DomainTools Blog

Online Threats to Your Brand: Defense on the Front Line

2012-05-22T21:39:23Z

DomainTools was recently featured in the World Intellectual Property Review‘s 2012 edition. In case you’re not familiar with the WIPR Annual: it is a reference guide for IP owners, legal counsel, investors and service providers. It examines the business and legal issues affecting IP, highlighting recent developments, problem area and, most importantly, solutions, in major markets worldwide.

In DomainTools’ article, Susan Prosser talks about different strategies and tools available to protect your domain names and combat cybersquatting.

You can read the full article here on pages 48 and 49. We also have an ad on page 9.

In addition to INTA this past May 5-9, approximately 12,000 copies of the WIPR Annual will also be distributed at:

LES International April 1-4 2012 (New Zealand)
EPO November 6-8 (Germany)
AIPF (Dates TBA)
IPO September 9-11 (USA)
MARQUES September 18-21 (Greece)
IP Service World (Dates TBA)
ECTA June 20-23 (Italy)
CIPA CONGRESS October 11-12 (UK)

Let us know what you think about the content!

INTA 134th Annual Meeting Recap

2012-05-10T17:45:05Z

We’re back from The INTA’s Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.!

It was really great to meet face to face with current DomainTools members who often approached our booth with, “Hey, we use you guys all the time!”. We learned about which tools our members use most heavily, and received excellent feedback about what is most helpful to protect brands and trademarks.

Of course, we also met with many potential members who often approached us with “Tell me more about what you guys do, because it sounds like exactly what I should be using.” It was informative for us to uncover what frustrations they currently have in researching and monitoring domain names. And, in exchange for that great feedback, we depleted our inventory of over 1,200 swag items in no time! We gave away black umbrellas that had the slogan, ‘Protection Against the Brand and Trademark Elements’, in addition to hard cover notebooks with pen sets that included our logo. The umbrellas, in particular, were a HUGE hit with the on and off rainy days in D.C.!

Until next year in Dallas, INTA! To see all of our photos from INTA, view our Facebook photo album.

DomainTools at INTA’s Annual Meeting in D.C.

2012-04-24T21:00:50Z

For the second year in a row, DomainTools will be exhibiting at The International Trademark Association (INTA)’s
annual meeting, May 5-9th in Washington, D.C.

Read more details about DomainTools’ exhibition this year and how we serve this market in our press release.

If you will be attending the INTA conference and would like to set up a meeting time to consult with one of us from
DomainTools, please email us at MemberServices@DomainTools.com and we’ll sync up with you.

You can also stop by our booth, #212, to meet us and walk away with some very awesome DomainTools swag!

Best of DomainTools Support Vol. 3

2012-04-20T17:19:12Z

Happy Friday! It’s the perfect day to showcase the next volume in our ‘Best of DomainTools Support’ series.

This little gem showed up a few days ago in an envelope. Support tickets and inquiries are queued via email to our support team, so this is pretty rare! We’ve never had a catalog request until now. It would make it *much* more difficult to set up your DomainTools brand alerts (and other services) if you had to do it via mail order, don’t you agree?

DomainTools Goes Mobile

2012-04-11T16:31:06Z

Finally! No more tedious zooming, pinching, squinting or scrolling to see who owns a domain name, browse Whois history, or search domains to buy in the new DomainTools Marketplace. Starting today, anyone who visits DomainTools.com from their Android or iOS device (plus a few others) will see a mobile-optimized layout that provides nearly all the functionality and content of the standard DomainTools site. Nearly 10% of our visits are from users with mobile devices, so this is a very significant launch for us, especially at our traffic volumes.

Building a mobile version of a big, complicated site like ours is not a trivial effort. Indeed, the biggest question is whether to build a “mobile site” at all. Why not build one site, and let it “adapt” or “respond” to whatever device happens to be accessing it? You get the benefit of a device-agnostic approach that more readily accommodates the direction web use seems to be headed. Essentially, if your code is saying something like “if device==iPhone” you’re doing something wrong.

That’s the concept behind a set of web design principles known as “Responsive Design”: build your site from the ground up to gracefully compress, re-flow, and even hide content when the site is viewed on a narrower screen. Users get essentially the same experience when they move from their desktop to their tablet to their phone, and developers only need to build and maintain one set of code. If you can avoid coding for specific resolutions, your site will continue to look awesome when Apple comes out with its new ultra-resolution iWhatever next month.

Like most good design, though, the concept works best when it’s part of your plans from the very beginning. Retrofitting an existing site can be quite tricky, especially if your site is more data-centric than content-centric, and if it has lots of interactive elements and conversion flows. It’s one thing to have text fill the full width of the screen, but does that really make sense for a button? Perhaps so on a mobile device, but certainly not on a big desktop screen.

Still, there are techniques from the responsive design paradigm that can be applied effectively to a site like ours, and in the end, that’s the approach we chose. We still built custom mobile style sheets for many of our products, but we usually steered clear of any changes to the HTML code itself. We tried not to code for specific device or screen sizes (although we did exclude tablets from the list of “mobile” devices), and we didn’t launch a separate mobile site on its own domain name.

That helped us quickly bring a mobile experience to the entire site without undertaking a long and painful re-design of every product.

We think mobile visitors to our site will prefer these optimizations to the standard site, but in case we’re wrong, we’ve provided a way out. There are few things more annoying to me than to visit a website on my iPhone only to be re-directed to a crippled, barely-functional mobile site. I can usually find a link to get back to the main site, but too often it just sends me back to their broken mobile site. I knew we could do better, so our engineers added a reliable “View Standard Site” link to the top of every mobile page. If you don’t like how a product functions on your device, use that to get back to the main site and we’ll remember your preference on future visits.

This represents the first step of a broader mobile product initiative we’re advancing in 2012. We’re working on a much-needed update to our iPhone app, and we’re building a new Android app. We will also continue to iterate on the mobile site, including a mobile-optimized Whois lookup designed for touch-based, small-screen interactions that puts the most relevant data at the top of the screen.

We welcome you to try jump in and try our new mobile experience!
As always, we want to hear your feedback.
What do you like? What would you improve on?
Send your feedback to mobilefeedback@domaintools.com

Preview and Test the DomainTools Marketplace!

2012-04-04T20:35:34Z

Today we release a preview of a very important and distinct product for DomainTools: the DomainTools Marketplace. It offers an integrated experience to discover domains to buy or register with a clean interface, easy-to-use filters, and a super-fast search engine.

As the leading provider of Whois data worldwide, DomainTools gets an enormous amount of traffic from people interested in a domain’s ownership, often because they are trying to buy the domain. We’ve had connections to major domain sales platforms for years, but the search functionality was fragmented across several products. If you searched for domains about “coffee” (something I have become notorious for during these last few weeks of testing!), you had to search twice, once in our “For Sale” product and again in the “Auction Search” product. Worse, not all sources were linked to those products, so if you found a domain for sale on our Whois page and wanted to find others like it, you were often unable to do so.

In the new Marketplace, all the domains we know of from major sales platforms are aggregated together and accessible from a single search. And not just for-sale domains, but also expiring domains, domains at discrete auctions, and even available domains – a topic I’ll touch on shortly.

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.

The result is a very responsive search interface that shows the result of your filter changes in near-real-time, a search box that sends results without you hitting “enter”, and a quick way to preview domain details without losing context.

Give it a try — we think you’re going to like it.

If you look carefully, you’ll see something special tucked in with the listings: a shiny new domain suggestions algorithm.

DomainTools was one of the first companies to introduce a useful suggestions engine, which we referred to as the Name Spinner, nearly a decade ago and we felt it was time for an update. In the Marketplace, we’re experimenting with a different semantic approach to surface good domains for a user to register. We haven’t retired the old name spinner yet, and there’s even a third generation already in the works. We’d love to get your feedback on how the new Marketplace spinner compares.

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.

The DomainTools Marketplace will change that.

The same users also told us they needed a reliable way to find the “best” domains without paging through hundreds of results. That’s a daunting challenge: “best” is a wildly subjective term, especially in the domain space. Valuation tools can give some context to help rank domains (or not!), but domain valuation is still more art than science even to this day. Instead, DomainTools built an algorithm against our internal data sets to create a logarithmic “score” for domain names. We even managed to score domain suggestions, something most valuation tools do not currently do.

Overall, we’re excited and proud of what our engineering and business teams have conceived and delivered. This is the first product of its kind built from the ground up for people who have little or no experience buying domains in the aftermarket. It represents the first of many products we plan to build that will expand our reach to a broader, more global audience.

Although we purposely built this product to appeal to less-sophisticated users, there’s no doubt the readers of this blog could create a very long list of useful advanced features. For now, though, our focus is to get the basics right and work out the kinks.

We can’t wait to hear what you think of it!

Share your 5-star feedback on Marketplace with us now through Friday, April 13, and you will be eligible for a $50 DomainTools add-on credit or some DomainTools swag!

Email your feedback to mpfeedback@DomainTools.com to qualify.

Escrow.com Integrates DomainTools’ API Suite To Accelerate Verification Procedures

2012-03-20T15:22:02Z

An exciting Press Release went out this morning about Escrow.com‘s use of our API services. Check out the full release below:

Escrow.com Partners with DomainTools to Reinforce Transaction Security and Elevate Customer Experience

DomainTools’ API suite allows Escrow.com to automate their verification processes while providing faster, more secure results for buyers and sellers

DomainTools, the recognized leader in domain name research and monitoring, today announced that Escrow.com has successfully integrated the DomainTools API suite to enhance the customer experience while improving on security measures.

Though Escrow.com , the leading provider of secure business and consumer transaction management services on the Internet, has been a DomainTools customer since 2004, in recent months they have been leveraging DomainTools’ API suite throughout the entire Escrow.com domain transaction process. DomainTools’ Whois data is extracted via API and integrated into Escrow.com ’s internal processing systems, resulting in a turn-key solution that accelerates verification procedures and elevates customer satisfaction.

Escrow.com ’s role in a domain escrow transaction is to secure the funds from the buyer, then verify that domain ownership has changed hands prior to releasing funds to the seller. This guarantees that highly valuable domain name transactions cannot be gamed by buyers or sellers with wrongful intent. DomainTools helps protect this from happening by supplying Escrow.com with up-to-date, accurate information of domain ownership. “The quality of detailed data provided by DomainTools allows Escrow.com to add additional layers of security to each transaction improving the transaction process. We are excited to partner with DomainTools and leverage their API,” says Brandon Abbey, President and Managing Director of Escrow.com .

Before using DomainTools’ API, the mechanism of verifying domain ownership records was manual and cumbersome. “Prior to partnering with DomainTools and leveraging their API suite, the process of verifying dns, registrar and Whois record information was manual and time consuming,” says Jason Whitlow, Chief Technology Officer, Escrow.com . “By automating that process with comprehensive, accurate data from DomainTools, Escrow.com is now able to verify data more quickly while providing a quicker, more seamless experience for customers. DomainTools has become an integral part of our domain escrow process. We’re even leveraging DomainTools’ data in other business operations to validate accuracy of information.”

Partnering with Escrow.com , the leading provider of secure business and consumer transaction management on the Internet, was an easy choice for DomainTools. Escrow.com is the recommended service of top eCommerce companies such as eBay, Go Daddy, Cars.com and AutoTrader. “We are excited that Escrow.com has chosen DomainTools to help improve the integrity of their transaction process and further ensure consumer protection,” says Tim Chen, CEO, DomainTools.

DomainTools first announced their API services in July of 2011. Nearly every piece of data available on DomainTools.com is available for use by integrating DomainTools’ standards-compliant interface via the DomainTools API page.

Welcome, Cindy!

2012-03-16T22:25:36Z

We are pleased to announce that Cindy joined the DomainTools team this Wednesday as our Senior Graphic Designer – you may have seen our Facebook update that included a link to her DomainTools employee profile on our website. Be sure to check out her shoes…

She’s already hitting the ground running, working on anything that needs some DomainTools-esque design or UI magic added to it (see that level of concentration in this shot?!).

A little more about Cindy:

She’s a fan of 80′s metal and new wave, and listens to tunes while working, boxing, jogging and traveling to her new favorite destination– Alaska’s arctic. She’s seen caribou herds, wolves, muskox, grizzlies, wolverine and polar bears with her husband. She looks forward to introducing her son to his first midnight sun, but in the meanwhile she’s content with introducing him to Echo and the Bunnymen.

We excited to have Cindy’s talent on board!

If you know of anyone who may be interested in working at DomainTools, be sure share this link to our open positions!

http://www.domaintools.com/about/join-our-team/

Explore Seven Years of Cool Apple Products with Screenshots.com

2012-03-08T21:38:09Z

We’ve previously described how Screenshots.com can be an incredibly useful tool for researching a
domain name before you decide whether to buy it, but we sometimes find it’s just great fun too.

With an archive of screen captures dating back seven years or more for many popular sites, it can be fascinating to dive back into the history of the web and remind yourself just how quickly technology trends have changed our online lives.

As a relatively new convert to the world of Apple products, I recently used Screenshots.com to delve back into the mists of time to see what treasures apple.com has offered over the time since the company’s return, circa 2004, from over a decade in the wilderness of the Microsoft-dominated PC era.

Apple has a habit of prominently displaying its latest and greatest products prominently on its homepage, which makes it a great example to show off Screenshots.com .

Remember when iPods had a monochrome display? A screen that didn’t even do anything when you touched it? One of our earliest captures of apple.com , from December 2004, shows the newly launched color version of the device, which allowed users to store photos for the first time.

Can you believe Apple users were still restricted to using one-button mice until 2005? In this August 2005 screenshot, we see the birth of the two-button Apple Mighty Mouse, now just called the Apple Mouse, with its “Single-button looks, multi-button charm.”

It was the launch of the iPhone that arguably set Apple apart and started to make it the tech powerhouse it is today. In this January 2007 screenshot, we see one of the first images of the device that reinvented the cellphone market. The first iPhone didn’t hit stores for another six months, by which time consumer appetites had been truly whetted, making the iPhone the must-have device of the last 10 years.

The original model iPhone went on to sell 6.1 million units, and following quickly in its footsteps came the rise of the app. This capture from April 2009 shows the late stages of the countdown to the one billionth download from the App Store.

And with the launch of the first iPad in February 2010…

… it was less than two years before Apple once again turned over its front page to a countdown, this time to the 10 billionth download from the App Store.

Technology changes so fast, sometimes it’s easy to forget just how far the online world has come in such a short space of time. Screenshots.com is a great reminder. What have you found?

DomainTools Ugg Boots Surprise

2012-02-22T16:23:08Z

As you may know from some of our previous “Best of Support” posts, DomainTools Support receives a wide variety of inquiries via our online support portal. Some of the inquiries are appropriate membership-related questions and other inquiries are not related to DomainTools at all.

With that said, we recently had a package delivered to DomainTools that contained a hand-written letter asking for a refund…and…a pair of fake Ugg boots.

Unfortunately, this is the case of someone who had difficulties finding the original company from which he bought the pair of shoes in his online search. Oftentimes, people find us out of frustration because they can not find the original company. This is a tactic that many counterfeit companies do – they confuse the customer, basically making it more difficult to locate the company and they come across DomainTools. However, this is the first time that DomainTools has erroneously received physical merchandise related to a counterfeit item, though we often receive confused e-mail inquiries like this on a pretty regular basis.