TRAFFIC Conference events and SEOMOZ announces MOZCAST
Elliot Silver After .SILVER gTLD in Round Two
With all the controversy and hubbub surrounding the new gTLD application process, many people haven’t noticed that ICANN is taking applications for round two. One domain investor, Elliot Silver, has definitely noticed and he’s put his application in for .SILVER with a $185,000 bid.
Silver says he obtained the money for the application by selling his Apple stock last month. He plans on building an information site about the silver market, as well as giving relatives free domains.
Conference Updates: TRAFFIC and DomainFest
The annual TRAFFIC conference gets started with Rick Schwartz sounding off about the Brazilian company that tried to reverse domain name hijack his SaveMe.com domain. The new gTLD applications will be a hot topic for the conference and Daniel Schindler is expected to have quite a bit to say given that his company has applied for more gTLDs than any other applicant in the first round. Frank Schilling is scheduled to reveal his newly upgraded domain selling system on Tuesday morning.
The entire weekend has activities planned with a ton of fun stuff like golfing and scuba diving on Saturday and Sunday. The official start to the conference is the opening cocktail party Sunday evening and then Monday night will end with a huge party. The live auction that everyone looks forward to will be held Monday afternoon.
The TRAFFIC event is being held at the Ritz Carlton in Fort Lauderdale from October 5-8. It was also announced that the next TRAFFIC conference will be back in Las Vegas at the Bellagio Hotel May 29-June 1, 2013. Rick Schwartz says the conference will remain in Las Vegas for the next couple of years so East Coasters need to plan to attend October’s event if they want a chance to finally not fly coast-to-coast for a TRAFFIC event.
DomainFest dates were announced. An Oversee employee told Domain Name News that the event will be held February 5-8, 2013 at the Fairmont Hotel in Santa Monica. Further details and specifics about hotel rates, registration, and conference agenda will be announced early in October.
MozCast Adds Daily Updated Metrics Including EMDs
In a post on the SEOMoz Daily SEO Blog, Dr. Pete announces the roll-out of the new Metrics feature on MozCast. This new feature will provide an overview of five of the metrics derived from ranking data: domain diversity, SERP count, EMD influence, PMD influence, and the Daily Big 10.
Metrics can be viewed by a 30, 60, or 90-day look but you can also get precise daily data by simply hovering over any data point shown on the graphs. Naturally, this information will be of prime use to SEO experts and webmasters, but the statistics and trends are also very handy for domain investors.
The MozCast Metrics provides a lot of very useful information in a slick and user-friendly interface. It will be interesting to see further developments of this new tool.
Trendy or Twisted – Reality TV Becoming Reality PC?
Twitch is a livestreaming website where people can watch other people play video games. To many of us, that would be about as much fun as watching paint dry but apparently Bessemer Venture Partners, Alsop Louie Partners, and Draper Associates think it could be the next big thing. Between the three firms, they gave Twitch $15 million in funding.
Twitch is an offshoot of the very successful Justin.tv which streams videos of ordinary people doing ordinary things, from kicking a soccer ball around to cooking a meal. Since the Justin.tv launch in 2007, the video game section was more popular than any other section on the site. In 2011, founders Justin Kan and Emmett Shear decided to take all the video game channels and turn it into a new site, thus Twitch was born.
Domain Sales News Today
Lunareclipse.net sold for $10,000 at Flippa today with 7 bids from 5 bidders. The winner won it by paying the BIN price. The domain was registered September 30, 1998. The site has 118 pages indexed in Google and is a PR4.
Moniker has confirmed a $250,000 sales price for Platinum.com which was sold by Computer Associates to a German company that manufactures premium natural pet foods. The Platinum Natural Pet Food & Care website is currently located at platinum-natural.com and there is no word on whether the site will be moved or if the new acquisition would be redirected, or something else entirely. Platinum.com currently shows a product listing for CA Technologies.
Congratulations to Lucasfilm Ltd for finally getting the domain name DarthVader.com earlier this week. It only took them 35 years! The film company has owned the trademarks associated with the Darth Vader name since the 1970s but surprisingly has brought very few complaints over Star Wars domain names. The domain was first registered on June 1, 1998 and was owned by the same person until at least this past July, when the domain went into Whois privacy protection.