Domain Movers: Pony.com & Much More

Well, I haven’t posted in several days and that is because I’m extreme sick, with little to no energy to really keep my head up, let alone to do other stuff but I need to get my mind off that and I’m on day 4 with the flu… so how about a domain movers! I have to do something other than lay in bed, so I did some digging from the past couple of days and here is a large list of corporate domain name movers with several brands being purchased which included several nice domains and much more!

Megabloks Inc. is moving over to brand protection registrar MarkMonitor! Two domains owned by the company, MegaBlocks.com and MegaBlock.com have switched domain name servers from a hosting provider to MarkMonitor. Both domains just redirect to MegaBloks.com . Doing a little bit of research and it appears Mattel Inc. acquired Mega Brands around May 2014 for $460 Million. Mega Brand only owns about 100 domains, but the majority of domains owned by any company are important to them and these domains will now be owned by Mattel! Mattel Inc. owns a lot of domains, with about 7,900 just under the Mattel brand name.

Emotii.com, BoardDudes.com, ColorBlanks.com are another Mega Brands owned domain that recently has had domain name servers switch to MarkMonitor as well.

Simon Property Group, L.P. has a planned $500 Million dollar project in the works called “Copley Tower” and they have hand registered domains for it including, TheCopleyTower.com |.net and .info. Some names pointed to “Copley Place” and “Copley Place Tower” do these registrations indicate the name going to be used? Hard to say, as Simon has owned the domain name CopleyPlace.com since at least 2005 and that is already a shopping mall. So Copley Tower IMO would make sense and CopleyTower.com was registered 2/11/2014 at GoDaddy by a Web Marketing 2020 LLC, and they also registered CopleyPlaceTower.com and have a website on this one. I am not sure of the connection to Simon! I’m sure Simon would likely want to own both of these domains, but they appear to be owned by a domain investor of Boston real estate domains.

CoplyTower1.com, CopleyTower2.com, CopleyTowerApartments.com, CopleyTowerOne.com, CopleyTowerTwo.com and CopleyTowerResidences.com have also now been registered by Simon.

DJO, LLC (DJOGlobal.com) have registered a nice domain that expired at GoDaddy and was dropped from the registry. PainWar.com . Whos feet don’t hurt all the time and it’s like fighting a war! So I see this as a good marketing domain for an ad! DJO Global, Inc. is a leading global provider of high-quality, orthopedic devices, with a broad range of products used for rehabilitation, pain management and physical therapy.

OutlawRaptor.com has been “taken over” by Ford Motor Company? I say taken over, because there is potential they used legal means to get the domain. OutlawRaptor.com was a website owned by “Outlaw Offroad, Inc” which offered offroad type parts for Ford Raptor trucks and others. Ford owns a trademark on the term Raptor which it filed in 2008… so this may have been used to get the domain. The website currently has 359 indexed pages in Google alone. The domain was registered in 2011 at GoDaddy.

Disney has registered several “Pete’s Dragon” domains like Petes-Dragon.com, DisneyPetesDragon.com, PetesDragonFilm.com and PetesDragonMovie.com. It was announced in 2013 that a remake of the film was going to be done, with a 2016 release. They do not own PetesDragon.com, which has been registered since 2002. The first film was released in 1977.

Paolo Donnarumma (China) has secured the domain name BeCaptivated.com from Mike Mann’s Domain Market. Mike often posts some sales on his Facebook page but I didn’t see him post this one. To note, the domain did have a $500 buy it now price in September 2014 according to a DomainTools screenshot history.

Microsoft Corporation has registered the domain name MarketplaceBridge.com | .net . Also to note, they secured the domain name CodeLens.com from HugeDomains.com on 6/24/2013 which redirects to VisualStudio.com . Microsoft filed a trademark for the term Code Lens on 1/30/2015.  They have also filed a trademark for Holo Lens, another domain they recently acquired at Sedo for $6,750. This has set off a storm of “Holo” related domain sales.

FortuneClub.com a domain name as far as I can tell that is owned by Vertical Axis, has moved to a verification hold, suspended domain. I found that interesting, since the domain was on Mark.com, which is basically a personal for sale service for the company. This makes me wonder if “somebody” is trying tactics to “secure” the domain in some fashion if they didn’t like an offering price to purchase it?

Local Corporation (Local.com) has acquired the domain name iCanAnswerThat.com from SimplyStatic, LLC (Octane360.com). The domain name was parked with Above.com prior.

Star Wars has announced its first stand alone film and they registered several matching domains. StarWarsRogueOne.com, StarWarsStandAlone.com RogueOneMovie.com, StandAloneFilm.com, StandAloneMovie.com and several more similar containing “Rouge One” or “Stand Alone” in different combinations with “film” and “movie”. The movie was announced March 12, 2015 and the domains were registered the same day by CSC Corporate Domains. The movie is due out May 26, 2017.

MayorsCompact.com and TheMayorsCompact.com have been registered along with the .net|.org|.info of each by a currently unknown CSC Corporate Domains client. This is likely related to what the United Nations announced in September 2014, which is a network of mayors to fight climate change.

PONY INTERNATIONAL LLC appears to be riding it’s pony out of Network Solutions and stopping at CSC Corporate Domains! Smart Move because NSI has been getting pretty shady now that Web.com owns them!! The domain has yet to transfer to CSC, but domain name servers have switched to CSC for Pony.com. PONY shoes have been around since 1972, with Pony.com being registered on March 21, 1997. Pony International only owns about 20 domain names and all of them, except 1, start with the word Pony. Two domain names they own, were actually registered BEFORE Pony.com and those are PonyUSA.com and PonyINT.com!

Doing a little further research… Iconix Brand Group has recently (February 2015) purchased Pony International and its assets for $37 Million, and the domain Pony.com was part of this deal.

StrawberryShortcake.com which was owned by American Greetings (AG.com) has been acquired by Iconix Brand Group, Inc as well. This was not just a domain deal, as Iconix acquired the Strawberry Shortcake brand itself from American Greetings for $105 Million in cash! The domain was one of the assets included.

Iconix Brand Group is an American brand management company that licenses brands to retailers and manufacturers primarily in the apparel, footwear, and apparel accessory industries. Iconix Brand owns about 1,200 domain names in total and just picked up at least two more valuable assets.

DirectvBucks.com was registered on March 10, 2015 by Directv LLC and they have put the domain to use. I’m not sure what the “site” is used for currently as it’s just a login page but the site is powered by Bamko.net which is a product sourcing company.

FallIntoMe.com has been purchased by a currently unknown CSC Corporate Domains client. The domain, which was registered on 4/29/2013 and was owned by HugeDomains.com, had a listing price of $2,195. I assume it sold for around that. The transaction is currently taking place at Afternic. FallIntoMe.net | .org | .info | .biz were all registered March 2, 2015 so it took them 12 days to purchase the already registered .com domain. Fall Into Me is several songs, but I’m sure the use of the domain is for something else.

CBS Broadcasting Inc. has registered two domain names that are interesting.. ColbertClubhouse.com and StephenNotAtHome.com . Stephen Colbert is set to replace the retiring David Letterman on the Late Show sometime in 2015.

The Weather Channel, LLC has registered the domain names WeatherMeansBusiness.com and .net

Twitter, Inc. has registered several new domain names and those include: AccessRegistries.com, TwitterCurate.com and TwitterCurator.com

Target Brands appears to be making some kind of play with the term “Pillow Fort” and appears to be making a brand with it? They registered several domain names relating to the term including: Pillow-Fort.com, PillowFort.info, PillowFort.biz, PillowFortBrand.com, PillowFortHome.com, PillowFortKids.com and TargetPillowFort.com

At this time, it doesn’t appear that they own PillowFort.com, a domain that has been registered since 2002. The domain is registered with Google Domains and is under whois privacy. The domain was owned by a Felipe Mendoza of Texas prior to transferring to Google Domains about August 13, 2014. Target also registered wwwpillowfort.com so this indicates to me they will likely be trying to purchase the .com! The .net and .org are also owned by somebody else.

ChalkBin.com has been acquired by Automattic, Inc. (owners of WordPress) according to whois in some fashion. I say in some fashion, because sometimes large companies buy smaller companies and the domain ChalkBin.com wasn’t being used but was owned by LearnBoost.com . Either Automattic had a need for it OR they domain was likely an asset of past owner and the change of ownership was likely due to the company being acquired. Doing a little bit more research and my hunch was correct. Automattic purchased CloudUp / LearnBoost around September 2013.

AllYouNeed.com is a similar situation as above. I am part German, but do not speak it nor read it.. so doing research on it makes it all that much harder! According to whois, All You Need Gmb owned the domain and there was a website on it that was a supermarket and a Jens Drubel was listed as the registrant. She had a Berlin address. The new registrant is Deutsche Post AG and they are located in Bonn. According to this article in 2012 from Bloomberg, they stated Deutsche Post AG purchased a “stake” in All You Need.  Maybe that stake became full course with the domains ownership changing to Deutsche.

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