Author name: fairwindsp

Taylor Frank ⬥ 15 July Back in April, the domain name iCloud.com made news with rumors that Apple had purchased it for a cool $4.5 million from Swedish company Xcerion, who had changed the name of its cloud-based storage service from “iCloud” to “CloudMe.” Now, it looks like clouds have rolled back into the media […]

Josh Bourne ⬥ 15 July This week, I wrote an article for Forbes.com about what retail brands need to know about new gTLDs. All brands will have to adapt their digital strategies to the new gTLD space, but global retail brands will face particular challenges and opportunities. For retail brands, perhaps more so than other

Tom Carroll ⬥ 5 July There are few things more American than eating hot dogs outside on a warm summer day. And there is almost nothing more American than Joey “Jaws” Chestnut scarfing down 62 hot dogs to win the Nathan’s International Hot Dog Eating Contest on Coney Island on July 4th for the fifth

Liz Sweezey ⬥ 28 June Back in February, Steve Levy blogged about Sarah and Briston Palin’s applications to trademark their names being held up. Last week, according to the Wall Street Journal, the mother-daughter duo successfully completed the trademark application process. Barring any last-minute objections or bureaucratic hiccups, the marks SARAH PALIN and BRISTOL PALIN

Samantha Demetriou ⬥ 24 June I should probably begin this post with a disclaimer that I am not much of an NBA fan. Aside from occasionally tuning in to watch the Celtics in the playoffs over the past few years, I don’t really watch or follow professional basketball. I’m much more into college ball (go

Phil Lodico ⬥ 22 June Monday was a long awaited day for many in the domain industry. While some of us have spent the past few years working hard to make the planned launch of new gTLDs as orderly and minimally harmful as possible, others pushed hard for less regulation and an earlier launch. At

Samantha Demetriou ⬥ 15 June According to Business Insider, a Hamptons real estate firm has been employing what it calls a “very aggressive web strategy” to drum up new business. Unfortunately for the firm, Saunders Real Estate, most people would call that strategy “cybersquatting.” Saunders had registered the names of the top brokers at other

Steve Levy ⬥ 13 June Ayn Rand’s renowned novel Atlas Shrugged has become famous around the world as an ode to the merits of a free market system. Last year, production began on a movie version of the first part of the novel. Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 opened in select theaters earlier this spring. Shortly

Steve Levy ⬥ 27 May According to a recent article that appeared in Bloomberg, Entrepreneur Media, Inc. (EMI), the company that publishes the eponymous Entrepreneur magazine, has garnered a reputation of doing exactly the opposite of what it claims to do – “smash[ing] the dreams” of self-starters. In other words, EMI fiercely defends its intellectual

Josh Bourne ⬥ 19 May People interested in acquiring desirable domain names that are already registered often track when these names are about to expire, so that they can quickly register them as soon as they become available. For that reason, it is important for domain name owners to monitor when their domains are about

Josh Bourne ⬥ 13 May This week, FairWinds published a paper that was the culmination of research into the prevalence of malware among typos of popular websites’ domain names. We discovered that hundreds of these sites expose users to computer-infecting viruses, invasive spyware, or information-stealing Trojan horses.   Typically when we study typosquatting, we focus

Steve Levy ⬥ 11 May The Cleveland Browns can now take their place among the Green Bay Packers, the Pittsburgh Steelers, the New York Giants, and the Indianapolis Colts – not because the team has won a Super Bowl Championship in the last decade, but because it now owns the domain name version of its