iEstates.com

About 3 weeks ago,  we wrote about the sale of the domain name GameGlobe.com by Marchex for $50,000.

Today the buyer emerged and it is in fact a gaming company who has HUGE plans for the domain.

The buyer is German online games company Bigpoint, who laid out its plans for GameGlobe to Gamasutra.com

“Gameglobe, a brand new free-to-play game platform that throws players into “limitless game worlds” directly through their web browser”.

“Gameglobe is an action adventure game first, and a set of game creation tools a close second. Players can begin by exploring the various developer-designed worlds of Gameglobe, with 3D environments ranging from medieval fantasy settings to more futuristic jetpack-driven storylines.”

“Once a player has seen enough of what the development team has to offer, he or she can then switch over to the user-designed levels and worlds and tackle a seemingly never-ending supply of content, or even try their hand at making their own levels. There is a heavy focus on this user-built content, as players can create and share their own games, worlds and environments with other players.”

Bigpoint has a partner in the project and its a company by the name of  Square Enix a maker of console and PC games.…

According to a Press release just issued, Archives.com was just bought by Ancestry.com Inc. (Nasdaq: ACOM) for $100 million in cash.

“Inflection launched Archives.com, then dubbed GenealogyArchives.com, in July 2009 to satisfy a growing demand for comprehensive online access to historical records. ”

“From humble beginnings, Archives.com rapidly grew to encompass over 2 billion records and generate over 5 million monthly visits.”

“Key partnerships, like those with FamilySearch International and NewspaperARCHIVE, have supported Archives.com’s massive content acquisition effort. Of special note is Archives.com’s partnership with the National Archives and Records Administration to provide free digital access to the 1940 U.S. Census, culminating in the April 2nd debut of 1940census.archives.gov, the most hotly anticipated genealogical record release of the decade.”

“The 1940 census release was an extraordinary event for both Archives.com and family history in general,” said Inflection Executive VP of Business and Corporate Development John Spottiswood. “It spawned a new level of mainstream awareness about family history, and we’re excited that this momentum will only grow as Archives.com joins the Ancestry family.”

“While Inflection was already superbly poised going forward, the sale of Archives.com significantly improves our ability to develop an array of incredible new products for consumers, professionals, and small businesses,” said Brian Monahan, the company’s Co-Founder and Chief Idea Guy. “The Inflection team will continue to be a top destination for technology talent and an industry-leader in data services.”

The sale is an exciting moment for Inflection and the broader family history community,” said Inflection CEO Matthew Monahan. “Thanks to Archives.com General Manager Joe Godfrey’s inspired leadership and our extraordinary team, Archives.com has quickly become one of family history’s most dynamic web properties. Our plan for a simple and affordable family history experience will be accelerated thanks to Ancestry’s deep expertise and resources.”

“Once the acquisition is completed, Ancestry.com will continue to operate and develop Archives.com using the existing Archives.com brand and website. Most of the Archives.com team, including key personnel in leadership, engineering, design, marketing, and business development, will transition to Ancestry.com.”

“The past three years have been marked by tremendous growth for Archives.com, as we’ve focused intently on making family history simple and affordable for millions of budding family historians,” said Joe Godfrey. “The acquisition by Ancestry.com will further fuel this momentum, and the team and I are thrilled.”…

According to a story in AllthingsD.com today,  Word Press now powers 70 million sites, up from 35 million sites a year ago.

“Almost half of the biggest blogs in the world are hosted by WordPress.com”

The company behind WordPress is Automattic which expects according to the story to generate $45 million in revenue this year.

“The majority of Automattic revenue comes from premium subscription services, and that’s supplemented by a “VIP” enterprise publisher business — in total, there are half a million paying customers — as well as a recently launched advertising revenue-sharing network.”

The company  has 106 employees.

TheDomains.com operates on Word Press.…

33 people were just inducted as the inaugural group into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Included in the group is the current Chairman of ICANN Steve Crocker.

“Dr. Crocker has been involved in the Internet since its inception. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, while he was a graduate student at UCLA, he was part of the team that developed the protocols for the ARPANET and laid the foundation for today’s Internet.”

Included in the 33 honored today was also Vint Cerf who is widely known as the father of the internet.

“Verf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet”

Even former Vice President Al Gore was inducted into the Hall for being:

“a key proponent of sponsoring legislation that funded the expansion of and greater public access to the Internet. Instrumental in helping to create the “Information Superhighway,” Gore was one of the first government officials to recognize that the Internet’s impact could reach beyond academia to fuel educational and economic growth as well.”

Craig Newmark the founder of Craigslist.com was also inducted.

You can see a full list and read a bio about each at the InternetHallofFame.org

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According to a post on xBiz.com tonight, two of the largest adult companies in the world, are planning to merger.

Manwin who owns and operates many popular adult sites, including Youporn.com, filed a merger notification with Austria’s Federal Competition Authority, an agency that probes mergers and acquisitions to merge with Miami-based RK Netmedia Inc.

RK Netmedia, Inc most well known adult brand is Reality Kings.

Manwin is the company which is currently suing ICM the operator of the .XXX registry for antitrust violations.

“The merger notification between Manwin and RK Netmedia was made April 16.”

“Every entrepreneur, whose legal or economic interests may be affected by the merger, may within 14 days (April 30) from the date of the notice … submit a written statement,” the authority said.

“The agency plans to end its investigation of Manwin’s planned Reality Kings acquisition on May 14.”

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HostExpolit publishes a quarterly list entitled “The To 50 Bad Hosts & Networks” and for the list just published today for the 1st quarter of 2012, both Godaddy.com and Oversee.com made the list.

Godaddy.com came in at number 40 overall on the top 50 worst list.

Oversee.net came in at number 49 overall, but was ranked number 5 in the world for “Badware”.

That’s actual and improvement for Oversee.net which was listed as number 1 in the world for “BadWare” in the last report for 4th Q of 2011 .

HostExploit analyzed all 40,000+ publicly-advertised Autonomous Systems (including web hosts, commercial networks and registrars) for things including:

MaliciousURL

Badware

Botnets

Exploit Servers

Spam

Phishing

You can check out the whole report by clicking here

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Rick Schwartz may have just bought the next category killer domain name for under $4k within the last month.

This week the Internet has been buzzing about what is broadly called “Smart Glasses”

Google’s own smart glasses product has been the subject of hundreds or stories in this past week

Google’s smart glasses project has been referred to as Google Glasses or Project Glass.

Smart Glasses maybe wind up being the new broad term for a product like cell phones or tablets as there seem to be a lot of manufactures for this new product.

Although this past week has been full of news of Google’s product, there is are other manufactures including Apple, that have plans to roll out their own version of Smart Glasses products in the near future.

Yes the domain name SmartGlasses.com was sitting for the taking, on one of the registrar aftermarket products either NameMedia’s DLS or SedoMLS but either way Rick purchased the domain off of a Directnic.com feed for under $4k.

It’s great story because there is always a sense in the domaining world that the old guys wouldn’t have been successful if they didn’t start in the 1990′s.

TechCrunch published an article on the  topic the other day:

“”Apple should seek to capitalize on Google’s lack of hardware experience, and spend some of its cash reserves to lock up critical component manufacturers. Even if Project Glass ends up an ugly mess, Apple could still make eyeglass computing beautiful. This technology sure seems like the future, so Apple needs to be ready to pounce. But the problem remains that it has no social network or other key services to power its own version”"

“Despite its lack of hardware experience, Google is the best positioned company to make, or at least provide the software for eyeglass computers.

Some other another old domainer just hand registered these domain names a couple of days ago:

eyeglasscomputing.com
eyeglasscomputer.com
eyeglasscomputers.com

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This week Facebook told the secondary market traders that they need to stop trading securities in Facebook.com in the run up to its May IPO

Today Sharespost.com just closed it last offering of Facebook shares and the selling price was $44.10 a share

At $44 a share the market cap of Facebook is around $110 Billion dollars which is I think more than the market cap expected by Facebook itself who was looking to sell shares giving it a $100 Billion valuation when it’s IPO hits in May.

We started following Facebook’s trading on Secondmarket.com back in January 2010 when shares were trading in the high 20′s but the stock split 5:1 in October 2010

So if you followed TheDomains.com for a while you could have bought shares of Facebook back in January 2010, for around $28 a share and sold them today for $44 and still had 4x the numbers of shares for free!!

After the final auction today, Sharespost.com, announced they were laying off 10% of their workforce because they couldn’t sell shares in Facebook anymore.

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Yahoo has just send out a notice to uses that it is closing down it Meme program in May.

Meme is a micro blogging site that was launched in August 2009.

Here is the notice that went out to users today:

“Meme will be discontinued on May 25, 2012.

Unfortunately, the time has come to say goodbye to Meme.

As part of Yahoo!’s commitment to delivering Web content and tools that matter most to people, we are reprioritizing our portfolio so we can focus on our core strengths and new innovations.

You don’t need to take any action. But if you want, you can export your posts or delete your account.

Here’s what’s going to happen:

- Your Meme blog will be available up to May 25, 2012. Until then, you can go to your posts and save to your computer any images that you want to keep. You can export all the text and images from the posts you created by going to the “Settings page” and clicking on “export my posts”. You can also go to the Settings page to delete your account.

- On April 25th, Meme will enter “reduced functionality” mode. This means no more new accounts, new posts or new comments will be allowed. The Meme API will stop accepting Inserts and Updates. You will still be able to access everything, export your blog or delete your account.

- On May 25th, we will shut down the site and all Meme URLs will become inaccessible. From this point on, you will not be able to access Meme anymore. Your Yahoo account remains unaffected.

We thank all the users that were a part of this community and hope to see you around other Yahoo! products.

Meme, from Yahoo!
http://meme.yahoo.com“”

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According to a new report by the Missouri University of Science and Technology, it takes a website visitor less than two-tenths of a second to form a first impression.

Using eye-tracking software and an infrared camera the research found that the sections of a website that drew the most interest were:

Logo – users spent 6.48 seconds focused on this area.

Main navigation – users spent 6.44 seconds on this area.

Search box – user spent just over 6 seconds on this area.

Social networking links – 5.95 seconds were spent focusing on links to sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Main image – 5.94 seconds spent looking at this image.

Main text content – users spent 5.59 seconds with this.

Bottom of website – users spent 5.25 seconds on this area.

“We know first impressions are very important,” says Dr. Hong Sheng, assistant professor of business and information technology at Missouri S&T.

“As more people use the Internet to search for information, a user’s first impressions of a website can determine whether that user forms a favorable or unfavorable view of that organization.”

Using eye-tracking software and an infrared camera in Missouri S&T’s Laboratory for Information Technology Evaluation, the researchers monitored students’ eye movements as they scanned the web pages. The researchers then analyzed the eye-tracking data to determine how long it took for the students to focus on specific sections of a page – such as the menu, logo, images and social media icons – before they moved on to another section.

“The longer the participants stayed on the page, the more favorable their impressions were,” Sheng says. “First impressions are important for keeping people on pages.”

Although use of color was not part of the eye-tracking study, participants indicated that it did influence their impressions of websites. “Participants recommended the main color and background color be pleasant and attractive, and the contrast of the text color should be such that it is easier to read,”

The use of images was also an important factor in web design, the subjects of the study said. “You must choose your main picture very carefully,” Sheng says. “An inappropriate image can lead to an unfavorable response from viewers.”

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