We just wrote about the dominance of number of .com domains and we’ve also reported that .com domain registrations were starting to turn around again after a poor 2008. Today, another .com domain passed the million dollar mark, with Call.com selling for $1.1 million via domain brokerage Sedo to an undisclosed buyer.
The domain was sold by Live Current Media, which had sold, then reacquired the domain over the past years. Live Current apparently sold the domain as part of a package of domains including Makeup.com, Automobile.com, and Exercise.com. Part of the deal was that Live Current would get royalties from any revenue earned from the domains. The company ended up buying back Call.com in 2006, and nullified the royalty stipulation. According to Domain Name Wire, the value of the royalty stream was $250,000 in future revenue, which makes the $1.1 million sale a good bet. Live Current also recently sold Cricket.com for a cool $1.75 million. Last year, Live Current experienced some financial difficulties and was looking to raise cash to survive by liquidating its domain names. → Read More
On its iGoogle Developer Blog today Google issued a warning to developers: Optimize your gadgets for speed, or we’re labeling them as “slow” in the directory.
Starting in late September, Google says that any widget that doesn’t meet a speed requirement, will get a nice “slow” badge attached to its directory listing. The only detail it gives about the requirement is that it will get the badge if it’s “slow enough to cause speed-related user dissatisfaction.” → Read More
The press release for the Canon EOS 7D has leaked. Unfortunately, it’s only available as a translation from Chinese, so it’s riddled with all sorts of gibberish. Not that that’s ever stopped us before! → Read More
Are you addicted to FriendFeed? Can’t get enough of Robert Scoble‘s incessant posts? Want to keep up with them even when you’re on the go? Are you praying to the heavens that Facebook doesn’t screw up FriendFeed post-acquisition? Then Stir (iTunes link) might just be for you. Created by StructLab Stir is an iPhone app that allows you to get your fill of FriendFeed anytime, anywhere. You can use it in the bathroom at work (guilty), while watching a lame chick flick with your girlfriend (guilty) or if you’re on the couch and don’t want to walk the 10 feet to your desk (umm, yes, guilty). Of course, it is hardly the first FriendFeed app for the iPhone, but it’s the first one I’ve looked at and it’s pretty damn good. Mind you, I only started using FriendFeed last week. Twitter [follow me] is still my micro-blogging platform of choice, but I quickly noticed that FriendFeed has some obvious benefits. And Stir takes advantage of all of them. → Read More
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6363872&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1 CrunchGear – Delta Pilar ToucH2O review from John Biggs on Vimeo. I present to you the Delta Pilar ToucH2O, an touch sensitive tap. I’ve seen it online for about $400 so you have to really want to be able touch your tap to turn in on and off. Obviously this helps halt the spread of germs in the kitchen – you don’t really touch the handle that much – and it’s fun to live in future world. However, I’d be hard pressed to recommend the upgrade unless you’re a germaphobe or want to amaze the in-laws. → Read More
NTT America announced today that it has leased a new 15,000 square foot data center in Santa Clara, CA. Big deal, you might think, a network provider expands its capacity. Except this network provider has a very high-profile client: Twitter.
Though Twitter is never actually mentioned in NTT’s press release, the blog Data Center Knowledge put two and two together, recalling a quote in June from NTT America COO Kazuhiro Gomi: “traffic generated by Twitter is getting so big, it’s basically eating up a lot of our data center network resources, especially the segment where Twitter is hosted. Other customers are riding on the same segment.” → Read More
http://media.rockstargames.com/products/rockstar/mediaplayer/RockstarMediaPlayer.swf Coming to an iPhone/iPod Touch near you this fall from the creators of the greatest game in history, Grand Theft Auto, is Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. I guess it’s going to be an exact port of the DS title. Are you excited? → Read More
“That’s right. That’s – that’s good. That’s good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you’re in trouble, huh?” – Ted (Ben Stiller), There’s Something About Mary
The more top level domains that are approved by ICANN, the less each of them is worth. People continue to flock to .com: 82 million of the 111 million non-country specific domains registered are .com. Everyone else splits what’s left, with .net and .org taking the bulk of the leftovers.
That means if you’re running the, say, .biz or .info domain registry businesses, with 5 million and 2 million domains registered, respectively, it’s time to come up with some marketing genius.
.Biz is first to market with, yes, one character domain names. These domains, previously reserved, will be auctioned off on September 23 at 12 noon EST via Sedo. A total of 36 domains will be sold (26 letters and 0-9). If you want to be the proud owner of 1.biz or whatever, the details are here. → Read More
It’s back to school time and you know what that means: crazy parties just like in Girls Gone Wild! Well, maybe not. But at least there will be lots of drunken Wii Bowling which is sometimes more fun than girls with their tops off depending on your school. As host of said parties, you may wanna have one of these personal alcohol detectors on hand. → Read More
Chances are most of you know what the Turing Test is, and therefore have a passable familiarity with Alan Turing, one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Important People of the 20th century. For most people, knowledge of the man stops there. Some might know that he was a fantastic mathematician and cryptanalyst responsible for much of the code-breaking success of the UK’s Bletchley Park during WWII, including much of the work that lead to the breaking of the German Enigma machine codes. → Read More
It seems it’s projector day today in Nippon. Here’s the ninth model that’s just been announced for the Japanese market: The Taxan KG-PH1004XS [JP], which looks like a DLP projector with decent specs. → Read More
Rumors had the launch of the Sprint-branded Touch Pro 2 pinned all over the calendar, but all signs as of late have pointed at a September 8th release. Sure enough, Sprint just sealed the deal: the Sprint Touch Pro 2 will be shipping in just over a week.
And just as we’d predicted, Sprint’s price matching T-Mobile here penny-for-penny: after contracts and rebates are said and done, your wallet will be $350 lighter.
Full specs and a bonus FUN FACT!© after the jump. → Read More
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6356197&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1 Live Webcast on 9/9/2009 – The next Generation of Leica Cameras from leica camera on Vimeo. While Biggs is at the iPod event in San Francisco, I’ll be here in NYC live blogging the Leica event. Oh, there’s going to be a live webcast of the event? Hm. Should I stay or should I go now? [Update: Look closely, could that be the rumored Leica M9 they're handling there?] → Read More
Want to see everything the Nokia N900 camera has to offer, months before release? Check Flickr. No, really. After an officially sanctioned Nokia N900 sample picture made its way to TwitPic, TheNokiaBlog got to sleuthing. Deep down in the photo’s signature data (known as EXIF data) the N900 prototype was identifying itself with a specific, if abstract, model number: 007 001. Flickr makes this data fairly visible, with each photo having “Taken with a [whatever camera model here].” A quick jump over to Google, a basic search query limited to Flickr.com – and bam, dozens and dozens of N900 camera samples. The photos don’t look too shabby, especially considering that they’ve still got 2 months to brush up the firmware. [Via IntoMobile] → Read More
The “anybody but iPod” crowd has another portable media player to choose from, and it’s from Samsung. It’s called the R1, and it’s your standard issue touchscreen PMP. It does play Divx-encoded video, which should be a benefit to those of you who haven’t moved into Blu-ray rips, or who enjoy watching standard-def rips of TV shows on the subway. → Read More
A week ago I had a chance to sit down for a hour-long one on one interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. There were no rules, and the whole interview was on the record. Part of the interview was on video as well.
There’s so much material that we’ve broken the interview notes up into a few different subject areas. We’ll post separately with his thoughts on the future of search, books, news, mobile and more. Schmidt also spoke candidly about the Microsoft/Yahoo search alliance, Twitter (he mentioned them before I did!) and Facebook.
What Is Google?
I started the interview with a simple question: What is Google?
Most people think of Google as a search engine, a place to start and end the day. People also think of it as an advertising company. But Google is obviously more than that.
Google says its mission “is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But that’s too much of a 50,000 foot view of the company – and it’s so vague it’s not very useful.
Schmidt describes Google: → Read More
Yahoo India has decided to shut down SpotM, the social network it launched less than a year ago in India. According to the site, SpotM. which never exited private beta, will be shut down on Sep. 1. Yahoo launched SpotM as a social network for the 16-24 age bracket in an attempt to capture the growing market in India.
It appeared that SpotM had potential to take off due the popularity of social networks in India and the addition of a few differentiating features. Yahoo said that SpotM would allow users to make friends with other users and if they wanted, to make those friends private so other users wouldn’t know about the relationship. SMS integration with anonymous chat would let users correspond via SMS without revealing their phone number. → Read More
So it looks like the rumors of an Apple event on September 9 are true. This event, themed after a Rolling Stones song seems to involve some classic tunes. It also a music-focused event so that means new iPods. But what else can we expect? → Read More
Of the 7 bookmarklets I have installed on my web browser, the Facebook Share one is the one I use the least. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of sharing stuff on Facebook, but the Share functionality is too slow and too clunky. Today, Facebook is trying to improve it — but it’s still won’t be as good as the functionality of the company it just bought, FriendFeed.
From what it has written on its Facebook Developers site today, it sounds like most of the Share changes will be happening functionality for buttons partners can install on their sites. If you have a Share button installed, for example, users should see a dialog box that pops up to post an item to their profile. The dialog box is said to be “more consistent with other forms of sharing on Facebook.” → Read More
