iEstates.com

According to ctvnews.ca, UltimatePoker.com has become the “America’s first legal, real-money online poker site  and it was launched in Las Vegas”

“There was black Friday, and now we’re going to have ‘trusting Tuesday,”‘ said Ultimate Gaming CEO Tobin Prior. “Players won’t have to worry if their money is safe. They are going to be able to play with people they can trust and know the highest regulatory standards have been applied.”

“It’s an opportunity to show the world how to properly run online poker,” Ultimate Gaming chairman Tom Breitling said.

“Earlier this year, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval approved legislation that gives him the ability to sign deals with other governors to facilitate interstate Internet gambling.”

“The company will have to pay 6.75 per cent of its revenue in Nevada state taxes.”

For those holding poker and gambling domains this is certainly good news as it seems that there is an movement by by states to legalize online poker and possibly online gambling which should make those types of domains more valuable than ever.

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According ESPN.com, the public face of Godaddy.com, the worlds largest domain name registrar and Sprint Cup Series driver Danica Patrick filed for divorce on Jan. 3 in the Superior Court of Arizona in Maricopa County  citing “irretrievably broken” from Paul Hospenthal.

“My marriage is irretrievably broken and there is no reasonable prospect of reconciliation,” Patrick said in the filing that she signed on Dec. 31.

According to the documents, Patrick and Hospenthal entered into a prenuptial agreement prior to their marriage in 2005 that defined property interest. She stated no alimony will be necessary.

“My spouse and I did acquire community property during our marriage, and it will be divided as indicated on a Settlement Agreement which will be submitted to the court at a later date,” Patrick said in the filing.

The documents cited there have been no incidents of domestic violence and there are no children.

According to the ESPN report her only public mention of the divorce came on Facebook.

“I am sad to inform my fans that after 7 years, Paul and I have decided to amicably end our marriage,” she wrote. “This isn’t easy for either of us, but mutually it has come to this. He has been an important person and friend in my life and that’s how we will remain moving forward.”…

Its been almost a year since we lost our little Boy Bandit Berkens.

With the help of Jenna Wehner and John Ferber Microgiving.com set up a fund and friends, domainers and readers of thedomains.com generously contributed over $6,000 to the Bandit Share the Love Foundation.

The money was donated to he TriCounty Humane Society,  a No-kill shelter located in Boca Raton, Florida.

TriCountry rescue animals mainly around the Tri County area of Palm Beach, Broward and Dade Counties, however they have also rescued animals as far as Georgia Alabama and Tennessee.

There mission is simple: “To place our rescued dogs and cats into loving forever homes”.

It was back in April that we heard that their van which they used to rescue animals broke down and was inoperable.

Without their van a lot of animals would not be able to be saved.

We found that over $10K was going to be needed for them to purchase a new van.

Judi and myself  personally added to the funds you contributed and gave Tricounty the money they needed to purchase the van and we are happy to report that the Bandit Rescue Van has already been used to rescue over 70 dogs.

Most recently the van was used to rescue 55 Chihuahuas from a warehouse in Hialeah which transported the dogs back to their facility.

Above is a picture of the van.

Yes we know Bandit’s last name is spelled wrong, but that’s not important.

What is important is that Bandit continues to do one of his favorite things, take a ride, this time traveling the highways of Florida, saving lives in the process.

As you can see from the banner on the left we are still collecting money for Bandit’s Foundation and will continue to find organizations who do great work in rescuing animals and finding homes for them, feel free to contribute if you can.

Here are a few stories about Tricounty:

Reported by wptv.com

Dozens Of Dogs Rescued From A Sarasota Puppy Mill & Given A Second Chance At Life

“”About 263 dogs were rescued by Sarasota County Animal Services, pulled from a home in Venice last week. Some of the animals are not in good condition, according to investigators. They were still being treated Sunday night.

Investigators said the owners of the dogs were cooperative with authorities.…

Although admitted not much to do with domain names, the domain industry is closely aligned with the overall tech sector and we could help but notice a few negative stories out this morning on Apple, a company which you typically can’t find one negative story.

Sales of the iPhone 5 came in at a disappointing 5 Million this weekend, 1 million higher than the iPhone 4s but well under expectations of 6 Million- 10 Million.

Over the weekend about 2,000 workers rioted at the notorious FoxCom plant in China where the iPhone (along with a lot of other products) are manufactured closing the plant.

According to reports over 40 people were injured, “About 5,000 police were dispatched and the rioting was brought under control by around 3 a.m. Monday morning. The facility was closed for the day and was expected to be back online Tuesday”

As part of the OS update Apple released last week they replaced Google Maps with their own mapping system.

The reviews are in and certainly for Apple shockingly negative.

I’ve read a lot of reviews and articles about Apple Maps and story for story, Apple Maps are getting ripped in comparison to Google Maps leading Tech publication Gizmodo.com, review speaks for itself:

“Apple Maps on iOS 6 is really bad when compared to Google Maps on iOS 5. It has misled people aplenty, the magic flyby is a horror show, and even Apple had to acknowledge it sucks.”

Finally Samsung started running some television ads in heavy rotation lampooning those waiting in the iPhone line when they say their Galaxy S3 has most of the new features of the iPhone 5 plus more.

The ads which seem to run 2 minutes, try to make the iPhone line look especially geeky or older, where as the cooler people are shown to be on the Galaxy.

Its one of the first attack commercials I can ever remember seeing where another company is calling Apple out for its product as being not “ahead of the curve” and maybe worse, not the choice of the cool people.

I especially like the part of the commercial when we find out that the cool young person in line is only holding the spot for their parents.

Even its new Passbook app is getting some mixed reviews.

Apple has been on a 10+ year run as the most inventive producer of consumer electronics, the company everyone loves to become the most valuable company in the world without seeming to miss a step.…

We are coming up to our 5 year anniversary of TheDomains.com.

Late last year we asked the readers if Thedomains.com should require people to use their real names to leave comments on the blog.

The 97 comments we got to that post were mixed with many in favor but others opposed it based on the internet history of allowing anonymity.

A couple of months ago we decided we would go to a blended solution to our comment section, but it wasn’t until the post by Rick Schwartz the other day that my programmer Adam got truly motivated and got the project complete.

As of this morning you need to register to make a comment.

You only need to register once and you can do so one of 4 ways.

You can register via email.

You will get a confirmation in your email with a password that will let you access the word press site and comment

Once on the Word Press interface of TheDomains.com you can change your password in the “your profile” tab or leave the password you were assigned.

You can also log in using your Facebook, Twitter or Google + Account.

Anyway method you choose, once you establish your account, you will be logged in you will remain logged in until and unless you log out.

Anyway you choose  you only have to register once.

We would urge you to use your real name in the registration process but we are not going to require it, so if you want to use a nickname or handle you can.

Your comment’s weight and effect on others has always been in part driven by who the comment came from.

Those who have stepped up to the plate and used their real name, as many commentators on this blog have always done, get more credibility, but the choice is yours.

But in either case your going to wind up commenting under the same name every time you comment and your registration will be linked to a valid email, Facebook, Twitter or Google + account.

In addition to the almost 70,000 published comments there are another 577,000 comments that were blocked by spam filters and 260,000 comments that were sent in from bots.

I anyone has any problems or questions you can reach me at Twitter Or Facebook or via email.…

Doing a quick test here guys sorry about that and will be deleting it shortly

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Acro.net made a post yesterday talking about a “huge advantage” he says European domainers have over their US counterparts.

Sorry my fellow blogger, I have to disagree with you.

Although not my first trip to Europe to cover an ICANN event I find it a huge disadvantage being 5 or 6 hours ahead of EST.

When I wake up at 8am its 2AM or 3Am back home, completely dead news wise or otherwise, Wall Street won’t even open for another 7 hours.

By the time I’m going to dinner at 8pm its smack in the middle of the the day back on the EST.

By the time the market closes its 9PM or 10pm in Europe and if you want to follow earnings and aftermarket news your doing it at 11pm or midnight.

Whether its placing backorders in on Namejet.com or bidding on expired domain auctions or covering industry news for TheDomains.com,  I have to tell you I find it almost impossible to do it operating so far ahead of EST.

Other than ICANN that seems to put news over overnight (although they are headquartered in California), I find no advantage to being ahead of the game to speak.

Actually I found another reason to respect what Kevin Murphy does covering the industry on DomainIncite.com having to do so at a huge time disadvantage.

I guess it will be interesting to get Elliot’s take on all of this when he returns.

I have 5 more days over here they back to normal time for me.

Can’t wait.

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The World continues to change.

As I found myself in Ireland, clearly blowing past the Independence Day celebrations and any signs of fireworks only to find myself in a large pub on July 5th with all the staff and most of the patrons celebrating Christmas, complete with Hats, a Christmas Tree and plenty Santa outfits.

Yes it was the Christmas in July party and the place was rocking to the live music.

In this case it was a rather good cover band who performed everything from Classic rock to hip hop, but not one sign of any ‘Irish” music.

Not only the traditional Irish music as you would expect to hear in any pub in Ireland but not even a Song from Bono.

So as I watched the room of filled with red and white, listening to the lead singer tell me “the summer of 69 was the best days of his life” when clearly he wasn’t born until at least the summer of 89, well times they are a changing.

The band is named Clockworks & their banner hanging behind them had a Facebook & YouTube banner as well as there domain name which they used Clickworkstheband.com

In a few years they maybe will be able to use Clockworks.music or Clockworks.irish or Clockworks.band.

Yes the world is changing the domain name world is not immune.

We all know what we have coming down the pike which is 500-1,000 extensions in the next few years that will give more choices to the consumer for domain registrations.

Maybe some of those new extension will even allow free registrations.

We know that the biggest search engine in the world applied for over 100 of these new gTLD’s including over 90 generics, so anyone wondering if Google will rank the new gTLD’s basically has their answer.

Over the next days we are going to look at what all of this could mean for domain investors, domain holders, and the domain industry as a whole.

Could we Verisign pass on some rate increases it is entitled to under its new and endless contract, or even see .com registration and renewal rates rolled back as new competition cuts into registrations?

Will registrants drop incumbent TLD’s and ccTLD’s domain registrations and will investors have a chance to acquire some great dropping domains, maybe not seen since the dot com bubble?

There are a ton of angles and considerations and we plan on covering them over the next week.…

Big shout out and congrats to Lana Del Rey, Rob Grant,  and the entire Grant family as “Born To Die”, Lana Del Rey album was released today and is currently number 1 and 2 on the iTunes US album chart.

The Deluxe version with bonus material is number 1 on iTunes and the regular album is #2.

According to Lana’s Facebook page the album is  “#1 in 11 countries”.

Lana has over 500,000 fans on Facebook and 158,000 followers on Twitter.com

Lana is scheduled to be on The Late Show with David Letterman on Thursday February 2nd (CBS).

Lana’s music video, Video Games, has been viewed online over 20 Million times.

Lana was also just nominated in the UK for the NME Award, for Best Track – Video Games and Best New Band…

We want to wish everyone a Happy New year.

Judi and I send out our best wishes for Healthy and Happy New Year.

I also want to thank all our readers, commentators and advertisers for another record year for us at theDomains.com.

2011 marked a record for traffic, posts and comments and I deeply appreciate that you chose to spend a part of your day over here.

2011 was a very challenging year for a lot of people and personally I’m glad to see it go.

2012 is going to be action packed for those in the domain industry pretty much right off the bat, with the new gTLD period opening on January 12, the SOPA hearing set for January 24th and Domainfest the first days of February.

Have a great holiday and we will see you on the flip side.