Domain tracking site Ipwalk thought something was rotten in Cyprus back in April, when they noticed Cyprus had a suspiciously substantial of .eu domain names registered:

EURid noticed the incongruency as well. Convinced that some shenanigans had taken place, the agency made 400 registrars painfully aware that their actions constituted a breach of contract.

They also singled out three suspected front companies for specific attention, in a statement about the issue:

Some registrations have been suspended already, but for a different reason. EURid requires those holders to verify they are based within the European Union. Without that verification, they cannot register a .eu domain name.

Ipwalk cited a substantial drop in the number of .eu domains registered from Cyprus. Since the EURid took action, that number has dropped to 12,297 registrations, a much more likely figure given the size of the population.

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Domain tracking site Ipwalk posted a new interview with Dotmobi regarding its withholding of a number of domain names from the marketplace. Dotmobi has taken over 5,600 generic words off the board, removing potential domains like money.mobi and food.mobi from the available pool.

An additional 2,600 domain names related to locations, like NewYork.mobi, have also been set aside so no one can currently purchase them. Ipwalk noted that Dotmobi could make them available in an invitation-only auction.

The action by Dotmobi keeps these premium names under wraps until the registrar decides how it may wish to make them available. The article cited Dotmobi’s desire to have these domains go to sites with content:

Raad referenced the “sunrise” period for .EU domains, where the registrar, EURid, did not restrict valuable generic names. Speculators swooped in and snagged a large number of those domains when they became available.

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Advertising To The Mobile Generation

Corporate interests in a variety of industries have moved to ensure their names in the .mobi world have been properly registered.

Domain information company Ipwalk cited registrar Dotmobi in commenting on the opening of the new domain to registrations. Within the first couple of hours, an assortment of high-powered brands had purchased their .mobi domain names.

“There is a trend among companies to go directly to the consumer,” said Alexa Raad, Dotmobi’s VP of marketing and business development, in an exclusive interview with Ipwalk. “They are opening up the gates, reaching consumers more efficiently. It’s all about channel building. These companies want to build their brands beyond the PC or the newspapers.”

Those brands include retailers like Wal-Mart and Target; media companies ESPN and Ziff-Davis Publishing; and luxury brands Rolex and Dolce & Gabbana. Internet companies, telecoms, and entertainment and media companies were able to register their .mobi names in May, ahead of the general trademark holders in other industries.

Securing the .mobi domains may be an exercise in trademark protection for many companies, rather than an indication that a race to provide content for mobile phones has just broadened greatly. Many millions of phones have versions of Opera’s mobile browsers installed, and those browsers have the technology to automatically reformat web content for the small screen on the fly.

Such technology may prompt companies to hold off on any full-scale mobile website development, if their existing sites already look acceptable on the small screen. They could choose to redirect a .mobi address to an existing dot-com website instead.

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That’s a pretty sweet pace for a beta service with relatively little publicity, and represents a pretty good start.

Considering Office Live, with its full-features web design system, free domain name and email accounts (completely free in the basic package), all puts anything Google or Yahoo offers to shame, when Microsoft puts the finishing touches on this service, it could wind up pretty popular.

(via Digg)

Here’s something interesting: Office Live gives you a free domain, but what if you just want to take Microsoft’s kindness and use the domain for your own purposes?

MS isn’t going to help you with a simple option to change the nameservers, but they did do two things good enough that you can do it yourself: They registered the domain through Melbourne IT, not by themselves, and they register all the domains in the name of the Office Live user.

That means you can contact Melbourne IT’s San Francisco office (510.595.2003), register an account with them, add the domain to your account, unlock it, and change the nameservers. Tada! Free domain from Microsoft, at least for one year.

This solution was written by Bob Henry over here, but he also says:

Thanks Microsoft! Their product rules, and it’s great to see they are willing to give back to their users ; )

I couldn’t have put it better myself. It’s nice and all that we are getting all these great web services, but more companies need to understand that holding onto our data only makes their services harder to use. The more open you are, the more we’ll want to sign up with you. Microsoft could have done more here, but at least they didn’t do less.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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After we reported on the threat Microsoft could present to Google through exposure of typo-squatting on misspelled domains, the issue gained more prominence with the Washington Post’s focus on the Google side of the equation.

Google and firms like Netster and Sedoparking have benefited from the mass registration of misspelled domain names, and the placement of pages laden with advertising at those URLs.

Analyst Peter Alguacil from disclosed his firm’s findings regarding typo-squatting, and how Microsoft’s release of the Strider URL Tracer with Typo-Patrol could lead businesses like The Walt Disney Company to more easily track down those infringers.

Should that tool become part of a future browser release, those that benefit from the typo-squatting may find that part of the business imperiled. “When that happens, companies serving ad pages are going to have to adapt or see a significant loss of income,” said Alguacil in our earlier story.

Typos can help buyers take advantage of eBay sellers who lack solid spelling skills. By using a site like TypoTracker, buyers can find auctions containing a desired item that other buyers may not find due to the item’s misspelling.

It’s a hit-or-miss process, as some typos may lead to great bargains while others go nowhere special. Considering how spelling seems to be a forgotten skill online, it’s not unlikely someone could uncover an incredible deal on eBay that better spellers will miss.

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Peter Alguacil of IPWalk, said, “Microsoft’s initiative could be the beginning of the end for typo-squatting.”

The rationale here is that as proper owners of trademarks discover how their intellectual property is being misused, they will take action against the offenders.

Alguacil noted how one prominent company’s name has been misused by typo-squatters:

Disney has long held a reputation for having a fearsome team of attorneys at its behest. Should they aggressively pursue typo-squatters, the result could be one that removes a pool of advertising displays from the web.

That would hurt the providers of those advertising networks; Alguacil names Google and Sedoparking as two of several who could feel a little pinch from the loss of revenue through those sites.

Microsoft Research makes the Strider URL Tracer with Typo-Patrol freely available for download and use with Windows XP and IE 6.

On the product’s page, Microsoft noted how Sedoparking, Oingo, and Netster all deliver ads that send the user through pagead2.googlesyndication.com, part of Google’s ad network.

“It is only a matter of time until the results of this and similar research projects are integrated as a security measure into web browsers and security applications,” said Alguacil. “When that happens, companies serving ad pages are going to have to adapt or see a significant loss of income.”

UPDATE (Apr 30): This issue should begin attracting more attention, now that the Washington Post published an article about the issue of typo-squatting. We compliment the Post on picking up the story only ten days after we did.

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Green Is Good, Red Is Bad. Ipwalk recently announced the debut of their distributed website monitoring system, GIGRIB.

A downloadable client for the beta version of GIGRIB is available for Windows platforms 2000, XP, and 2003. Once installed, the client communicates with other clients, which regularly test connectivity while using a small amount of bandwidth.

Ipwalk collects the uptime information on its website where anyone can check to see if a website in the system has been up or down. Since the tests come from multiple locations, a webmaster can see if a site has been available to all or some of those testers.

On the Uptime site, Ipwalk displays information for a site including the date, time up or down, and time monitored for that period. A downtime log shows the periods of time a site was down before returning to an up status.

Peter Alguacil of Ipwalk explained more of the concept in a statement from the company:

Alguacil likened GIGRIB to technologies like the former SETI@home project or the BitTorrent technology for sharing large files; both functioned as distributed systems, one for computation, the other for file sharing.

Ipwalk’s issue will be to find critical mass for its application. Until then, commercial services like those provided by Keynote have little reason to worry about GIGRIB becoming a threat.

Ipwalk should consider a Unix/Linux version of their client, as many webmasters prefer running on a non-Windows platform. That could help it find more acceptance among Linux or Unix users who may be interested in GIGRIB.

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Domain names are being registered by Melbourne IT, a registrar, although if Microsoft wants to keep this up, maybe they should become one too, like Google is.

As IPWalk points out, the large numbers should be even higher and are only limited by the number of product keys Microsoft sends out. Well, Microsoft sent me two, and while I used one to test out the service (it’s surprisingly good, for what its worth), I would like to give one away to a happy reader, so they can get a free domain, hosting, and powerful web-based site creation tools. However, this reader must have merit to receive. How about somebody find me a new blog template!

(via Elinor Mills)

Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

Visit the InsideGoogle blog.