Yahoo files trademark for Y.com

According to a story published on TechCrunch today, Yahoo has filed a trademark for Y.com. Why is this so odd?

First of all, Yahoo does not own the domain Y.com. In fact, no one does. The majority of .com names under three characters are reserved by the IANA and have been unavailable for registration since 1993. Perhaps Yahoo thinks the domain will some day become available?

Finally, even if Yahoo gets the trademark, that does mean the company will ever get the domain. The trademark only applies to search sites. If someone were to register it and develop another type of site unrelated to Yahoo, the use of the domain would be perfectly legal. Not to mention that in arbitration cases, panels do not consider the extension to be part of the trademark.

Photo | Flickr

Yahoo to keep web hosting division

Several months ago, rumours abounded that Yahoo wanted to refocus its business model and get out of the web hosting business. It reportedly wanted between $350 million and $500 million for its small business hosting.

Because of a lack of buyers, Yahoo has announced it will keep its web hosting division, which hosts 2.2 million websites worldwide. Last year, the company also shut down its free hosting service, Geocities.

Personally, I would not pick a host that was so intent on selling out. While Yahoo has reaffirmed its commitment to stay in the hosting business, I honestly think the company is just waiting for the right price.

Photo | Flickr

Yahoo seeks to get hands on Yahoo.tel

Internet giant Yahoo recently filed a complaint with the National Arbitration Forum, arguing that it has rights to Yahoo.tel. The domain was registered on March 23, 2009 by David Blanco of Oviedo, Spain.

Yahoo will likely win the dispute. Given the company’s vast web presence and many trademarks, how can the current owner justify his use of the name?

What Yahoo should be concerned with is why it didn’t register the name in the first place. The .tel TLD, like all other new extensions, mandated a sunrise period where trademark holders could register their names before the mainstream public. Obtaining the domain then rather than paying the National Arbitration Forum fees to get the name now would have saved the company quite a bit of money.

Source | Domain News
Photo | Flickr

Sex in the data center?

The average data center technician is called to perform a number of duties. These include troubleshooting with customers, replacing system hardware, installing Linux kernel updates, and rebooting equipment. One system admin on Yahoo Answers, however, seems to have a much different view of this job:

I am a night technician at a fairly large data center in the silicone valley. I am a very reliable employee, but there is often nothing to do and I find myself sexting my girlfriend on MSN at work.

Needless to say, this is getting old. The data center is loud, full of tall server racks, and no one ever goes in there. Do you think it would be ok to have sex with my gf in there?

Most responders to the question seem less than sympathetic, telling the poster to do his job and find another place for intercourse. One insightful individual, however, is quite right in stating that the data center isn’t monitored enough if such activity can go on unnoticed.

It sounds like this guy will be spending more time troubleshooting his girlfriend tonight than any server that is unlucky enough to go out.

Photo | Flickr

Yahoo to Buy Arab Portal, Maktoob.com

In an effort to reach a wider audience in Arabic-speaking countries, Yahoo announced that they intend to acquire Maktoob.com (the domain and the website), which is one of the largest Arabic online portals. Interestingly enough, it also has English support, which it automatically detected when I visited the site. Undoubtedly this reflects that the opposite is true. Arab countries want to reach a wider English-speaking audience.

Yahoo already has 44 million Middle Eastern and North African users, so this move will seek to customize their Yahoo experience rather than draw them in for the first time. Maktoob’s offerings includ Souq.com, an Arabic auction and online ecommerce service, cashU.com, an Internet payment solution, and Maktoob-Research, which does just what the name says.

Another indication of its obvious attempts at western mainstreaming is the fact that it uses .com top-level domains rather than those of a particular Arab country. What is not clear is how much of Maktoob will remain after it has been “Yahooed”. In the past, services like Flickr have remained relatively the same after Yahoo purchases. Will an Arab site receive the same respect? Yahoo answered questions about censorship rather easily. They will respect the “law of the land”.

Source: NY Times

Frisky.com sells for $20,000 USD, Yahoo to upgrade data center for the cloud

Frisky for a bit of domain auction action? Then you’ll want to know that frisky.com just sold for £12,124 ($20,000 USD)– a solid price for a solid adult domain. The buyer has yet to be revealed.

SatinSeduction.com also sold for $3,250. The sale of most interest to me, however, is Oomi.com for $2,100. The name is very brandable and easy to remember. Whoever bought it made a wise decision.

On the data center front, Yahoo has announced plans to upgrade an existing Taiwan facility for cloud computing. The work is scheduled to be completed to 2010 and is part of Yahoo’s new strategy to beef up its server infrastructure globally.

Photo | Flickr

Yahoo purchases OMG.com for $80,000

OMG WTF! Internet giant Yahoo has bought OMG.com for the price of $80,000 USD, or £48,642. The sale reportedly occurred last week, but the buyer wasn’t revealed until today.

As anyone who texts or uses instant messaging knows, OMG is short for “Oh my God.” Urban Dictionary sums up the definition perfectly:

Possibly the most irritating piece of chatroom vernacular in existence. Often used by teenage girls in chatroom who, for some reason, punctuate their sentences with “Like”, “Totally”, “soooooooo” and “Lolz.”

Right now the domain doesn’t point to any site, but it is rumored that it might be used for a Yahoo gossip blog located at omg.yahoo.com.

Source | Domain Name Wire

Yahoo to pull the plug on GeoCities

Those who used the Internet in its early days know all about GeoCities. Created by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs John Rezner and David Bohnett in 1994, the service was the first to offer free web hosting to the masses. It quickly grew in popularity, and by end of the 1990s, hosted more than one million websites. Around the same time, Yahoo bought the web host. Today, however, it announced the permanent closing of GeoCities on October 26.

Yahoo had been able to turn a profit on the freely hosted sites at GeoCities by displaying advertisements to visitors and also through the sale of paid hosting with more features. The service declined in popularity over the years, though, with the advent of social networking sites, competition from other free web hosts, and a decrease in the cost of paid hosting.

To anyone who was on the web before the turn of the century, GeoCities represents much more than a free hosting service. It radically changed how people then used the Internet, much like how Facebook and Google have transformed the web today. The end of GeoCities marks the end of an era, an era that will be missed by many.

After October 26, all GeoCities sites will permanently disappear. Users have plenty of time to move to a new host, but there’s bound to be a large number of casual Internet users who, unaware of the change, lose their sites.

For those who don’t remember the early days of the web, here’s an old version of the GeoCities homepage from 1996 courtesy of the Internet Archive.

Yahoo fails to acquire domain for latest product

Yahoo recently launched a new service called Search Pad, a free tool designed for researchers that lets you track and organize sites found on Yahoo Search. In a blunder similar to when Pizza Hut launched a new brand and failed to acquire the relevant domains, Yahoo launched its new product without buying searchpad.com.

The name has been active since 1997 and is registered to Robert Barbour of Ashburn, Virginia. It is currently parked, but Barbour is accepting offers from interested parties. So far seven offers have been made.

When Pizza Hut made the same mistake, I had a bit of sympathy because the company is in the food business, an industry not known for being very web-savvy. The Internet is Yahoo’s business, however. It should know the web better than anyone else.

One might argue that maybe Yahoo is starting to realize that domain names are no longer important given the widespread use of search engines, but if that is so, why did it just buy contests.com for £231,870?

Source | The Domains

Yahoo Battles for Data Center Efficiency

You and I may only be concerned with how fast we can get our computers to load Photoshop or burn a DVD- not how much power they use or heat they generate- but when you have thousands of servers running in a data center, electricity and cooling become critical concerns.

To prevent its equipment from overheating and save money, Yahoo has developed a new type of contained cooling that integrates overhead air conditioning units and water cooling with closed cabinets of servers clustered into groups, or “podules.”

The new technology has helped the company soar to the top in the race for the lowest POE, or Power Usage Effectiveness. Beating Microsoft with a score of 1.21, the only company with better efficiency is Google- by a very small margin. This is not only good for the environment, but also saves vast sums of money.

According to Adam Bechtel of Yahoo:

Our power consumption was doubling every 10 months, and that was just a shocker. We started to look at energy consumption in a very different way.

The efficient cooling has been installed at Yahoo’s newest data center in Quincy, Washington.

Source: Data Center Knowledge

Photo: Flickr