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Domainer Jan Barta invests in dotFree

Kevin Murphy, August 30, 2011, Domain Registries

The Czech company hoping to apply to ICANN for the .free top-level domain next year has secured an undisclosed investment from local domainer Jan Barta.
Jeremie Godreche from dotFree described the deal as “an active and long term relationship”.
Barta is the founder of Elephant Orchestra, a domain investment and lead generation company based in Prague. You can read a recent interview with him in the Prague Post here.
DotFree appears to have recently overhauled its web site also.
It now has a planned launch schedule that would see a .free founders program open in January 2012 and its sunrise period begin a year later.
Now there’s confidence.
I expect .free to be a contested gTLD, and we won’t find out until April at the earliest how many other applicants are also chasing it.
The company plans to monetize .free by charging for 200,000 premium names and imposing an annual upgrade fee on registrants with more than one non-premium domain.
It has had 97,000 pre-registrations since last November.

dotFree reports 15,000 .free preregistrations

Kevin Murphy, November 3, 2010, Domain Registries

The dotFree Group, which intends to apply for the .free top-level domain, says it has taken almost 15,000 preregistrations in its first 48 hours.
Dominique Piatti, chief executive of the Czech-based company, tells me the domain count at the two-day mark was 14,831, preregistered by 2,787 users, an average of five domains each.
About 4,000 of those came in the first hour.
Considering that it’s not possible to preregister tens of thousands of “premium” strings – dotFree plans to auction those – that strikes me as a not-bad start.
As I discovered on Monday, the company has also banned the preregistration of any string ending in the number 4, presumably due to the “for.free” pun.
If dotFree’s .free ever gets approved – which is of course by no means certain – it would be at least 18 months from now before any of these preregistrations convert into actual usable domain names

DotFree starts taking .free domain preregistrations

Kevin Murphy, November 1, 2010, Domain Registries

The DotFree Group, which plans to apply to ICANN to run .free as a top-level domain, has become one of the first would-be registries to open its doors for preregistrations.
From noon UTC today, the Czech company has made a tool available on its web site enabling users to reserve their desired strings by handing over their contact information.
Of course, there’s no guarantee any preregistration will actually turn into a .free domain – ICANN may turn down DotFree’s application or award the string to another bidder.
While the plan is to offer some .free domains free of charge, DotFree intends to hold tens (or hundreds) of thousands of “premium” strings for auction or paid-for registrations.
In other words, if you try to register any really juicy strings today, you’re out of luck.
DotFree is one of only a few unapproved TLD registries to accept preregistrations.
ICM Registry started taking .xxx preregs a few years ago, but only after it had already received ICANN’s approval (which was, of course, later revoked).
Another wannabe TLD operator, the MLS Domains Association, is charging “multiple listing service” real estate brokers many hundreds of dollars for the opportunity to own their own .mls domain name.
UPDATE: Messing around with the preregistration tool, I’ve noticed that it appears to ban any string that ends with the number 4. Presumably these will be “premium”, due to the “for” pun.

dotFree to allow pre-registrations October 1

Kevin Murphy, September 8, 2010, Domain Registries

The dotFree Group, which plans to apply for the top-level domain .free, plans to start allowing pre-registrations from October 1, this year.
While .xxx has had an open pre-registration period for years, I believe .free is the first of the next round of new TLD applicants to offer a similar pre-launch phase.
It would be well over a year from now before .free would be able to actually start taking live registrations, assuming its application was even successful.
The Czech company has just relaunched its web site with a new look and new information. It appears to be closely modelled on the .CO Internet site, even copying big chunks of text in some cases.
It also includes a page targeting registrars, containing this text:

How much do I earn for every free registered .FREE domain?
We plan to pay each reseller $0.05 for every .FREE domain name which was referred to us. The definitive reseller commission is still under review.

Now there’s a way to get Go Daddy beating down your door.
It’s not much of an incentive, and it suggests that dotFree isn’t planning on targeting a traditional registrar channel, at least as far as the free .free domains go.
If you can make a recurring $10 mark-up (my estimate) on a .co domain, or a one-off $0.05 on a .free, which TLD would get your store-front real estate?
However, as I’ve previously reported, not all .free domains will be free, so there may yet be opportunities for the ICANN-accredited registrar market.