According to a post on Most Wanted Domains newly launched Facebook page and a corresponding tweet, Michael Berken’s company is going to be reporting information on their domain sales through social media in real time, starting next week. It also appears that the company bought mwd.com for an undisclosed price – the domain currently redirects to MostWantedDomains.com. The domain used to host a blog called “Mixed Web Data”.

German based HEXONET, a domain technology solutions provider, recently announced that they are now managing over a million domains for clients, resellers and partners. The one millionth domain milestone is a goal that many registrars strive for and HEXONET reached this goal last month.

The company empowers resellers to privately brand many unique internet services, including domain names available in hundreds of ccTLD’s via an API and web at wholesale prices. This is all done through 1API, an ICANN accredited registrar operated by HEXONET. Today thousands of resellers, startups, and service providers world-wide make HEXONET their solution provider of choice when it comes to registering domains, web hosting, private label dns services and ssl certificates.

HEXONET is headquartered in Homburg, Germany and has a North American subsidiary, HEXONET Services Inc. based out of Vancouver, Canada. It was in February of 2009 when Robert Birkner founded HEXONET Services Inc., the North American arm of HEXONET GmbH with former Key-Systems CEO and founder Jens Wagner.

Before joining HEXONET, Robert held important posts throughout the domain industry including General Manager of Hostway Canada, General Manager of Domainpeople Inc., Director of Global Domains at Hostway Corporation, and Director of Sales and International Business at Key-Systems GmbH.

Robert is known throughout the domain industry for his expertise on the industry’s business policy, market insight, product development, and especially for understanding the needs of end users and registrars. Robert also consulted on the re-launch of the .ME domain registry in 2008.

In recent years, the company has had a strong presence in domain conferences such as Domainfest and DNCruise, as well as ICANN meetings. Getting some big domain investment companies and professional domainers to come on board and use HEXONET’s platform has surely helped the company reach the 1 millionth milestone much faster than they probably expected.

After the jump you can find some of the highlights from the recent blog post announcement by Robert Birkner, Chief Strategy Officer at HEXONET Global, and founder & president of HEXONET Services Inc. in Vancouver, Canada.

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The operator of the .ORG domain extension, PIR (Public Interest Registry), is looking for nominations to the advisory council to fill seats that are opening up. They are specifically looking for individuals with significant internet leadership experience within the non-profit, non-governmental organization (NGO) and domain name arena’s who represent the broad and geographically diverse spectrum of the global non-commercial communities.

PIR says that the .ORG advisory council has been a valuable global resource for the Public Interest Registry (PIR) management for providing advice on policy, outreach, and new services to improve registry operations and support the noncommercial .ORG community. Currently the council consists of 15 members, with at least 2 from each of the following 6 regions: Asia, Asia Pacific, Africa, Europe, North America and Latin America. The members of the advisory council are selected by the PIR board of directors. All seats are for 3 year terms.

Advisory Council Working Groups

The advisory council has organized into “working groups” for the purpose of providing project-based analysis and input, serving as a resource to both the .ORG staff and board of directors at PIR.  Comprised of leaders from a broad spectrum of the non-commercial world, the Advisory Council Working Groups will contribute in four area’s:  IDN, Policy, DNSSEC, and Outreach & Awareness.

Interested individuals are encouraged to submit nominations, including self-nominations. A nomination statement of approximately 400 words should include details of the nominee’s experience with the internet, commitment to promoting the non-commercial use of the internet, understanding of the technical or policy issues facing the .ORG registry, and perspectives regarding the needs of the .ORG community. A biography and photo is also needed.

All nominations must be submitted no later than June 15th, 2012. The newly appointed advisory council members will be announced on June 30th, 2012.

Just the other day Luxembourg based EuroDNS.com announced that they are running a special promotion on all newly registered and transferred .eu domains. The prices have been reduced to €0.99 per single domain or $1.30 according to the latest exchange rates. The promo ends on May 22, 2012. Daniel Eisenhut, Chief Sales Officer at EuroDNS said:

“At EuroDNS we are currently offering our customers an excellent promotion on .EU domain names, for the next two weeks all .EU domain names are available for registration and transfer for only €0.99. EuroDNS does more than just register domain names; we also offer a constantly evolving range of solutions and services to assist our customers with all domain requirements. The list includes local presence service, Whois Privacy, and ProDNS which delivers safe and secure DNS services with no risk of data loss…”

To get in on the action you have to visit the EuroDNS website and then enter promo code PREU12C to get the discounted rate. Please note that in order to register .EU domains (ccTLD of the European Union) you have to be located in Europe or have a local presence there.

According to EURid, there are currently 3,568,477 .EU domain names registered. There are typically around 70,000 to 80,000 new .EU domain registrations per month. It will be interesting to see what the number is for May once this promotion wraps up and the .EU domain statistics are updated.

As per an update sent out by ICANN earlier today the California not-for-profit is now offering applicants refunds of all paid fees (about $350M USD in total) if they would like to withdraw their application prior to the publication of the list of all new TLDs that received applications. The TLD Application System (TAS) exposed some of the filenames of applications to other applicants. The board authorized refunds with a resolution during their workshop in Amsterdam on May  6th.

See the full email update from ICANN after the jump.

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The most popular posts on DNN in April of 2012 by web traffic were:

1. XXX Goes Live in the Root Servers (04|15|2011)
2. Joichi Ito Joins Tucows Board (12|15|2008)
3. Frank Schilling’s InternetTraffic.com now powers 1,500,000+ domains (04|19|2012)
4. Will Marchex Sell iPanel.com to Apple? (04|05|2012)
5. First Brannans Domain Auction by Clements brothers yields $34,000 ( 04|09|2012)
6. Google settles Dispute over gmail.de after 8 years (04|16|2012)
7. Internet.bs Corp Responds to KnujOn Accusations (04|09|2012)
8. Keep Playing the Music . . . Really, The Ship’s Not Sinking (02|22|2008)
9. LeadRefs Announcing New Version of Domain Sales Lead Generation Tool (04|16|2012)
10. ICANN Issues additional statement regarding new TLD Application System Bug (04|14|2012)

The operator for the German .DE ccTLD announced that it has entered into a strategic partnership with Swedish based Netnod, adding Netnods 35+ worldwide DNS locations to their own network.

“We have chosen Netnod for their outstanding technical expertise and fully trust their competence to meet the high level demands associated with the operation of our supplementary name service for .de, which is by far the biggest ccTLD worldwide. Also, both Netnod and DENIC are not-for-profit, neutral, and independent basic infrastructure-providing organisations and share similar strategic positions and views. Therefore, this partnership ideally matches with DENIC’s commitment to provide services of utmost reliability, on a self-regulatory basis,” said Dr. Jörg Schweiger, Member of the Board and CTO of DENIC.

See the full press release after the jump.

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A few days ago the registrar EnCirca released new feeds (available via RSS and HTML) on their site that list new, expiring and auctioned domains in the .Travel and .PRO TLDs. According to EnCirca, News.pro recently sold for $3,600.00; credit.pro sold for $2,400.00 and irki.com sold for $1,200.00.

[via EnCirca]

As per a press release sent out by DENIC, the German .DE registry operator, the 15th million .DE domain was registered today at 12:56pm central European time. The domain was “floristennetzwerk.de” (which translates to FloristNetwork.de).

See the full press release after the jump.

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ICANN emailed another announcement regarding the security issue in the TLD Application System (TAS) has been fixed, but the fix is currently undergoing Quality Assurance testing and ICANN is still gathering the information required to contact the applicants and let them know. The application system will not open today; another announcement regarding the opening date can be expected by April 20th, 2012.

See the full announcement below.

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