DomainTools Blog

I almost lost my domain permanently because I was unaware it was expiring. I got an alert from our new Registrant Alert system on DomainTools and it saved my ass. I am extremely thankful we invented this system. It is nice to have an example I can point to so soon after launching the service. The alert told me that “Registercom” now owned my domain. That was a huge tip off that the registrar was about to delete my domain. I had won the domain in a Snapnames auction in 2007 and it was sitting at Register.com account that Snapnames opened for me because they Register.com was the old registrar. I normally keep at one registrar that has an auto-renew feature and nothing in my account deletes. However I didn’t remember to transfer this domain over to my normal registrar after I won the domain in the auction.

With this Registrant alert I was able to see I had lost the domain, so therefore and was able to quickly act and get the domain back by renewing it. It would have sucked if I had needed to go to auction to get my domain back. When buying domains at multiple registrar I would highly recommend setting an alert on yourself.

Registrant Alert
The system spots strings that are Newly place on a whois record which were not on the previous historical record.? The system now supports the exact opposite too; It will alert you if your strings get removed from a current whois record. I have set a few alerts on public domainers and I see when they buy or sell domains.

Acquisition is a major milestone in Thought Convergence’s strategy of developing a self-sustaining, symbiotic Domain Ecosystem that services the global domain community.

Los Angeles, CA and Seattle, WA, May 6, 2008 — Thought Convergence, the industry-leading provider of domain management, monetization and development tools and technologies for premium domain owners and aggregators of high-quality domain portfolios, announced today that it has completed its acquisition of Name Intelligence, the company behind the highly-acclaimed DomainTools service and the Domain Roundtable conference. The acquisition expands Thought Convergence’s already extensive suite of industry-leading domain tools, services and technologies, and paves the path for management’s vision of a unified Domain Ecosystem.

“We are proud to welcome Jay, Ray and the entire Name Intelligence team into the Thought Convergence family”, said Kevin Vo, Thought Convergence Founder and Chief Executive Officer. “The addition of Name Intelligence further strengthens our industry-leading technology platform and lays the groundwork for the continuing expansion of our comprehensive suite of tools and services for domain professionals. Further commenting on the acquisition, Thought Convergence Director and Chief Operating Officer, Ammar Kubba, added that “Name Intelligence shares our passion and drive to create technology-driven solutions and innovation within the domain industry. By combining our award-winning monetization and development platform, deep industry relationships and extensive resources with Name Intelligence’s unparalleled research, analysis and data aggregation tools, we are putting into place a robust and scalable framework for the creation of a symbiotic Domain Ecosystem.”

In commenting on the close of the transaction, Jay Westerdal, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Name Intelligence, said, “We are incredibly excited to join forces with Thought Convergence and to leverage our core competencies and proprietary technology in order to create the next generation of DomainTools, our auction and marketplace platform, intellectual property protection services, and semantic suggestion technology.” Name Intelligence operations will remain in Seattle, Washington, and will continue to be led by Jay Westerdal and Ray Bero. In addition to their responsibilities at Name Intelligence, both Westerdal and Bero will collaborate with senior management at Thought Convergence to develop and execute on the Company’s long-term strategy.

About Thought Convergence
Founded in 2001, Thought Convergence is an industry-leading service provider of domain information, management, monetization and development tools and technologies for the domain name industry. Widely regarded as a pioneer in the domain industry, Thought Convergence provides its award-winning services and technologies under several brands, including TrafficZ, DomainTools and Idea.Net. By leveraging its comprehensive suite of fully-integrated domain services, tools and technologies, Thought Convergence is pioneering the industry’s first symbiotic Domain Ecosystem and is working to promote the continued evolution, success and sustainability of the domain industry. Thought Convergence is a privately-held company, growing profitably since inception, and headquartered in Los Angeles, California, with offices in Seattle, Washington. For more information, please visit http://www.ThoughtConvergence.com.

Thought Convergence Media Contact:
Ammar Kubba
310.909.7900
PR@ThoughtConvergence.com

Update by Jay: This is the official announcement. However, I thought I would personally comment as well, I know there have been a lot of rumors about this deal and lot of incorrect speculation. I wanted to set the record correct and say, I am extremely proud of the team we are putting together with this deal, the entire Thought Convergence team will number at around 100 strong after the acquisition. We are going to have more resources at our disposal now to focus on bigger projects, the synergies in this deal were awesome. I would not have signed onto the deal unless it allowed DomainTools to better serve the entire Domain Ecosystem. I will be joining the board of Though Convergence and look forward to working with the entire team in both LA and Seattle. The integrity of our DomainTools data is not in jeopardy with this deal and DomainTools website will remain as a trusted third party to everyone regardless of their affiliations.

We are installing some really neat servers on our network right now. I could not resist taking pictures while the engineers were putting them together. We just purchased 10 servers (and one fail over server) that each take 64GB of ram. This totally takes me down memory lane (no pun intended) to when I had a summer job in High School, my first computer job was selling Memory for Seattle Memory. My job was to sell people an extra 16MB of ram to make people’s Windows 3.11 run faster!

Fast-forward to 2008 and I think these new servers have more memory then the entire Seattle Memory company sold in the 90’s. I can imagine that in another 10 years someone will find this blog article and think I am crazy for being so happy with 64GB in a one box. In the future I can imagine my car’s dashboard will have more random access memory then this.

These 10 servers will allow us to store all of our most valuable information in random access memory, each server will have 10% of the data stripped across them. We are going to be able to cross reference and use information in brand new ways with this cluster. We have the ability to do it right now, but we find that it takes 30 seconds to complete each operation and we have far too many operations to complete right now. This will allow us to complete the same 30 second operation in a few milliseconds. The number of operations we can complete in a day will be jumping 1500X.

Each new server was only about $6,000 per server which is super cheap compared to how much computer we got for our money a few years ago. Our top of the line computer in our arsenal back in 2001 held 4GB of ram. When Domain Tasting started we moved to 16GB of ram for our one top end processing boxes. These new servers will be configured and process information before the end of May.

This is what will process the information behind DomainTools for the next 3 years.

We are very excited about the live auction on Monday, April 21. There are excellent domains on the list with a broad appeal. The auction will start at 11:00am PDT and ends at 4:00pm PDT. If you are in San Francisco, please come join us for the live event at Palace Hotel the auction day is FREE to attend. You can find the details at: www.domainroundtable.com/2008/venue. It is also available on line at: www.domaintools.com/live-auction/bid.html

We had to make some tough decisions at DomainTools about the Live Auction. Reviewing the submissions to determine value and strength of a name is both interesting and challenging. With over 35,000 domain submissions, we identified roughly 350 domains that we would like to have in the auction.

With the top names selected, we then worked with a domain consulting team to review the auction list. The group, Domain Consultant is a collection of top domainers in the community. Their experience in the industry and knowledge of domains is impressive as you can see from the list of appraisers. With their input, adjustments were made to the list of onsite Live Auction versus those in the Extended Live Auction. We appreciate their perspective and input on the final auction list. And, believe working with this team will prove beneficial to buyers and sellers in this auction.

Recognizing auction fatigue occurs, we have continued to trim the list. Also, we have a hard close time of 4:00pm PDT of the onsite Live Auction. However, we have an Extended Live Auction for additional domains submitted that were identified as potential for Live. The names that sell in the Live Auction will immediately close. Any domain not sold will remain open for 1 week following the live in the extended online auction. In addition, those names that we originally acknowledged as potential listed domains for the Live Auction are going to be available in the Extended Live Auction. That auction closes on Monday, April 28^th at 1:00PDT.

Do not wait for the last minute to figure out if you can bid. Visit the bidding page and look in the second yellow box. If the auctioneer is telling you that you are not eligible go through the wizard and become eligible. If you have ever purchased ANYTHING on domaintools then you are eligible, just sign the contract. If you have never shared your credit card with us and we do not know who you are, we ask that you purchase a $1 verification item prior to the auction so that we can verify your identity and make sure you are a real person.

The latest list of domains in full auction are available at: www.domaintools.com/live-auction/bid.html

LIVE AUCTION: starts at 11:00am and the last lot will be called at 4:00pmPDT. Anything not sold or called out in Live Auction will go to the extended Live Auction.

EXTENDED LIVE AUCTION: Monday, April 28^th at 1:00PDT.

If you thought Registrant Search was cool, you are going to love Registrant Alert! Registrant Search is a great tool, but like all reports, the information eventually becomes stale over time. To help address that, we are proud to release a new alert system that keeps you updated after that initial search.

Registrant Alert is the industry’s first service to provide proactive searching (with a built in alert) if a particular string appears inside a whois record in the future. The alert system works across all registrars and across all top-level domains. There is absolutely no other company in the world that offers this universal watch service.

Here’s how it works. You’ll receive an email when we find a new whois record that matches your search. Our systems are constantly updated to ensure you continue to receive alerts for your saved searches. I have been beta testing this app for a while now and I have to say it is the best service we have come out with yet, hands down! It is still in beta and there are a lot of changes planned, but our team has stabilized the core functionality and it’s definitely ready for production.

Registrant Alert is an EXTREMELY effective service for locating domains that someone is registering in almost real-time. Alerts are sent once per day, and it generally takes us a few days before we find the change depending on how often the records are queried. So although it may take us a bit of time to detect the change in the whois record, you can be assured you’ll be the first person we notify when it happens. Better still, you don’t have to remember to keep pulling a report to catch all the changes for a given search string.

It’s important to note this service will not detect whois records which already use a particular string: it is designed to find new records or records that change after you create the alert. You’ll want to use the Registrant Search service to locate existing whois records and then add an alert to catch future updates.

I simply cannot express how extremely cool this service is. For people that don’t know about it, it’s like magic. To learn how the magic works and how it can help you, please read the Registrant Alert description page.

We are only making the system available to Gold Members of DomainTools, If you are already a member I encourage you to try it out. I promise you this service is awesome!

We have spent months creating the “Who’s It Gonna Be” Tool. No longer will intellectual property attorneys need to track down offenders of trademarks in domain names. The technology is roughly based around the Psychic Whois system we released last year. The new system stops all trademark registrations before they happen. The technology uses proprietary algorithms and millions of whois queries and extensive history to come up with predictions on who will register any given domain name in the future. The system will email challenging lawyers prior to the registration of a domain to let them know they may want to object to the registration prior to it actually getting registered. They can either register the domain before the offending registrant or they can choose to take the registrant to court to stop them. If the registrant is not alerted by an attorney prior to the registration, they are guaranteed that the domain is trademark-free and that no one will sue them over the domain.

Our technology is now so good we believe we can predict what people will registered about 36 hours before they commit the crime. This is clearly a win-win for everyone involved in the domain industry. There will no longer be squatters and only true domainers will be registering new domains. Attorneys will be able to send out “cease and desist” letters to suspected registrants to keep them on their toes. “This is keeping us one step ahead of the bad guys” said an IP attorney who wished to remain anonymous. The tool will likely cause a serious outcry in the domainer community but eventually everyone should accept it. Lawyers have begun private beta testing of the service two months ago and it will be released to everyone later this week. Please email us if you would like access to the private beta as signups are limited.

ICANN has indicated this new, “Who’s It Gonna Be” technology will allow them to form a new UDPRP (Uniform Domain Pre-Registration Policy). Cases will be more proactive than the current UDRP. We’re happy we can assist ICANN in making the world safer one domain at a time.

We have added the ability to do Dot Asia whois lookups on DomainTools.com. A good example would something like microsoft.asia or money.asia.

The Dot Asia launch is in progress right now, so you may want to reserve your domain at your favorite registrar.

A lot of domainers don’t want to talk about their favorite tools for fear that they will create more competition. Here is one of those cases.

Peter Askew of Domainer’s Gazette said this in his last blog post, “I debated whether to share this info or not, but darn it, it helps me, and - in the end - I wanna help the domainer community, so what the hell, I’ll share it. One great angle researching domains is targeting really old domains. Domains that have been registered for more than - say - 8 years or so….” - Full Source

I started with one 30 Inch monitor in 2006 and that was great, I was able to get more work done and did less alt-tabbing. Having to flip between applications and juggle things on screen is a chore that most technology workers need to do on a daily bases. All our developers had dual 21 inch monitor to avoid this, however one 30 inch monitor is double the space of two 21 inch monitors so we made the corporate decision earlier this year to upgrade all developers to a one 30 inch monitor. While we were in the upgrade process I decided to move to dual 30 inch monitors to personally test the productivity increase we might get if we had dual 30s in the future. It is hard work, but someone had to do test it out. With all the 21 inch monitors that we were phasing out, I decided I would plug them in and see if my system could handle them too. So with all this plug and play I am now running Quad Monitors with over 11.7 Million pixels. Pretty neat, here are the calculations.

What a brilliant way to get your brand out there. A Tattoo is a source of pride and a conversation starter. So I thought I would make the offer of a free Gold Membership for life to any member that wanted to come to Seattle and get a DomainTools logo tattooed on themselves. You will become a marketing engine for our company and everywhere you show off your tattoo people will learn about our company.

After watching Inked on A&E I know there are enough people out there that get tattoos. So my proposal is for those domainers out there that want to show off their DomainTools pride and also get a permanent page on our site where we document the whole process and have lots of pictures of the event is to come and get the tattoo.

We are basically paying people $0.50 a day for the rest of their life (via the free Gold membership) and covering the tattoo costs, plus airfare and hotel. Flights within North America only. Airfare and Hotel are only valid for the first person that gets the tattoo.