business is actually in stealth mode right now. We’ve been working on a secret project that is quietly taking off. 2011 is going to be a banner year for my company. I wish I could tell you all about it but I can’t. I will say only one thing. If you operate a parking company and we haven’t talked about business in the past 2 week, please contact me.

What I can tell you is that auctioning domains, tradeshows, etc are the least of our priorities. You won’t be hearing much from us for some time but we will still be bringing occasional premium domains to the market like oe.com.”

I’ve also been wondering what Rick’s been up to, and I figured he was re-grouping and working on something big. He previously hinted at something, and I have a guess about what it is, but I will keep it private.

I am glad to hear Rick’s business is adapting and maturing, and I think that his news will be interesting to domain investors once it’s released.

DomainRoundtable.com Now Live With Special Offer

Elliot Silver
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4

Domain Roundtable is coming back!  The conference, which was on a hiatus in 2010, will be held March 1-4, 2011 at the Atlantis Resort in  Nassau, Bahamas. Domain Roundtable is put on by Thought Convergence, the company that owns and operates Aftermarket.com, DomainTools, and Trafficz, among other leading domain companies.

The new DomainRoundtable.com website just went live after some aesthetic work, and organizers are now offering complementary Tuesday Excursions for the  first 100 people who register to attend. Popular excursions include behind the scenes tours, snorkeling, rum and cigar tasting, deep sea fishing, and more.

The early bird registration rate is an affordable $695, which will slowly increase to $995 as it gets closer to the conference.

As with most domain conferences, a live domain auction will be held on site, and they are now accepting domain submissions on the DRT website.

Funny Christmas Story

Elliot Silver
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5

I am spending some time away with family, and it always seems that when a piece of domain name news makes it to mainstream media outlets, I am always asked, “did you hear about…”

This morning at breakfast was no different. I was asked if I heard about Bank of America defensively registering domain names with the CEO’s name. For instance, BOA registered BrianMoynihanSucks.com, BrianMoynihanBlows.com and many others. Of course the humor is that my friend Andrew’s article on Domain Name Wire was the impetus for the mainstream news, and it was funny to hear the store referenced by non-industry people.

It reminded me of the time one of my best friends emailed me an article written on CNET about the Sex.com foreclosure auction. Ironically and unbeknownst to him when he forward it to me, the article’s source was an article I wrote!

Network Solutions Offers $6.99 Registration Discount Code Promo

Elliot Silver
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4

One complaint I hear about Network Solutions is that the price of a .com domain registration is way too high when compared to other companies like Moniker, Godaddy, and Name.com.

I just learned that Net Sol is currently offering new registrations for $6.99 when you use this promo code: PCXXX04007. This is a pretty big savings when you consider the regular price of a .com domain name is $34.99 at NS.

I also noticed that Network Solutions offers a 100 year domain registration, something that might be interesting if you have a domain name you know you’ll never want to sell and want to protect. With this discount code, the cost is $999.99.

I don’t think this code is valid for transfers or renewals.

I don’t love Net Sol’s customer support, but I do know a number of companies use them, and this code will bring a pretty big savings.

Can Firesheep Plugin Be Used to Steal Domain Names?

Elliot Silver
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3

There’s an interesting article on TechCrunch about a new Firefox plugin called Firesheep that exploits some websites’ non-usage of the secure https for logins. The jist of it is that if you log in to a website that is known to Firesheep from an unsecured network (think a domain conference or a Starbucks), and someone has Firesheep installed, they can access your account.

According to the Firesheep website, it’s this easy:

  • After installing the extension you’ll see a new sidebar. Connect to any busy open wifi network and click the big “Start Capturing” button. Then wait.
  • As soon as anyone on the network visits an insecure website known to Firesheep, their name and photo will be displayed
  • Double-click on someone, and you’re instantly logged in as them.

Further, according to the TechCrunch article, a number of large websites have vulnerabilities: “to give you a sense of Firesheep’s scope, the extension is built to identify cookies from Amazon.com, Basecamp, bit.ly, Cisco, CNET, Dropbox, Enom, Evernote, Facebook, Flickr, Github, Google, HackerNews, Harvest, Windows Live, NY Times, Pivotal Tracker, Slicehost, tumblr, Twitter, WordPress, Yahoo, Yelp.”

eNom, Demand Media’s domain registrar and partner company of NameJet, is listed as a website whose cookies could be captured by Firesheep.

I don’t know if it would be possible for someone to log in on someone else’s account using the Firesheep plugin, but that’s what the article seems to imply. Perhaps there are other domain registrars that are vulnerable as well?

I sure hope domain registrars know about this plugin, and if not, I hope they learn about it quickly. I for one generally don’t log in to secure websites while at domain conferences or in public places, but when I do, I change my passwords quickly after.

Parked.com Provides Bing / Yahoo Migration Updates

Elliot Silver
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3

I just received an email update from Parked.com regarding the Yahoo and Bing merger, and the change over from the Yahoo feed to the Bing feed for Parked customers.  I would imagine this update also goes for WhyPark customers as well.

Here’s the email update:

As many of you may be aware, the migration from Yahoo to Bing.com/Microsoft is already underway and will be completed within the next few days.   All traffic that is currently sent to Yahoo in the US and Canada will be migrated from Yahoo to Bing.   Since these changes are being implemented in phases, we wanted to keep you informed of the process by providing specific dates of each phase to make the transition as seamless as possible.

Currently in the initial phase, 20% of all traffic we receive is sent to Bing. On Thursday, October 21, 2010 at 10am PST, Yahoo is scheduled to migrate up to 50% of the traffic to Bing.   Then in the final phase on Monday, October 25, 2010 at 10am PST, Yahoo will be migrating all of the remaining traffic to Bing.   So far the migration has been going very well and we’re seeing some nice increases in overall revenue across the board.

Parked.com has always utilized the PST time zone in regards to our reporting, because our primary ad provider, Yahoo, has always used PST.   Bing however, uses UTC as their time zone. As a result, we have decided to change the time zone of our reports to match those of Bing to ease the transition now and going forward.   This means that today we will be changing everything to use UTC which will result in 7 fewer hours in the reporting day.

While the overall migration is going very well, there have been some delays in receiving stats from Bing.   The stats for October 8th and October 15th were received after the payments were finalized for the 22nd payout date.   Instead of causing any disruption to the normal payout schedule, we have updated your account and added a credit on the next payment which will be on November 7th.   If you generated any revenue with Bing on these particular days, you will be receiving an email from us indicating how much additional revenue was added to your account.

There are additional changes that are currently occurring as a result of the migration including how keywords are used, changes in countries/markets, and traffic quality scores.   For more information on these and any other changes, please check our forum which is updated with the latest information as it becomes available. The forum is located at BLAH” class=”delete_me_please

If you have any concerns please don’t hesitate to contact your account manager with any questions or simply post them on the forum.

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