Commercial Email Advert...

The California appellate court's decision in Balsam v. Trancos requires marketers nationwide using commercial email advertisements to include in the from line of each email a domain name that is registered to the sender which can be determined by performing a WHOIS look-up, or the name of the sender...

Top Domains: ViSalus Di...

Domain names are important, and some might even say that a premium, memorable domain name is priceless. It’s become increasingly difficult to argue against businesses scooping up those short, relevant, easy-to-remember domain names when they’re available. Doing so can give your business, customers, and search engines a simple and quick way to find your business, along with the bonuses of brand protection and a potential increase in traffic, not unlike prominent placement in the yellow pages or the local shopping mall for brick-and-mortars. Thus, to some, making a big purchase on a coveted domain name seems ridiculous, while others have dreams of other-worldly click-ability and traffic that enables massive ROI. Whichever side you fall on, companies have become increasingly willing to spend big on premium, recognizable domain names, as evidenced by the Domain Name Journal’s list of the top domain name purchases of 2011 . The biggest purchase in 2011 was, unsurprisingly, “social.com,” which was co-brokered by Moniker.com’s John Mauriello and Marksmen’s Cyntia King on behalf of the latter’s new sales division at NameQuiver.com. According to DN Journal, only two domains were sold for $1 million or more in 2011, with the second being “DomainName.com” for a cool million. However, in early January, Robin reported on the first big domain name purchase of 2012 , which went to “dudu.com,” bought by a Dubai-based social networking service provide called DUDU Communications. Today, we’ve learned that ViSalus Sciences , a direct sales “health transformation company” that distributes weight management and nutritional supplement products, has entered the shortlist of pricey domain name buyers. The creators of the so-called “Body By Vi Challenge,” which (among other things) is a 90-day contest that offers people health products, support, and cash prizes in an effort to incentivize them to achieve their weight loss and fitness goals, announced today that it has acquired “challenge.com” and “vi.com.” Together, the domain names were purchased by ViSalus for $500,000 and $325,000, respectively. The purchase of “challenge.com” alone is one of the top ten most expensive domain names bought in 2011, through today. At a combined value of $825,000, the two domains together would be the fourth highest purchase over that time, and individually “challenge.com” and “vi.com” are the second and third most expensive buys of domain names this year, behind only the million-dollar “dudu.com.” So why did ViSalus shell out all this cash for its two new domain names? According to Co-founder and CEO Ryan Blair, the company just announced a seven-fold year-over-year sales increase in 2011 to $231 million, which means that the purchases represent a fraction of a percentage of current sales. Obviously, this means that, for all intents and purposes, ViSalus now owns the word “challenge” online, and Blair says that with the acquisition of “vi.com,” the company has gained a “simple, multilingual brand architecture” that can help them work towards creating a global, household name. The company’s goal is to acquire one million customers before the end of 2012, and Blair thinks that putting the new domain names to work will help speed up “the viral nature of the Body By Vi Challenge.” The move is meant to complement the recent launch of The Challenge, a newsstand publication that features Body By Vi success stories and is expanding into Canada this month. It’s a lot of money to dish out to promote healthier living, but with Americans spending upwards of $50 billion on products and services designed to help them lose weight and stay in shape, there’s certainly plenty of demand for the type of platform ViSalus is building, and owning the word “challenge” on the Web certainly doesn’t hurt. For more, check out ViSalus at home here , or the list of recent big-ticket domain purchases here .

DreamHost’s Unhappy Jan...

DreamHost has been having a rough couple weeks. The low-cost hosting provider and domain name registrar found some unauthorized activity in its databases back on January 20th, which they later admitted were a series of attacks that may have led to the theft of some of their customers’ FTP passwords. The company required mandatory password resets for all their Shell/FTP accounts — you can read our coverage here . DreamHost’s bad dream continued today, as they’ve been reporting outage problems, as Web, SSH, and FTP services were down for many of the company’s virtual private servers, shared, and dedicated machines. The outage was first reported at 4am PST on Sunday, and has continued throughout the course of the day, with the company offering updates on its blog . In the company’s initial blog post, the team said that “the apache (web), SSH, and FTP services on a subset of our VPS and dedicated servers are currently down. FTP services on some shared servers are also experiencing downtime. Our system administration and data center operation teams are currently on the case and we are attempting to restore services as soon as possible.” Furthermore, the post said that the outage only affected web VPS/dedicated and shared web server FTP services, while other services or servers, i.e. mail were unaffected. They also, unfortunately, did not specify which “subset” was affected in particular. Yeesh. And, judging from the parade of comments and subsequent updates, users were apparently experiencing problems with MySQL and webmail services as well. The majority of the large problems seem to have been addressed as of DreamHost’s last posting at 6:30 pm on Sunday, although there’s been no final word. DreamHost plays host to thousands of small websites and personal blogs across the Web, and for many of them, it was a surprise to find their sites offline for most of the day. By now, most of the sites are back up, but from what these site owners have learned from DreamHost, the VPS server was damaged by new software they were installing this morning, leading to a sizable outage with ripple effects across their services. Even though the outage lasted nearly 24 hours for some, many could not even access files to move to another host. Unsurprisingly, the outage caused a flurry of DreamHost users to flock to Twitter to express their chagrin, with some saying that it might cause others to consider moving to other services. Veteran tech journalist Dan Frommer and his SplatF were among them: Props to @swein for his reaction. Clearly, other hosting providers may be seeing some new clients in the near future. Though as of now, it remains unclear whether the software installation this morning had anything to do with the database breach on January 20th. As far as I can tell, they were unrelated. More here from DreamHost . Will update should we hear any updates.

Next On Amazon’s Road T...

The rights to Casa.com (Spanish for ‘house’) have been transferred to Amazon, indicating the ecommerce giant’s next dedicated vertical shop may be a home decor site. Amazon’s Quidsi network of sites already runs diapers.com for baby goods, wag.com for pets, beautybar.com for — well, you get it. If you visit  Casa.com  now you’ll find more evidence, with a blank screen explaining “You have reached an invalid location. Maybe you are looking for http://www.diapers.com, http://www.soap.com…” Casa.com could offer a more affordable, traditional home decor shopping alternative to luxury and flash sales sites like  One Kings Lane  and  Gilt’s Decorati . Domain Name Wire  first reported on the domain switch, noting that casa.com was protected by whois privacy for years prior to the transfer. Also, I found that Quidsi employee Morgan C. lists herself on LinkedIn as a “Merchandising Associate at Quidsi Inc., Casa.com”, and Domain Name Wire spotted another Quidsi employee with the same title. You won’t find that logo above anywhere else though, it’s just a mockup I concocted. Amazon bought Diapers.com parent Quidsi for $545 million in November 2010. When Quidsi launched Yoyo.com for toys in September 2011, it’s CEO Marc Lore told TechCrunch that the company’s next vertical site was going to continue its focus its core demographic of moms. Casa.com fits that bill perfectly. The new one-stop shop could include standard Quidsi features such as a combined shopping cart with other Quidsi sites, free 2-day shipping for purchases over $50, seasonal product selections, and featured picks by the site’s team. Considering One Kings Lane was expected to do $100 million in 2011 sales, the home decor market could be a huge opportunity for Amazon.

Exclusive: Groupon Acqu...

Groupon has continued its (talent) acquisition spree with the recent purchase of a hot Silicon Valley startup before they even launched – and with extremely little fanfare. We’ve learned that Campfire Labs , which was founded by ex-Googler Sakina Arsiwala (previously Head of International at YouTube) and her husband, social search technology expert Naveen Koorakula (previously at search companies like Inktomi, Yahoo and Picch), was quietly bought by Groupon. I noticed something was up when ownership of the domain name campfirelabs.com was transferred to Groupon earlier this week – it currently forwards to their site (as long as you leave out the ‘www’). There’s no good reason for Groupon to gain ownership over the company’s domain name and forward it to their own website, other than Campfire Labs was acquired by them. From what I can gather, Campfire Labs was working on a social networking service, trying to improve the way people engage, collaborate and converse with others online. Admittedly that’s quite vague , and this recent job description makes us none the wiser: We’re an early stage seed-funded startup that wants to change the way people think of social interactions in the real world and online. We are committed to building an intellectually stimulating and fun environment, where technology and product excellence are respected above all. We pride ourselves in having an open culture of equals. We have a cozy office in downtown San Francisco with a red couch and a well-stocked kitchen. We are tackling very complex algorithmic, technology and product problems. We’re building systems designed to scale. Some tools in our toolkit – javascript (node.js, javascript mvc), hypertable, hadoop, C++ and Ruby. We like unit testing, continuous integration and contributing to open source. Vivek Wadhwa mentioned the startup in a post about entrepreneurship back in July 2010. We’ve reached out to Groupon and some people at Campfire Labs, and are still waiting on an official confirmation. But we’ve confirmed the deal through unofficial channels. According to the company’s website – at least, the Google-cached version of it – Campfire Labs investors and advisors included SV Angel’s Ron Conway and David Lee, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, the late Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani, former Facebook and YouTube CFO Gideon Yu, former eBay SVP Michael Dearing, Felicis Ventures founder and MD Aydin Senkut, Splash CEO Michael Powers, Asha Jadeja and Vuclip CEO Nickhil Jakatdar.