Author name: fairwindsp

FairWinds Partners ⬥ 28 July A new kind of Public Service Announcement (PSA) has arrived – the public service app.  It looks like smartphone apps are no longer limited to games, drink recipes, and social media platforms, meant purely to entertain us and keep us from having to interact with others during those oh-so-tedious minutes […]

Josh Bourne ⬥ 27 July I’m up in Eagle River, Wisconsin on vacation with my sons this week.  We visited last year around this time, and I blogged about that trip as well. My birthday was on Saturday, and in addition to my two boys Charlie and Oliver, my sister, my parents and my grandmother

Josh Bourne ⬥ 26 July FairWinds recently released a study that calculated the cost of typosquatting for the brands behind the 250 most highly trafficked websites.  The total included costs from visitor acquisitions, lost sales and impressions and also recovery of typosquatted domain names, and came out to $327 million per year. A major source

Josh Bourne ⬥ 16 July I was driving with my family to Nationals Park to see the Nats play the San Francisco Giants on Sunday, when I noticed a Windows Catering truck drive by. As it passed, (because I can’t help myself) I noticed the company’s domain name displayed on the side of truck. Again,

Josh Bourne ⬥ 24 May Proxy services are a serious problem. They embolden cybersquatters and cybercriminals by providing them with safe harbor in the form of invisibility and/or anonymity and make it difficult for trademark owners to gain access to infringers. A proxy service is a registered domain name holder (“registrant”) that licenses the use

Josh Bourne ⬥ 24 June George Kirikos wasn’t the only one who raised really interesting and challenging points at the ICANN meeting.  There are two more people who made comments and asked questions that I think are important and that I’d like to talk about here. The first is Zahid Jamil, who hails form Karachi,

Josh Bourne ⬥ 24 June I just finished a conversation with a contact who is still at the ICANN meeting in Brussels.  He attended the ICANN Public Forum and let me know that in his opinion it looks like the .XXX gTLD, an extension dedicated to hosting adult content, should be approved soon.  Overall, he

Josh Bourne ⬥ 22 June While in Brussels, I had the chance to participate first-hand in one of ICANN’s international meetings. One of the sessions I attended yesterday was the “New gTLD Program Update.” George Kirikos, who many in the ICANN community know and appreciate for his knowledge and commitment to improving ICANN, submitted a

Phil Lodico ⬥ 15 June The aftermarket is one of the resources we use to measure the value of domain names.  We recently decided to look into how the reported sales prices have trended across domains that have changed hands more than once over the past few years.  We found that roughly 30 total domain

Josh Bourne ⬥ 10 June What could the domain names coconutloving.com, desperaterussianhousewives.co.uk, and jellyparties.co.uk have in common? The answer is surprising – all three sites are registered and run by the BBC. Following a Freedom of Information request, the BBC recently released a list of 154 of the domain names that it owns. The sites

Liz Sweezey ⬥ 30 April After being closed for a year for renovation, the Safeway located at Wisconsin Ave. and 34th St. NW is re-opening its doors to local Georgetown and DC residents on May 6. Thank God.  I’ve been living in DC for nearly 3 years, and Georgetown’s Safeway has been my local grocery