h488 domain names, admin tools, provisional patent, and more!/h4 pIn the summer of 2006, at the height of the digerati's Web 2.0 frenzy, social networking startup Kiko.com sold itself on eBay. The share-your-appointments-with-the-world online calendar extravaganza was pulling in exactly zero dollars a month. But after a flurry of late bidding, eBayers decided it was worth $258,100..../pa href="http://ad.uk.doubleclick.net/jump/reg.rss.4159/main;sz=336x280;ord=1234567891?" target="_blank"img src="http://ad.uk.doubleclick.net/ad/reg.rss.4159/main;sz=336x280;ord=1234567891?" border="0" alt=""/a

Google App Engine SDK 1.1.6.201Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users.

You can serve your app using a free domain name on the appspot.com domain, or use Google Apps to serve it from your own domain. You can share your application with the world, or limit access to members of your organization.

App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account, and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see, at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month. During the preview release of Google App Engine, only free accounts are available. In the near future, you will be able to purchase additional computing resources.
WHAT'S NEWVersion 1.1.6.201:

• Datastore now supports filtering and sorting on the key special property, which evaluates to each entity's key.
• Fixed a bug where it was possible to append None to ListProperty.
• Datastore appengine.ext.db models allow deletion by key without instantiating a model instance.
• Datastore models allow access to key name before put() if key_name given.
• Datastore fetch max results and max query offset match production limits.
• Fixed an issue in production where query fails with NeedIndexError when a model has two ancestor indexes.
• • http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=423
• Allow trailing whitespace in PropertyValueFromString for datetime.
• Fixed to_xml on models with binary data in a BlobProperty: they now are base64 encoded. Note: This changes XML serialization.
• • http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=430
• Fixed an issue with setting expando attributes.
• • http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=431
• Fixed an issue where TypeError was raised instead of NeedIndexError for "merge join" queries, i.e. queries with only equals filters and no ancestor or sort orders, that still need an index.
• • http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=749
• URLFetch in the SDK now has the same 5 second timeout to match production.
• URLFetch response headers are combined
• • http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=412
• URLFetch now uses original method when following a redirect.
• • http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=363
• URLFetch logs a warning when using a non standard port.
• • http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=436
• URLFetch allows integers as values in request headers.
• Enforce response size and API request size limits to match production.
• • http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=447
• SDK sanitizes response headers to match production
• • http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=198
• Login URLs now require login in the SDK to match production.
• • http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=53
• Fixed an issue with long URLs in HTTP 302 redirect responses.
• • http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=407
• Fixed an issue with regular expressions in static_files in app.yaml
• • http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=711
• SDK only allows "C" locale to match production.
• • http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=356
• Support the bufsize positional arg in open()/file().
• lstat is aliased to stat.
• appcfg handles index building errors more gracefully.
• Fixed an issue with symlinks in the path to the Python core libraries.

REQUIREMENTSMac OS X 10.4 or later.
DEVELOPERGoogle
DOWNLOADS2875
DOWNLOAD NOW (3.6 MB)
More information

Hello All,

I use to have a domain name that was my full name ( darylgregg.com )

I missed the renewal by about 2 weeks and now its gone. I have tried to email who actually bought it and they are giving me the run around that this was a personal blog / picture share site and that I have no trademark etc on this site and want me to purchase it for $3000 or more.

Is there anything I can do? I would like to have my domain back.

I have pleaded that this is my personal site and that it was not acquired in good faith as they say they only acquire names in good faith.

I informed them that my site was used to share pics and stuff with friends and family and what could they possibly gain besides my traffic.

I even went as far to show them previous renewal and emails and locations to where that domain use to point too etc.

:mad::mad::mad:

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks Guys!!!

The EFF is representing a NYC activist who is protesting redevelopment efforts for New York City's Union Square. The woman, Savitri Durkee, set up a website parodying the website of Union Square Partnership, a group that is pushing to heavily redevelop Union Square. Such a parody is certainly a reasonable and lawful way of making a point and protesting USP's actions. However, USP basically fired off multiple shots against Durkee to get the site taken down, starting with a href="http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/11/18" target="_new"a DMCA takedown notice to Durkee's hosting company/a, followed by a copyright lawsuit against Durkee and a claim with WIPO that the domain name Durkee used violated their IP, and demanding that it be handed over to USP. As the EFF notes, parody is protected under fair use doctrine, and it seems quite clear that USP is doing all this to stifle Durkee's right to speak out against USP's redevelopment efforts.br /br /a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081119/0404062885.shtml"Permalink/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081119/0404062885.shtml#comments"Comments/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20081119/0404062885op=sharethis"Email This Story/abr / br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=e63fc8e5e7395a448de55d03931ff7e0p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=e63fc8e5e7395a448de55d03931ff7e0p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=e63fc8e5e7395a448de55d03931ff7e0" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?a=PKQqn"img src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?i=PKQqn" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~r/techdirt/feed/~4/460282711" height="1" width="1"/

Last I heard about Leapfish (this was a couple of years ago), they ran a useless but fun tool that provided you with a free appraisal for your domain name based on a variety of ratings and criteria. Now they’re back with an equally useless tool, this time without the fun part.

The company just revamped itself under the ownership of California-based DotNext, morphing into what they refer to as a “multi-dimensional information aggregator,” which is actually nothing more than yet another meta search engine. You know the kind: sites that pull together search results from real engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo and attempt to differentiate themselves by adding tabs for meta-searching images, videos, Q&A, blogs, and so on. Leapfish also displays a number of static, non-customizable widgets on their homepage for the latest news, weather reports, and a stock market summary, which is a kind of step backwards from all the start page personalization efforts we’ve seen over the years.

The company is actively contacting potential advertisers to buy keywords for top positions in their search result listings for a flat fee—typical registration fees are reportedly around $1000 and there’s a yearly renewal fee of 5% of the amount spent —which would give them a “lifetime” guarantee for a top slot for that keyword, but they also get the opportunity to resell it later to another advertiser. Of course, this is only beneficial if Leapfish becomes big, and the chances for that are slim.

The premise of meta search engines is that the aggregation process digs up the most relevant results across different sites and technology platforms, all on a single page. What I want to know: if these meta search engines (and boy, are there many) deliver significantly better results or a greater experience than a Google’s or Yahoo’s core search technology can on its own, then why doesn’t everyone flock to them instead?

The answer: people don’t want to get as many search results as possible and they don’t care about how large the unindexed part of the internet is, let alone what they might find on this so-called “invisible deep web.” All they want is a quick, convenient way of obtaining decent information from a source they know and trust. Or do you honestly visit Search.com, Dogpile, Zuula, Fazzle, Clusty or Mamma.com to get what you need? (I can go on with this list forever, but ask Mark Cuban about how much that last one is worth).

Don’t get me wrong: I see the value of startups trying to improve search and driving innovation both on a technology and a business level, and I’m sure some will be able to compete and carve out their piece of the market. In fact, I hope some of them will. Because no matter what your opinion is on human-powered search, semantic search, vertical search, or social search engines, you have to admit several companies in that space are trying to push the envelope, often drawing attention from the big guys or keeping them honest at least (see yesterday’s announcement about Yahoo Glue, for example).

For me, though, wanna-be search engines like Leapfish don’t clear that hurdle.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Live Current Media, a Canadian company which is in the business of developing, operating and monetizing premium domain names, has raised a little over $1 million through a private placement. The money comes from Live Current’s own management team and a couple of outside investors, and is expected to be the first part of a private funding which could total up to $2 million in the next 15 days.

Live Current, which changed its name from Communicate.com earlier this year, is a publicly traded company (OTCbb:LIVC). The investors paid 65 cents per unit, a premium of 38% to yesterday’s closing price of 40 cents.

The company acquired YCombinator startup Auctomatic in March 2008. A month after, it was time for a far bigger deal: it signed a $50 million deal to obtain the exclusive online rights to official content from the Indian Premier Cricket League. (Live Current owns Cricket.com and operates IPLT20.com, the official site for the league). When we reported on the deal, we wrote:

It is a pretty big commitment for Live Current Media, a domain-name company with revenues of $9 million last year and a net loss of $2 million. The Canadian company is basically betting its entire $51 million over-the-counter market cap on this deal.

And that was before the economic meltdown. Now, Live Current is being forced to sell up to six of its premium domain names, including Communicate.com, Brazil.com, Vietnam.com, Indonesia.com, Malaysia.com, Canadian.com and GreatBritain.com, hoping to fetch a combined total of $6 million to $10 million. It could turn into a fire sale or worse, deadpool tag for the company, unless they can convince some outside investors that they’re able to turn the ship around.

Most of Live Current’s revenue, which was nearly $2 million for the quarter ended September 30, comes from its Perfume.com operation. But with a gross profit of $352,435 and expenses of $2,343,285, those numbers aren’t going to do the trick.

Live Current CEO and Chairman, Geoffrey Hampson, said in a statement:

“This financing, in addition to the expected proceeds of the previously announced sale of up to six non-core domain names, is consistent with management’s strategy to ensure that sufficient cash resources are available to meet our obligations through the end of 2009 while minimizing dilution for existing investors.”

Only time will tell if the cash resources are sufficient enough to keep the company afloat.

(Hat tip to DomainNameWire)

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

h4Court rules against ITT/h4 pDealers and resellers can use a manufacturer's trademark as a domain name even when their sales are not authorised by the manufacturer, an arbitration panel has ruled..../p