I read a New York Post report today that I found interesting and wanted to share with you. Apparently, the iPhone was almost called the “Mobi” which may have had an impact on the .mobi extension. According to the report:

“As the lawyers battled it out for control of the “iPhone” name, four alternatives were heavily considered by Apple.

The four alternatives, and the reasons for considering them were:

Mobi — A play on “mobile” but with a “with a little personality,” according to Segall.”

Although .iPhone probably wouldn’t have people clamoring to register domain names, I could see app developers wanting to buy various names to match their apps. I wonder what .mobi domain names would be worth if everyone had a “Mobi” in their pocket instead of an iPhone.

This is one example of how a marketing decision by a large company can have a major impact on the domain space.

When word of Apple’s apparent iCloud.com purchase for several million dollars hit tech blogs, I did some additional research to see if the price was for iCloud.com or if there were additional domain names possibly involved in the transaction. Now that the Whois record for iCloud.com confirms that Apple did make the acquisition, we should be able to see if they bought additional iCloud domain names.

Below is a list of domain names that were also owned by Xcerion, the company that apparently sold iCloud.com to Apple. Next to these domain names is a note about whether the name is now owned by Xcerion or Apple. As you can see, Apple bought more than just iCloud.com, which means that we won’t see the sale atop the DNJournal sales report, assuming the sales price is confirmed.

• iCloudApps.com – Xcerion
• iCloudMusic.com – Xcerion
• iCloudNews.com – Xcerion
• iCloudos.com (net and org, too) – Xcerion
• iCloud.org – Apple
• iCloud.us – Xcerion
• LiquidCloud.com (net and org, too) – Xcerion
• iCloudBlog.com – Xcerion
• LeadCloud.com – Xcerion
• AlbumCloud.com – Xcerion

There may be additional domain names I didn’t find, and there’s also a chance the Whois will change on some of the other names at a later point. However, it appears that Apple only purchased iCloud.com and iCloud.org from Xcerion.

According to PC Magazine, Apple has a big cloud-related announcement on June 6, so we should learn the scope of the iCloud project. My bet is that it’s going to be very big and will be something that most of us (Apple users) are going to use.

Many technology blogs and Apple fans are looking forward to the Apple event scheduled for tomorrow in San Francisco. It is widely speculated that the event will be the venue for an announcement about the newest version of the Ipad.

Some people have speculated that the IPad 2 may have a camera, which would likely enable Apple’s “FaceTime.” FaceTime is a popular application that allows video calls on the iPhone 4, the newest version of the iPod touch, and Mac computer to Mac computer using a wifi connection.

I just received a tip that in the last couple of days, it appears that Apple has taken possession of the FaceTime.com domain name. According to a Whois lookup as recently as February 20, 2011, FaceTime.com was owned by a company called FaceTime Communications, Inc.

As of this afternoon, the Whois information now shows Apple, Inc. as the current domain registrant for FaceTime.com. The domain name does not yet resolve to Apple’s website, so if you want to learn about FaceTime, you need to visit www.apple.com/mac/facetime.

I don’t have any idea if FaceTime.com will be a part of tomorrow’s Apple announcement, but the timing of the Whois change is interesting.

Thanks for this tip goes to to Mark over at SpreadOffense.com.

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Please help me raise funds for the Ronald McDonald House

As news spreads of a presumed iPhone announcement from Verizon Wireless tomorrow, commentators have been discussing some related domain names that are now owned by Verizon. For instance, iPhoneForVerizon.com now appears to be owned by Verizon. The company fiercely defends it’s trademarks, so this is no surprise to me.

Perhaps the best iPhone / Verizon domain name would be VerizoniPhone.com, which does not appear to be owned by either Apple or Verizon Wireless. Instead, it appears to be registered to a California resident and registered with Go Daddy.

According to a historical snapshot available on DomainTools, the domain name appears to have previously had a standard Godaddy landing page, which generally contains pay per click links.

However, the landing page seems to have suffered the same fate as that of the WikiLeaks.com domain name. Instead of a PPC-filed lander, there is a graphic that says, “Sorry! This site is not currently available.” I don’t know if there is a way to tell if Go Daddy intentionally isn’t monetizing it or if the customer changed the landing page, but it seems to be a smart move to avoid litigation for monetizing this domain name.

A big question I have though is if Go Daddy is responsible for removing the PPC landing page on this domain name, does it put the company at risk with other potential trademark names that are being monetized by them on their coming soon pages?

Could other trademark holders argue that if Go Daddy is willing and able to change the landing page for a name like VerizoniPhone.com, they should be doing it for all trademark names?  I have no legal expertise but think it’s interesting.

Oh… and I am very eager to hear the news… You can be sure my Blackberry will become a relic once the iPhone is available on the Verizon network.

When I walked into a photographer’s studio in Lowell a few years ago to speak about my new website, the photographer was very interested in what I planned to do. I wanted to show him the first concepts of the site, and after taking several minutes to load his computer, we loaded the site on his browser. Unfortunately, due to some browser issues, the site looked like crap and he wasn’t exactly impressed.

Fast forward a few years to a couple of months ago when I was invited to have a representative of DogWalker.com stand outside a new pet store in Manhattan to hand out magnets with the website listed on them. Smartly, I brought my iPad, and when people asked how the site works, the person who was standing outside the table was able to use the iPad to walk them through the site to show them how it works and looks.

There was no need to rely on a wifi connection. We simply hooked it up to AT&T’s 3g network, and voila!  It was a helpful sales tool, and after talking with my friend and fellow domain investor Tony Casella whose company owns Tampa.org, I expect it would work for local sales agents in places like Lowell and Burbank.

If you rely on one-on-one sales for your websites, the iPad is a helpful tool you can use to show off your site. The only caveat is that Flash movies and ads won’t show up on the iPad.

After considerable speculation and discussion, Steve Jobs introduced the new Apple iPad today in a press conference that received much fanfare. The iPad is a device that is a new category of computing systems that bridges the gap between the iPhone smartphone and the Macbook laptop.

If history is an indication of the current situation, Apple is going to want the iPad.com domain name, just as they own iPhone.com and iPod.com.  iPhone.com was also privately held before Apple paid a great sum of money for it, and iPod.com has been owned by Apple for quite some time (since at least 2001 according to a Whois history search).

iPad.com has been a privately owned domain name since 1997. The current registrant (Administrative Contact) is a person with a New Jersey address named Martine Bejasa. They don’t have much on the front side of the website, although it’s quite possible there is information for clients of the owner, as there is a client log in on the home page. The owners will probably get a ton of traffic, which will be expensive for server maintenance.

If I were to advise  Martine Bejasa, I would recommend selling the domain name for the million dollar plus offer that will be sure to come from Apple. The name probably can’t be monetized by the current owner enough to justify passing on an offer in this range. In addition, there is no guarantee that the iPad is going to be a huge success, just as Apple TV has not taken off. If that’s the case, the domain name will probably be worth much less than its peak value today.

Now is  the best time to sell iPad.com, and I hope the owners and Apple are able to come to terms in the best interest of both parties.

Update:

As Bill Hartzer points out in the comments below, the domain name is registered to a company called Enero 6 Corp, translated to January 6 Corp.  Apple and Jobs always seem to have announcements right around that time, so it’s conceivable that the domain name was already acquired by the company.