New gTLD Application Tracker 3.0 launched

While we’ve added several smaller requested features to the DI PRO New gTLD Application Tracker over the last few months, the time has come for the second big update to the service.
Subscribers have asked for a number of changes and upgrades to make it easier to quickly get at the data they need, and we’re happy to oblige.
The Application Tracker, has been updated in three areas.
New “Current Status” Tab
Talking to subscribers over the last few weeks, it became clear that different people are using the Application Tracker in different ways for different reasons.
Some want to be able to find out if, for example, an application has ever been objected to or received GAC advice, while others only want to know whether those objections and advice are still active.
From today, both use cases are made easier with the introduction of a new Current Status tab.
Searches conducted under this tab automatically filter out all withdrawn and rejected applications. If a contention set has been won, the winner will not display as contested in results.
Similarly, if an application managed to fight its way through objections or GAC advice, it will show as unopposed and unencumbered in search results pages.

Subscribers who want to carry on using the service to access historical information about applications can continue to use the previous version of the Application Tracker under the new “Original Status” tab.
Full IE Results
The existing IE Results database has been folded into the Application Tracker under a new tab, and there’s also a new option to see the full scores for each application that has passed through Initial Evaluation.
The new IE Results (Detailed) tab shows the scores each application received for each of the 27 Applicant Guidebook questions for which scores are made available
The Basic tab shows the financial and technical evaluation subtotals along with other information about the applicant and back-end provider.
New Search Options
With ICANN’s publication of Interilse Consulting’s report into the potential security risks of new gTLDs last week, each string was assigned a risk profile: Low, High or Uncalculated.
The database was updated with this information the same day it was published, but now you can search on it too, choosing to limit your search to, or omit, any of the three classes.
You can now also search for, or exclude, applications that have been rejected by ICANN. There are only three such applications right now, but I’m sure this option will become more useful in future.
Past and Future Updates
For details of all the original features of the Application Tracker, see this April blog post. For DI PRO subscription information, click here.
Subscribers can send suggestions for future updates to kevin@domainincite.com, as always.

Donuts details second private gTLD auction list

Donuts has committed 68 of its new gTLD applications to a set of private auctions due to commence August 13.
It’s the second round of auctions conducted by Innovative Auctions, which last month settled six contention sets for an average of $1.5 million per TLD.
Here’s the full list of Donuts’ strings:

.apartments .hot .art .jewelry .auction .law .audio .lawyer .baseball .legal .beauty .life .blog .living .boats .loans .broadway .memorial .broker .online .cafe .phone .casa .pizza .chat .place .church .plus .city .property .construction .rent .data .run .deals .salon .direct .school .discount .search .dog .show .expert .site .fish .soccer .football .storage .forum .store .furniture .studio .fyi .style .garden .team .global .theater .gratis .trading .group .website .guide .wedding .help .world .hosting .yoga

It’s very similar to the list of 63 strings that Donuts committed to the first round of auctions, which was under-subscribed by its rivals.
The additions since then are: .broker, .casa, .data, .deals, .dog,. expert, .lawyer, .life, .loans, .place, .property, .rent, studio, .website, .world and .yoga.
This list does not include the six gTLDs that were settled in the first round, for obvious reasons, but the following strings have also been removed: .forsale, .juegos, .marketing, .media, .sale.
Some of those appear to have been removed because Donuts has already won the contention set due to withdrawals.
The list still includes many in which Donuts is in a contention set with Uniregistry, which has previously said it would not participate in private auctions due to legal concerns.
Innovative said recently that over 100 applications had been committed to the August 13 auction.
It had previously said that the over 40 strings being applied for by applicants that had participated in the first auction had also been committed.
The deadline for committing to the auction is August 5.

Microsoft and others join London gTLD strategy conference line-up

Momentum Event Group has updated its agenda for the forthcoming Digital Marketing & gTLD Strategy Congress, with additional speakers from Microsoft and the new Domain Name Association joining the line-up.
Dave Coplin, “chief envisioning officer” of Microsoft UK, has been tapped to deliver a keynote entitled “What Lies Ahead. Looking Forward to the Future of Brand Marketing Post-gTLD”.
Momentum also said that ARI Registry Services, NetNames, Interbrand and the Domain Name Association are also set to speak at the event.
The agenda at this point is an interesting mix of industry regulars and dot-brand gTLD applicants. From the brand side of the house, the conference will feature also speakers from Richemont, LEGO, HSBC, Google and KPMG.
From ICANN, vice president of stakeholder engagement for North America Christopher Mondini is delivering a keynote, apparently on the wrong continent.
The Congress runs from September 26 to 27 at the Park Plaza Hotel in London. Tickets are priced at £795 ($1,220) until August 3, when prices go up.
DI is a media sponsor but has no financial interest in the conference.
The first morning session on day one of the conference is me interviewing Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling on stage about the future of the internet, post-gTLDs. Coffee had better be provided.

DomainsBot takes its new gTLD spinner to registries

DomainsBot has started promoting its domain name suggestion services to new gTLD registries.
Announced today, its new TLD Recommendation Engine for Registries is designed to make TLD suggestions more relevant when people are hunting for a new domain name.
It’s a sister service to the TLD Recommendation Engine for Registrars that, as we reported last week, DomainsBot hopes to have in place on many of the major registrars’ storefronts when new gTLDs launch.
After last week’s news, Domain Name Wire did a test of its demo and found it lacking in certain areas, such as failing to offer a .accountant domain to a query containing “CPA”.
DomainsBot CEO Emiliano Pasqualetti told DI that the service being announced today will help TLD registries avoid this kind of problem.
In consultation with DomainsBot, they’ll be able to more accurately define the meaning of their TLD string, improving the relevancy of DomainsBot’s results and potentially not missing out on sales.
Under the hood, it’s based on a database of all the existing second-level domains in existence today. DomainsBot wants to connect each second-level string to relevant results in new gTLDs.
“My goal is to pre-classify every existing second-level domain before new gTLDs go live,” Pasqualetti said.
The service is not free, of course. The cheapest tier has an introductory price of $1,000 per month, which Pasqualetti said will go up in future.
It’s “pay for relevancy” rather than “pay for display”, he said. “I’m not saying if you pay me I will display .cpa every time.”
MinardosGroup, which has applied for .build, .construction and .expert, has already signed on to use the service, according to a DomainsBot press release.

Report names and shames most-abused TLDs

Newish gTLDs .tel and .xxx are among the most secure top-level domains, while .cn and .pw are the most risky.
That’s according to new gTLD services provider Architelos, which today published a report analyzing the prevalence of abuse in each TLD.
Assigning an “abuse per million domains” score to each TLD, the company found .tel the safest with 0 and .cn the riskiest, with a score of 30,406.
Recently relaunched .pw, which has had serious problems with spammers, came in just behind .cn, with a score of 30,151.
Generally, the results seem to confirm that the more tightly controlled the registration process and the more expensive the domain, the less likely it is to see abuse.
Norway’s .no and ICM Registry’s .xxx scored 17 and 27, for example.
Surprisingly, the free ccTLD for Tokelau, .tk, which is now the second-largest TLD in the world, had only 224 abusive domains per million under management, according to the report..
Today’s report ranked TLDs with over 100,000 names under management. Over 90% of the abusive domains used to calculate the scores were related to spam, rather than anything more nefarious.
The data was compiled from Architelos’ NameSentry service, which aggregates abusive URLs from numerous third-party sources and tallies up the number of times each TLD appears.
The methodology is very similar to the one DI PRO uses in TLD Health Check, but Architelos uses more data sources. NameSentry is also designed to automate the remediation workflow for registries.

See all new gTLD withdrawls and Initial Evaluation results in a handy timeline

From today, DI PRO users have a new feature for tracking new gTLD withdrawals that removes the huge pain and inconvenience of actually having to read DI and other domain blogs.
It’s been the mostly commonly requested feature over the last couple of weeks, and we’re happy to oblige.
The New gTLD Program Timeline lists all withdrawals, evaluation results and other major changes to application status, in chronological order.
There are over 1,100 entries in the database so far, going back to August 2012. Withdrawals are automatically updated daily, IE results weekly on Friday evenings UTC.
It’s designed for utility. Here’s a screen grab:

To join the growing ranks of DI PRO subscribers click here. Subscribers also get access to the following tools and searchable databases:
Daily new gTLD program stats, searchable Initial Evaluation scores, the most comprehensive and flexible database of gTLD applications available anywhere, and much more.

Tickets on sale for newdomains.org conference

After a year’s hiatus, the newdomains.org conference organized by United-Domains is back this October.
Registration has now opened for the two-day event, which is entirely focused on the new gTLD market. The agenda is still forming and United is looking for speakers.
The conference will take place in Munich at the Sofitel Munich Bayerpost hotel from October 28 to 29. Unlike the 2011 event, I believe this time the official Oktoberfest jollities will be over.
Early bird registration comes to €583 ($780) when you include VAT. Prices go up to €821 July 15.
Afilias, Verisign, Donuts, PIR, InternetX, Sedo, Nic.at have already signed up to sponsor.
While in 2011 newdomains had to compete with .nxt for your new gTLD conference dollar, this time it’s competing with Momentum’s gTLD Strategy Congress, coming to London in September.
Like .nxt, the first newdomains.org suffered from coming before the Big Reveal and became a bit of a vendor echo chamber as a result, but was nevertheless a breath of fresh air compared to ICANN meetings.
By October we might have seen the first new gTLDs go live, so this year it will likely be a different story. DI will be in attendance.

Get live new gTLD program stats

Today DI PRO is launching a new live dashboard for new gTLD program statistics.
The idea is to give users quick and easy access to key program metrics.
Want to know the maximum number of gTLDs that can be delegated in the current round? It’s 1,365.
Want to know how many contention sets remain? It’s 222.
Want to know how many how many applications have failed Initial Evaluation? It’s 4.
Here’s a partial screenshot:

While almost all of this data has been easily accessible via the DI PRO New gTLD Application Tracker for months, the new Live Stats interface provides a quicker, at-a-glance view.
All the stats are generated live from the DI PRO database, which is updated at least once a day with the current status of all 1,930 new gTLD applications. New IE results are added Fridays at 8pm UTC.
What’s more, users can drill down into detailed search results by clicking the stat they’re interested in.
User previews have been positive, but we’re always open to suggestions if there’s a stat you’d like to see included.
Subscribers can check it out here: Live New gTLD Stats.

Donuts loses five of the first six new gTLD auctions

The full results of the first six new gTLD auctions are now known. Donuts lost five of them, raising millions of dollars in the process.
Here are the winners of last week’s auctions, which were managed by Innovative Auctions:

• .club — .CLUB Domains.
• .college — XYZ.COM.
• .luxury — Luxury Partners.
• .photography — Donuts.
• .red — Afilias.
• .vote — Monolith Registry

Five of the six were a two-way battles between Donuts, which has applied for 307 gTLDs, and one other applicant. Each of the losing applicants has now withdrawn its application with ICANN.
The exception is .club, a three-way fight that included Merchant Law Group. Neither losing application has been withdrawn with ICANN yet, but the result it well-known.
Innovative revealed last week that the round raised $9.01 million in total. The winning bids for each auction were not disclosed.
Given that Donuts managed to lose five out of the six, it’s a fairly safe assumption that most of that money will have gone into its war chest, which can be used in future auctions.
Of the five applications it has now withdrawn, only .red had already passed its Initial Evaluation, so the company will have also clawed back a $130,000 ICANN refund on each of the other four.
The auctions mean that we now know with a high degree of certainty which companies are going to be running these six gTLDs.
Most of them have not yet passed IE, but with the success rate so high to date I wouldn’t expect to see any failures. None of them are subject to objections or direct GAC Advice.

A little iCal tool that might make your ICANN life a little easier

I’ve created a little free service that might make it a little easier for regular participants in ICANN public comment periods to keep track of deadlines.
It’s basically an iCal feed that should automatically update your online calendar whenever a new comment period is created or extended by ICANN.
This is the link: http://domainincite.com/pro/publiccommentcalendar.php
If you click it you’ll see it attempts to download a .ics (iCal) file to your computer. The contents are automatically created, daily, based on whatever deadlines ICANN has published on its web site.
If you use Google Calendar (as I do) you can add the calendar to your existing calendars by clicking the “Other calendars” drop-down in the Google Calendar sidebar, then “Add by URL”.
My Apple-using guinea pigs tell me that the same functionality is possible with the Mac’s built in Calendar software, by clicking on “File” and “New Calendar Subscription”.
It seems to work with Yahoo! Calendar too.
Subscribing should immediately add the 30-odd current public comment deadlines to your calendar, automatically adjusted to your time zone.
With Google Calendar, the entries are easy enough to remove if you don’t like what you see. I expect the same is true in other software.
If it’s working properly, updates should be automatically reflected in your calendar on a daily basis.
It hasn’t been tested on any other platforms yet, but iCal seems to be a widely-embraced technical standard so I can’t see why it won’t work everywhere.
As you may be able to tell, I’m providing this service for free very much “as is”. If ICANN changes the layout of it its web site or my code is dodgy, it will stop working properly.
In other words, if it breaks and you miss a deadline, don’t blame me.
But if it does work and it makes keeping track of things a little simpler, feel free to buy me a pint.
Bug reports, suggestions and grovelling thanks to the usual address.