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.

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.

Telepathy sells Republic.com for $200,000

Sedo has brokered the sale of the domain name republic.com for $200,000.

It appears to be an end-user sale – Whois reveals the buyer is the UK clothing retailer Republic, which already owns republic.co.uk.

Republic.com already redirects surfers to the .co.uk site.

The seller appears to be Telepathy Inc, the company owned by well-known domainer Nat Cohen.

It’s the third six-figure deal Sedo has announced this week, following the $100,000 sales of silvercoins.com and siteweb.com.

Space.travel – the awesomest .travel domain – sells

It’s fairly rare for a .travel domain name to change hands on the aftermarket – on my database of 60,000 sales I have only two.

Today I can add space.travel, easily the best .travel name I’ve ever come across, to that list. It seems to have been sold via Sedo for $1,600 in late August.

The newly listed registrant is Planet Space Inc, which appears to have previously been involved in a social network for space enthusiasts at planetspace.com.

That fact, coupled with the fact that the .travel gTLD is restricted to travel-related companies, makes me extremely curious how the domain will be developed.

Space tourism is an emergent growth market, so it’s not too crazy to imagine the domain being used as a travel agency for suborbital flights before too many years.