My first story in three years – Oversee’s auction scandal

4 February 2010

So I’ve written my first news story is what I think is three years. It’s on The Register and is about Oversee’s auction scandal following a discussion with CEO Jeff Kupietzky at Domainfest last week.
Here go: Domain auction house wrestles with alleged shill
I held off journalism while in my job at ICANN – mostly [...]

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Vote now to stop government regulation of .uk

2 February 2010

Nominet is canvassing support for a crucial Net governance vote that it says will help prevent government regulation of Britain’s dot-uk registry.
The company has just published a series of resolutions to be put to a member vote at an Extraordinary General Meeting on 24 February in London. The resolutions will see several significant changes made [...]

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You want iBooks? Apple gives you iBoobs

28 January 2010

I think Apple really needs to rethink about how it launches products. The Steve Jobs super-secret wham-bam thing is all well and good when something really new comes out – like the iPod with video or the iPhone – but in between the super-hype is just tedious.
I recall a number of jazzed-up keynotes that simply [...]

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The iPad launches

27 January 2010

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How much do you love.info?

27 January 2010

Enough to pay $12,000 for it?
I just got the results for the Domainfest first-day auction, described as “very strong” by Oversee’s main on the ground, Mason. Certainly looks better than last year, which was a bit of a wash-out. Is this another sign the economy is finally picking up?
Anyway, of 73 domains, 49 were sold [...]

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Adam Epstein wins Domain-pitch-fest

26 January 2010

Just an update on my previous post – Adam Epstein from AdMarketplace won the first round of the PITCHfest.

The winning idea – pubMarketplace can be found at, well, pubMarketplace.com. There is a flyer in the Domainfest bag about the service.
It advertises itself as “Bringing the Power of Search to Content Publishers” and offers the [...]

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How d’you like my shiny thing? – Domainfest 2010

26 January 2010

Whenever you hear editors decrying the death of newsprint – and the Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger did exactly that this week – there is always someone who points out that online advertising has jumped x percent in the past year and is now worth xx billion.
And the response is always: but that remains only a [...]

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Domainfest 2010 begins

26 January 2010

I’m off to Domainfest 2010 in Santa Monica this morning, hampered slightly by a dreadful cold.
Should be interesting – this morning they are experimenting with almost a TV format and having people pitch new product and service ideas for increasing website traffic and revenue to a panel of experts who will tell them what [...]

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The Internet is a better place – ICANN replaces policy head

23 January 2010

Of the hundreds of people I have worked with, some of them very difficult, I have only truly disliked two. Not so much for their personalities but for the fact that they infected the whole work environment with destructive and negative behaviour. One was an incompetent bully of a news editor on a weekly PC [...]

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Why the new gTLD process is going off on another wrong tangent

28 December 2009

I’ve just submitted a response to an ICANN public comment period asking for feedback on a model that would allow people to send in “expressions of interest” for new Internet extensions like dot-com or dot-info.
Broadly, ICANN is putting a system in place that would allow anyone to apply for their own Internet extension (known as [...]

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