Did a university just pay $3,000 for its .xxx domain?

The domain name sju.xxx has changed hands for $3,000 on Sedo.

It’s the first .xxx domain I recall popping up in Sedo’s sales feed.

However, I think there’s a pretty good chance it’s a damage-mitigation move by an American university.

SJU is the acronym used by Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, PA. The college uses sju.edu as its primary domain.

Knowing how paranoid universities have been about protecting their reputations in .xxx, and given that the sale came in just below the price of a cheap UDRP, I suspect we’re looking at a defensive move.

The Whois record for the domain is currently under privacy protection. Until recently, it belonged to one Jay Camina. It resolves to a suggestive Go Daddy parking page.

Paul Goldstone puts co.com up for sale

The domain name co.com has been put up for sale by domain investor Paul Goldstone.

The domain, which received 4.5 million unique visitors and 14 million page views in 2011, will be brokered jointly by DomainAdvisors and SellDomains.com, according to a press release.

I can immediately think of two companies that should be interested.

It might be a very smart move for .CO Internet, the .co registry, to buy the name and wildcard the third level in order to capture .co typo traffic.

It’s also exactly the kind of address CentralNic – which sells third-level names under domains such as us.org and uk.com – likes to use as a pseudo-gTLD.

If these two and others get into a bidding war, Goldstone could wind up making a packet.

DomainAdvisors CEO Tessa Holcomb said she expects the domain to fetch a “multi seven-figure” price.

DomainTools.co sells for $2,500

Somebody has just paid out $2,500 for the domain name domaintools.co, according to Sedo.

I guess not even the most savvy domain name industry companies are immune to typosquatting.

Given that the price is just below what you might expect to pay for a cheap UDRP complaint, but more than the domain is probably worth alone, I assume the buyer is DomainTools itself.

According to DomainTools (the historical Whois service, not the company), domaintools.co has been in the hands of a Chinese registrant since .co went live in July 2010.

The domain, which is parked, is currently in escrow.

Dudu buys dudu.com for $1 million

The first big-figure domain name sale announcement of the year has me cackling.

A Dubai-based social networking site, Dudu, has paid $1 million for dudu.com, making one Chinese domainer a very happy man indeed.

Sedo brokered the deal over three months and announced the sale today.

Dudu was previously located at godudu.com.

The lesson to be learned here is so painfully obvious it’s barely worth mentioning: if you’re going to launch a brand and try to make it successful, first make sure you have a domain to match.

Before Dudu built up the brand, dudu.com was probably a five-figure sale.

To Dudu’s credit, it does not appear to have ever attempted a reverse domain name hijacking using the UDRP.

Alibek Issaev, chairman of Dudu, said in Sedo’s press release:

With the purchase of dudu.com, we will be able to match our platform’s brand with the exact domain name we need, and migrate from using godudu.com to this shorter version. This purchase means we don’t lose important traffic, and at the same time we ensure that visitors from around the globe will remember our brand’s name.

No dudu, Sherlock.

Borders sells IPv4 addresses for $12 each

The bankrupt book shop chain Borders intends to sell its IPv4 addresses for $12 each, raising over $786,000, according to a bankruptcy court filing.

The deal, which is subject to approval by ARIN, follows Nortel’s fire sale of its address block to Microsoft for $11.25 per address earlier this year.

The buyer is Cerner, a healthcare software consulting company.

I’ve reported the story for The Register, here.

You can download a PDF of the relevant court document here.