DomainTools Blog

An Improved Website, Plus More Flexible Membership Options

DRUMROLL please…DomainTools launches a fresh, new and improved site!  We are excited to announce that now DomainTools.com is even better! The new website is now LIVE(be sure to check out what’s new)!

The goal of the revamped DomainTools.com website is to create a more user-friendly experience for all visitors while offering more customized, flexible membership and service options. We listened to feedback from our core user groups and analyzed usage patterns, breaking things down to create a membership system reflective of activities that provide the most value to members across the board.

For those who kept suggesting a universal utility bar, it’s now ever present on the website. For those who wanted the ability to only buy Hosting History or some other service, now you can. For those that demand more insight into account usage, you can have it.

Overall DomainTools Improvements Include:

• New Look and Feel to DomainTools.com
• Easier Website Navigation
• Flexible Memberships and A la Carte Pricing
• Enhanced Account Reporting

We hope that you find the new website to be a more engaging experience, and that all of our service options better accommodate your needs. We encourage you to navigate the new website to see the improvements and to review all of the membership and service options now available! For those who kept suggesting a universal utility bar, it  is now ever present on the website.

Additional Resources:

• Take a tour of what’s new!
• Visit our Relaunch FAQ’s to find answers to common questions you may have regarding the new website and membership options.
• Leverage the  DomainTools Knowledge Base. It is also a great resource to find answers to any other DomainTools questions you may have.

We have already received some great feedback regarding the website, including this one from domain industry expert and editor of domainnamewire.com, Andrew Allemann. “One of the big DomainTools improvements is simplifying account usage.  I no longer have to calculate how many credits certain services cost and it’s much easier to understand.”

For more in-depth details and background information around the new website and membership structure, be sure to read our press release.

We Welcome Your Feedback:

Please send any comments you may have to memberservices@domaintools.com. Thank you in advance for your thoughts!

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To kick things off with the new DomainTools.com and membership options, we are stirring up some fun:

*********’Like’ DomainTools on Facebook and Win One of Three Prizes!**********

Choose from One of the Following:

One Year DomainTools Professional membership or Extension to your Current Membership

Conference Ticket to Domain Roundtable 2012

An Apple iPad

**How to Enter**

1) ‘Like’ DomainTools on Facebook by March 31, 2011

2) Leave a comment on our Facebook page telling us about your

favorite DomainTools product or service by March 31, 2011

**Announcing the Winners**

2 Winners will be selected at Random by DomainTools’ CEO, Tim Chen, on April 1, 2011.

A video announcing the drawing will be posted to DomainTools’ Facebook page!

We made a decision some time ago that our live auction platform would function on all major OS’s and browser platforms. Sure, building a Java applet or ActiveX component may have been the traditional approach, but you risk locking out potential buyers if their system doesn’t meet a narrow set of requirements. Even if their system supports it, people may choose not to participate in the auction rather than installing software they don’t trust on their machine. Fewer participants’ means good domains unsold as buyers were not “present” to bid.

The Aftermarket.com Auction system uses the browser as the application container, much like Gmail or other so-called “Web 2.0″ apps. Most people already have Adobe Flash installed and are using IE 6 or 7 or Firefox 2 or 3, so when the live auction page loads, participants are immediately immersed in the action. New bids start appearing in their browser in near real-time, engaging them in the auction and encouraging participation in much the same manner as an auctioneer builds energy in the room. That is one of the most compelling attributes of our platform, and why other companies are taking notice.

Of course, getting the system working in four different browser combination’s, on both PC’s and Mac’s, is anything but trivial. Nothing mangles the carefully constructed project plan like a good set of cross-browser compatibility issues. Suddenly, that feature pegged for 3 days has dragged into the 3rd week, and not by any fault of the dev team. Once tight, clean code devolves into absolute confusion as we are forced to introduce new code paths to work around bugs in IE without messing up Firefox.

Implementing a good JavaScript framework helped us eliminate about 85% of those problems when we built the latest version of our auction platform. Now we face a new challenge: the JavaScript engine in IE7 is terribly slow, and in IE6, it’s almost unusable.

As web apps become more sophisticated, the JavaScript engine in the browser is pushed beyond what it was ever designed for in the first place, such as form inputs. Now, with our platform, every bid sends the browser into a frenzy trying to update all the pieces of the UI while still letting the user interact with the page. Some browsers, like Firefox 3, handle this relatively well; others, like IE 6, grind to a near standstill. IE 7 is marginally better, but Firefox is still superior, especially considering the improvements to the JavaScript engine in the most recent version of Firefox .

You’ll note that one browser is conspicuously absent from this discussion: Google Chrome. The “risk management” side of my head has been telling me not to list it as an officially supported platform for the auction, largely because I don’t want yet another browser to test in. I was mostly a spectator during the last browser war between Netscape (aka Mosaic) and IE – now I’m right in the middle of the arena, and things look considerably different down here than they did in the stands! I’m also nervous about the stability of the Flash plug-in in Chrome, but both of those arguments are losing force by the day and I’m beginning to yield. Frankly, my team thinks I’m crazy not to put Chrome on the list – some of them have been using it during testing, and they say the comparison between JavaScript engines in IE6 and Chrome is like comparing the zero-to-60 times of a tricycle and a Ferrari.

Our recommendation, if you weren’t sure after all this, is use the latest version of Firefox when you bid at our Aftermarket.com Auction in Gold Coast, Australia. It’s simply that much better.

SharedReviews.com announced it took on a first round of capital today. Monster Venture Partners, Frank Schilling, and Internet Real Estate Group have chipped in to Fund the Toronto based SharedReviews.com company that Peter Ejtel (CEO) and Frank Michlick (COO) are building. The first round of capital for $500,000 was completed today and gives the group the resources to further enhance the company and develop it out further. The SharedReviews.com site is designed to provide syndicated content about products out to the edge of the network. Parking pages and shopping portals can license the content and add richer information to the browsing experience of products.

Frank Schilling commented, “My investment in Shared Reviews is first and foremost a bet on people. Peter Ejtel (CEO) and Frank Michlick (COO) are two gentlemen whom I have known for years and whom I respect greatly. I also believe in the vision of syndicating high quality content onto under-developed domains as a step forward on the path to full domain development for domain properties that receive significant traffic and are good candidates for indexing by search engines due to the presence of truly novel and useful content.”

Mr. Ejtel (CEO) gives an interesting insight into the company, “With Shared Reviews providing a safe social environment for members to maintain detailed demographic profiles and a community with which to share consumer experiences, it has been an ongoing focus for us to leverage non-traditional monetization verticals to define the true value of this high quality consumer feedback. We are delighted to have assembled an investor group with expertise to help tap this lucrative search vertical and better reward our users’ contributions”.

Monster Venture Partners has been focusing on more domain related Venture deals lately that take generic domains and build them out into their true potential. The venture capital company is looking for good generics domains and a smart operational teams. Monster just helped fund the Patents.com domain acquisition deal and then went on to buy the already established Patent Monkey company. By combining good generic domains with top notch matching content the resulting companies dominate Google’s organic results.

I have taken three days off this week to attend the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. There are no new brands being launched but there are a lot of interesting people in the hall ways that I am talking to. Domain conferences are good and comfortable but some real business can take place when talking with people in different sectors. It was well worth the trip to come down here and meet a few of these people. I think I like TechCrunch 40 conference better because it had all the startups and that is more entertaining to watch. However this conference has a lot of important leaders of established tech companies and it was very easy to approach people and talk about deals. I found out that Jay Adelson of Digg used to be an old sysadmin and loves our site and uses it all the time. MC Hammer was here, he has a new company called Dance Jam. I met Chad Hurley the founder of YouTube. Overall this is a very good place to make new business development deals and see what neat features these companies are coming out with.

There are a lot more Domainers running around as well, Champ Mitchell (CEO of Network Solutions), Rob Hall (CEO of Momentous), Roland Chemtob (Branded Holding Group), Rob Monster (Domain Strategies), Victor Pitts (Moniker), Andrew Miller (Internet Real Estate), and Mike “Zappy” Zapolin (Internet Real Estate).

Last week I was at TechCrunch40 to see what was exciting in the world of Web 2.0. For a first time conference, it was pulled off very nicely. The quality and caliber of presenters was exactly what I was expecting, and nothing short of phenomenal.

The conference was setup as a launch party for 40 Internet companies. I was expecting to see 40 never-heard-of companies but I found that I already knew about a few of them. The first to present was Powerset. I have been hearing about this company for a while, this is a new search engine company that hopes to solve a semantic search problem. They claim that there is no good way to understand a complex human query. For example I should be able to ask a computer, “What is the best rated Pizza place within 2 miles of my current location?”. I think we are a long way from that. But what powerset does do well is something most users would not appreciate I think. I know that less the 1% of Google users used advanced search queries; so Powerset may be solving the wrong problem if they can’t tell me where to go for pizza. If you are one of the 1% type of people I suggest you go play with Powerset at labs.powerset.com.

Instead of talking about every company that launched I am going to tell you which companies I am addicted to and had no idea I was missing them until I saw them at the launch.

Cubic Telecom is a company that I have been searching for and didn’t know it. If you travel internationally like I do, then you need this company. They sell a sim card and phone that will allow you to talk to anyone else in the world for $0.15 a minute when you are traveling. So imagine being in Spain and calling home to the states for just 15 cents a minute. If you used your regular phone you would be charge $2 or $3 a minute. Now the neat thing with the phone, if you are in a Wifi spot you get charged nothing! People can call your cell phone number back home and reach you in Spain as well. Only costs 15 cents a minute. The best part is that the sim card and phone allows you to have unlimited local present numbers. So I have have UK phone number, Spanish Phone number, where ever I am I can get a local phone number. Everything is a local call. So with my Spanish phone number I can call Spanish places and it is local call. Yeah, Sign me up. I am buying one of these phones before my next international trip. UPDATE: It appears the prices mentioned during the launch party were not 100% accurate, read the comments for more detail.

TripIt.com is the next company I didn’t know I needed until I saw them. Every time I travel I book things like plane tickets, car rentals, and hotels. After booking something I get an email confirmation. However, now if I forward all those email confirmations to TripIt they will parse my emails and organize my schedule for me and share that data in an RSS ICAL feed and keep my family in the loop by sharing the schedule. The feed can be directly and automatically loaded into my Google calendar, which I then have automatically synced to my IPhone. My one word review, seemless. The service is completely free, so I hope they stay in business a long time. They are the same guys that started Hotwire so I am sure they know what they are doing. I think this is almost better then a personal assistant for booking travel.

BeFunky.com is a cool company. I don’t know if I need them, but I am going to use them. They offer free cartoons of pictures that you upload. They have an artist that turns your picture into a cartoon. They also have a service that allows you to upload a video to the service and they make the entire video into a cartoon. After a while they will charge $5 per cartoon-ization they do of people’s faces. I think the cartoon face would be one cool avatar. I recommend getting your own avatar before they start charging the $5.

Mint.com won best in show and was one that I thought I would use right away. They are like TripIt except instead of knowing everything about your Trip they know everything about your money. You give Mint.com your login to all your bills, credit cards, and thing that you pay. It then sucks in all the information on a daily basis and gives you a heads up display. It alerts you if you are low on something or if you should be aware of something. It is hard to describe exactly why I want to use it but I have the feeling it will help me organize my bills. They promise it will also help you save money too. If you use a service they compare rates and competitors to that service and tell you how you can save money by switching. It is fitting that the best of show award went to a company that had the best domain name too.

Vudu was a neat company that offered a hardware device no bigger than a large hard cover book with movies on demand. It was like an Xbox, but just for movies. You can order a movie and it would be available on your vudu after a quick download. The movie was in high definition and you had the option to buy or rent the title. I want to buy one of these but my home theater is already on the low end, a high end device like this would put it to shame. There is also a backup option so that you could plug in extra storage to the Vudu. I recall the guy saying that if I paid for something I could re-download it if my device crashed.

If you are a single, WooMe.com and SpeedEDate.com looked neat, but required a video camera and a microphone. They are both online speed dating companies that look like they will crush Match.com and eHarmony but they will need to get some serious funding behind them to do that.

Our post “Techcrunch, Go Back to the Basics” just won their contest. Now the problem of finding a hotel room in the Middle of San Fransisco. The Web 2.0 Expo websites said that most of the hotels were sold out. The few that I called which were available informed me that, yes, they too were “Sold Out”. Thanks for the ticket Mike. Does that come with a Hotel room?

If any readers want to meet up while I am in town I would be glad hang out and grab some drinks with them. Sort of a mini DomainRoundtable. I hear that the Bay Area has good Burritos, just see Bay Area Burritos.com (Owned by Google)

I just got off the plane and I am in the car headed to the conference, I met two interesting people on the plane, Ian Manasco of Amazon Web Services and Dave Schappell of JibJab. Dave is actually driving as I write. I will give more updates on the conference later.

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Our blog post this Saturday titled Techcrunch, Go Back to the Basics was just nominated by Techcrunch as one of the top ten bashings for their Techcrunch contest which asked users to bash them. We didn’t really bash them as much as gave them some constructive comments on how they could improve a little.

It appears we are in the voting lead right now too. I don’t want to game the system, as that would disqualify us from winning, but I would ask our readers to judge for themselves which post deserves to win. In no particluar order we where placed at the top of the ballot, I think that helps. The prize is one golden ticked to the Web 2.0 Expo in two weeks.

Once you have read all the entries, you may Vote here.

When Michael Arrington started his blog, it had a simple scorecard type layout, a sort of “Just the Facts” type thing. It never really developed, and in fact it has completely disappeared. We took a look at his earliest reviews like Qumana, Vskype, SNOCAP, Odeo, and Deli.cio.us, and we miss the scorecard layout. Techcrunch has become a lot more free form and loose on how and what it reports on. It was exclusively dedicated to “Tracking Web 2.0″, but the site has generally morphed into covering tech “Start-Ups” or anything that Google does (44 entries in company index, last I checked Google was one company). It now covers a number of off the web type things like Free 411 phone number services, Registry fees, Rumors, and Downtime reports. Michael did a wise thing when he started – he didn’t name his blog Web20Crunch.com & picked a generic domain name. Websites that pigeon hole themselves into a name are doomed to that category. Amazon is a good example, they chose a generic word that had the context of the largest river in the world. Amazon is not pigeon holed into only selling books.

One of the later feature of Michael’s blog is to always include a picture in the upper left or right hand corner. I borrowed this concept when I started this corporate blog – it holds the readers attention when users are scrolling through all their RSS feeds. Men are visual people and eye candy helps us stay interested. Arrington’s audience is 95% 20-45 year old men, so he needs a lot of visuals to keep their attention. I would freely give this advise to anyone with a blog.

Michael should go back to the basics, gather the facts, write a rich review, and call it a day. A table in the upper or lower corner of the article with the basic facts would be great. Don’t get me wrong, I like the articles, but those basic facts are gems. Small things I would also correct would be tagging people names in the “Just the Facts” box, it would be nice to find what other projects a person or investor was involved with. Screenshots are cool, but more then three and I hit the next button in my RSS feed reader.

• Location: Vancouver, BC
• Launched: June 13, 2005
• Status: Private Beta
• What is it? wysiwyg blog editor
• Features:
• Screen Shots:
• Corporate Information:
• Management:
• Investors:
• Relevant Links:

This blog post is a response to Arrington’s challenge to point out things TechCrunch could be doing better. Last time I tried to give Mike advice, he interrupted me mid-sentence and told me, “My advice is don’t give people advice”. Then he walked away. Ouch! Later, he apologized because a former colleague relayed the advice and he thought it was a pretty good tip. So here is some more advice, Mike, Please bring back the “Just the Facts” information.

Often thought leaders define new words but forget to register the domain name. Seth Godin in his blog this week defined the word, SheepWalking. Seth should remember to register the .COM before he publicly posts about new words in his blog. Here is Seth’s interesting definition of SheepWalking:

I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a braindead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA ‘screener’ who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A ‘customer service’ rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars of TV time even though she knows it’s not working–she does it because her boss told her to.

Looks like a loyal reader named Russell Page registered the SheepWalking.com domain for Seth and ironically there is a post from Mr. Page on January 24th to Seth, titled, “Forgive me Seth”. But blog post was before the blog entry and the registration date so he was apologizing about something else.

Remember to register your words!

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Michael Arrington of TechCrunch recently spoke at a domain conference in LA. He was talking to a room full of Domainers about his adventures in Web 2.0 land. Mr. Arrington left the domain world a few years ago and started TechCrunch. However, back when he was co-founder and CEO of Pool.com, he firmly lived in the domain world. Mike and I first met at an ICANN meeting about 5 years ago. Little did I know that he would turn out to become a Web 2.0 superstar reporter.

Arrington gave the room a firm lecture about how Silicon Valley does not understand the domain industry. He explained that they view Domainers as evil hoarding monsters that just squat on perfectly good domain names. Arrington said the industry is ripe for change because it is so heavily Web 1.0 based and has numerous ways it could improve if it embraces 2.0 technologies. He remarked that he is a customer of GoDaddy and that when he uses their website he wants to throw his laptop out the window. He called for a Web 2.0 company to step up and handle domain registrations. Mr. Arrington also wondered why it is not possible to see all domains listed for sale in one place. I quickly pointed out DomainTools provides this service in the For Sale section. Yes, we must have a low profile if a former domainer like Arrington does not know about this service. DomainTools gathers domains from all corners of the world such as Afternic, Sedo, GoDaddy, BuyDomains, and Fabulous. Any organization that has over 2,000 names may include those names in the For Sale section on the DomainTools site.

I must admit, DomainTools does not have an RSS feed for these For-Sale domains. Arrington’s call for more APIs in general, was a good one. If a service has an API or RSS feed it can be used by a far bigger audience. People can then create mash-ups and extend the base service. If DomainTools controlled the end point of purchase, I can guarantee we would have released an API or RSS feed by now. Instead, I think we may release a Widget because we need users to come through us in order to generate any revenue on our free listing service.

It was a pleasure to hear Arrington speak and I recommend attending any event where he will be speaking. He mentioned he plans to hold a conference called “20″ later this year and I look forward to attending. BTW, Arrington mentioned that he bought 20.com for $70,000.00 and that this will be the conference’s domain name.

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