DirectI, the parent company of BigJumbo, DomainAdvertising.com, Logicboxes and ResellerClub amongst others has announced today with an email to its customers that it will be merging the DomainAdvertising and BigJumbo brands.

From the email:

DomainAdvertising.com is pleased to announce today, the merger of BigJumbo.com & DomainAdvertising.com into a single Domain Parking Platform. The merged entity will function under the brand DomainAdvertising.com.

This merger combines the best features from each of the platforms, further strengthens our position in the domain parking market. The move brings with it a gamut of advantages and possibilities – the combination of DomainAdvertising.com’s graphic-rich, topical templates and BigJumbo.com’s superior keyword optimization technology, more resources on the account management and optimization front, greater industry insights and access to more intelligence– just to name a few.

According to the login details email sent out to customers, it seems that Domain Advertising.com will also continue to accept traffic via URL forwarding.

DomainAdvertising was launched at the Targeted T.R.A.F.F.I.C. show in New York in 2009 and then hired former Fabulous.com executive Dan Warner as a CEO. He left the company at the end of June 2011.

See the full email after the jump.
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DirectI’s LogicBoxes unit announced today that that they are going to power HostGator’s new registrar. HostGator has over 7,000 servers under management and is planning to launch their registrar in 2011. They have been accredited under the name Launchpad.

“The LogicBoxes Registrar Automation Platform allowed us to avoid having to ‘Reinvent the wheel’, so to speak,” said Brent Oxley, Founder & Chairman of Hostgator. We realized that we’d have far greater ROI on our development resources by engaging them in perfecting our core products, viz. Hosting, rather than having them build Registry connections and manage all of its related tasks.”

“Our Platform represents a single point of Integration to over 50 popular TLDs across the internet, so companies like HostGator can effectively use the platform to go live as their own Registrar within a few weeks. And as we constantly add new TLDs, features to handle new ICANN and Registry policies, etc. to the platform, HostGator’s one-time integration effort is enough to always keep them on top of the ever-changing marketplace,” said Bhavin Turakhia, CEO & Founder of LogicBoxes.

See the full press release after the jump.

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Over the last few months Brian Krebs of the Washington Post has been covering stories about domain name resellers and registrars who are in one way or another tied in to nefarious online activities such as spamming, spyware and malware.  A noticeable trend in these articles is that the activity of these scammers is consistently showing them to be using registrar reseller accounts and privacy protection to cover their tracks.  Krebs’ stories are worth reading as they highlight the issues in the domain name system, ICANN and registrars which continue to provide a means for these scammers to operate.  (more…)