SnapNames®, a KeyDrive S. A. company and leading domain name online marketplace for already registered, expiring and deleting domain names announced today the release of their domain name auction bidding app for iPhone and iPod touch. With over twenty-five million domains to choose from annually, SnapNames.com users can now easily bid on a wide selection of domain names while on-the-go thus preventing missing out on domain names while away from a computer.

The SnapNames.com mobile app features include:

• A real-time dashboard with a snapshot of active auctions and history
• Streamlined bidding for auctions in users’ accounts
• Instant tracking of bidding activity, number of bidders, time remaining and high bidder status – Display of historical auction activity and closing status of transactions

The newly released auction app has been made available free of charge.
“With the release of a mobile bidding application for SnapNames.com auctions, we are providing users (both businesses and individuals) a more convenient way to acquire the domains they want, when they want them,” said Craig Snyder, CEO of Moniker and SnapNames. “Furthermore, by extending our proven auction technology to the iPhone, we are accelerating access and domain inventory selection options to an expanded audience across the globe. “

[via Press Release]

As just announced in blog post, LeadRefs has just released their latest version of their lead generation tool. The new version of the tool now mashes up the data of the list of dropping and expired domains with the amount of leads available to sell the domains. It also has a paid membership now – the Search Package for only $24.99 or the Expired Package for $49.99 a month, which includes the Pending Delete, NameJet exclusive, SnapNames exclusive and GoDaddy exclusive leads along with 100 daily lead generation searches. The free trial is now limited to three days. For those who don’t have the time to follow all of the leads, the service now also offers a brokerage service.

Elliot’s Blog had a number of helpful posts as to how best use this tool:

• How I Used LeadRefs.com
• Another Way to Use End User Lead Generation Website
• When NOT to Use LeadRefs.com
• LeadRefs.com Works

DomainTools has always included affiliate links to domains listed in various marketplaces in their search results before, but has now enhanced the search functionality for domain markplace listings.

As the company’s  Mark Kendrick writes:

Of course, simply mashing together nearly 20 million domain sales listings in a table and sticking a search box on it doesn’t solve anyone’s problems, and it sure won’t be fast. Our back-end engineers used new technology they’d been researching to help structure and index the data while our front-end team applied several patterns and techniques that make parsing that much data usable and even fun.

As he goes on, it appears our industry still has to go a long way then it comes to getting word about the aftermarket out there, so they aimed to build a tool that allows users to sift through large amounts of domain listings without a frustrating experience.

Our user research (yes, we interviewed real people!) uncovered an interesting trend: plenty of people know you can register a domain name, but they are almost completely unaware of the secondary market. Surprisingly, it’s not the price that’s keeping them away. They usually have a few hundred dollars, or maybe a bit more, to spend on the right domain name, but they don’t know what to buy or where to find it. Even those who found their way to the popular domain sales platforms were confused or intimidated by what they saw. They abandoned the process and resigned themselves to a sub-par domain name.

If you share your feedback with the DomainTools Team before Friday, April 13th you will be eligible for a $50 DomainTools add-on credit or some DomainTools swag. They ask for your to email your feedback to mpfeedback@DomainTools.com to qualify.

Disclaimer: DomainTools is an advertiser on DNN.

[via DomainTools Blog]

After Frank Schilling shook up the domain parking industry with his release of his own parking company, Internet Traffic, it now appears he’s setting course to enter the race against incumbent domain name marketplaces. Schilling re-launched his DomainNameSales site today with a new look and new features.

The relaunch seems to be a natural progression for the company, after launching their own domain parking business. Schilling’s company has been selling domains from their own portfolio of hundreds of thousands of domains for a number of years.  The tools and systems and data that from these sales and inquiries are valuable insights in to the domain marketplace from one of it’s top portfolio owners.  The company freely released their own internal domain sales inquiry tracking system to the benefit of users of the InternetTraffic parking service a few months earlier.  We suspect that we’ll see more iterations from the crew at DomainNameSales in the coming months.

DNN is a big supporter of freeing up information and data like this.  Personally, I’d like to see more accurate reporting on prices, rather than broad ranges. We’ll take what we can get though. Tools and insight like this from leading companies in the domain space can only help to provide more intelligence and better decisions for all.  Clearly we understand that this information held privately is an asset that can improve revenues and fend off competition as well.  Data and information want to be free though.  They help inform the entire marketplace including buyers.  We’re glad to see this company leading the way like this.

The new site features:

• a domain search (displaying recent searches)
• a whois search (displaying recent searchs)
• a newsticker
• a list of recent inquiries
• a list of recent quotes (with price ranges)
• a list of recent sales (with price ranges)
• a chat system  (appears they found a new use for the company’s “chattr” online messageboard experiment)
• a valuation system based on the following parameters:

As announced in a Press Release that went out early this morning, DomainTools just launched a new site, ScreenShots.com. The site makes the entire website screenshots of DomainTools available for search. When you conduct a search on the site, aside from the history of screenshots it will also display the amount of domains the domain owner owns, the amount of domains on the same nameservers as well as similar sites.

The DomainTools thumbnail image capture system, the back-end service for Screenshots.com, was originally developed in 2004. The current version now checks up to 1,000,000 websites a day and, unlike other screenshot services, captures critical external resources like ads and images (even though those do not appear to show in the screenshots for DNN). With Screenshots.com, what you see is exactly what a visitor would have seen when they visited the site.  Domain investors, trademark attorneys and brand agents alike have relied upon DomainTools’ screenshot history tool to make more informed business decisions and to investigate and defend potential trademark-infringing domain names.

[Update] DomainTools just put up a background post on their blog.

The DomainTools network now emcompasses:

• Screenshots.com
• DomainTools.com
• DailyChanges.com
• ReverseWhois.com,
• Reversemx.com

DomainTools had bought the domain ScreenShots.com for $32,500 in Q1 of this year according to DNJournal.

Disclaimer: DomainTools is a current advertiser on DNN.

See the full press release after the jump.

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The namespinner company Domainsbot today announced a relaunch of their main site, featuring a real-time search experience and new tools that make it easier for people and companies to search for domain names, Twitter handles and Facebook Page Names. By offering an integrated domain and social identity search, the new service makes it easier for users to find and obtain
unique, brandable identities. In addition to adding social identity search and revamping its website for speed and ease of use, DomainsBot also offers a downloadable mobile application, for identity searches on the go.

“Five years ago we only needed to worry about checking domain availability before naming a new business or product. Today’s challenge is to take care of domains and social media identities, such as Facebook and Twitter. Our goal is to simplify an important and time consuming process creatively,” said Emiliano Pasqualetti, DomainsBot, CEO.

The new domainsbot.com also features premium domains from GoDaddy and Sedo, the two largest marketplaces of names for sale. These partnerships will enable users to browse for the largest selection of domains available on the secondary market. Additional features of today’s release include the introduction of DomainsBot Deals, a selection of top discounts for domain
registrations and renewals in partnership with some of the most popular registrars, and a whole new selection of B2B services for domain registrars, registries and new TLD applicants. The services for new TLD applicants will provide statistics based on existing registrations estimating potential for new TLDs.

As announced today, DomainTools has just released a new site, ReverseMX.com, The website allows users to analyze MX (mail exchanger) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework) usage and configuration by region and or network, helping to uncover relevant relationships.

In order to build the ReverseMX product, DomainTools has researched and gathered intelligence on mail server data related to over 130 million domains by querying their nameservers. ReverseMX not only uncovers which mail services are the most popular on a domains-in-use basis, it also uniquely correlates relationships between mail servers. You can also see which domains are hosted by a specific mailserver.

Says Tim Chen, CEO, DomainTools, “The DomainTools brand has historically been about surfacing and correlating interesting data around domain names and the DNS. The release of ReverseMX.com gets us back to those roots while simultaneously allowing us to experiment with some new database technologies that will help us to serve more data faster. We are looking forward to seeing how our strong community of active users can benefit from our SPF and MX data.”

See the full press release after the jump.

(more…)

This morning, DomainTools has announced a revamped verision of their API. What originally started as a tool for domain name suggestions and has since been expanded to include almost all of the data and functionality of the DomainTools website.

Sample uses of the API are:

• Add value to lists of domain names by highlighting important statistics such as historical event counts and related domain names
• Tap into the largest available database of historic Whois records to discover the true legacy of a domain name
• Set up a customized keyword or trademark monitoring system to keep tabs on domain registrations
• Quickly search through millions of domain names to find the perfect domain for a specific project

The DomainTools API is available today and can be set up in three steps via the DomainTools API Web page.

The pricing requires a monthly subscription of $39.95 for each of the services on top of per query pricing ranging from $0.0025 (domain profile) to $0.95 for (whois history). Reverse whois is priced based on the amount of domains included in the report. Services accessible via API are:

• Domain Profile
• Whois Lookup
• Whois History
• Hosting History
• Reverse IP
• Name Server Report
• Reverse Whois
• Domain Suggestions
• Domain Search
• Mark Alert
• Registrant Alert

Tim Chen, CEO of DomainTools, stated that “DomainTools has seen increasing demand for dataaccess, and we are excited to make these powerful new APIs available to our individual and enterprise clients. We are already seeing initial partners integrating our data into their service offerings, and expect that the community will also be building innovative new products on top of DomainTools data.”

After DomainTools was purchased by Thought Convergence in 2008 many things happened. A settled lawsuit, forming it up as a separate company, a new Board of Advisors, new office space and 30% new employees. And now the company relaunched their website.

“An enormous amount of work went into rebuilding our core infrastructure in 2010, an effort that lays the groundwork for more rapid product innovation in 2011 and beyond”,Tim Chen, CEO of DomainTools told DNN. “Our new content and navigation better services the significant number of novice users who visit our site, while the flexible membership structure allows professional users to purchase only those products they plan to use. This launch is just the beginning; we will continue to improve the site and services throughout 2011 while rolling out new products.”

Here are the things changed on the site:

• Redesign with the goal to improve usability and access to products
• New Account Management Page
• New “Learn” Educational Section
• Connecting to its users via Social Media is part of the company goals
• New membership levels (see below)

The pricing was simplified and there are now three different membership levels:

1. Novice Account (free)
2. Standard Membership ($29.95 per month)
3. Professional Membership ($49.95 per month)

Existing members retain their existing pricing levels for paid members.

When iWhois.com had a sudden change in its interface at the end of last week, many of its loyal users were surprised. DNN dug deeper and found out that there was also an ownership change behind the scene. The sales price has not been disclosed.

The new owner, industry veteran Richard Lau (who also is co-owner of the DomainName.com registrar) has added some new features to the site as well, allowing users to directly query domain related information at sites like Alexa, Compete.com and many more. Lau told DNN “As an avid and loyal user of iwhois.com for many years, I am extremely proud to carry the mantle as the new owner of iwhois.com.”

Andrew Moulden had established iWhois.com in December of 2004 with the aim to provide a secure way of looking up domain names – the site quickly gained popularity after it was mentioned on a private forum and many of its early users (including the author of this article) have remained loyal to the site. While the method of lookup has now been changed to use the DomainTools whois API, the site will remain free of any front running activities. Richard Lau also is a member of the advisory board to DomainTools. As Moulden told DNN, “it was a condition of sale that there would be no front running.”

The current trust policy states:

• We do not monitor searched domains at iWhois that are available for registration.
• We never access or extract such data from our server logfiles. These are emptied daily.

Lau added: “I have been running registrars since 2000 and have never engaged or enabled front-running and renew iwhois.com’s commitment to no front-running whatsoever.”