.mobi domain names were launched for the Sunrise period on May 22, 2006 and to the general public on August 28, 2006. When they were launched, their was a 2 year minimum registration period which is just around the corner.

We’re highly excited here at Bido to see quality of listed domains going up. It is thanks to you for submitting those names, for trying something new, for helping to establish a liquidity market in the domain space.

A nice write up via Forbes.com on domain names. Ron Jackson, Adam Dicker and Jeremiah Johnson of Sedo are included in the article. I think the start of the article is a little misleading as it talks about a teenager, Steven McDonald who purchased QSD.com for $620 last year and flipped it for $12K Two weeks later. I find it very hard to see him buying it for $620!

Perhaps the adult entertainment industry is seeing an uptick in business as the economy heads the other way. Moniker ’s live adult domain name auction at InterNext in Hollywood Florida is underway and it has already sold more money worth of domains than the company’s last auction through about 2/3 of the domains. BJ.com sold for $200,000, Shemales.net sold for $60,000, [redacted].net $90,000, and Sluts.net $58,000. Not bad, especially since some of these domains, including BJ.com, have been on the block before.

If you haven’t heard already, Owen Frager is getting ready to launch GrandNames.com . Owen will be focusing on the Small Busniness market with specific "call-to-action" domain names for under a Grand!

You may have heard about recently discovered vulnerabilities in the DNS system that take advantage of recursive DNS to allow DNS cache poisoning. Spare the technical details: basically, if the nameserver your domain is hosted on is vulnerable, cybercriminals could redirect traffic meant for your site to a different web page.

After spending several million dollars on the domain name, I figured there would be a new sleek design with several great partnerships with some of the leading chains in the pizza biz….

State Fund Mutual Insurance, a company providing workers’ compensation insurance in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and South Dakota, has been found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking in its attempt to snag SFM.com.

The domain name OD.com has sold for $220,000 at Sedo , according to the “recent sales” section of the site. The whois record for the domain shows that it was previously financed by Domain Capital. The new owner in whois is Yusuf Okhai.

We decided it’s time to eliminate “weekend auctions” on Bido. While it works fine, most of us, like the rest of the world, deserve a couple of days off a week. It is hard for us to keep the team coming 7 days a week to monitor auctions, especially when weekend activity is extremely light to begin with. So, this week is the last two “weekend auctions” and from next week, it will be five auctions per week only.

Sedo has released their pre-selection list of 350 domains (German) for the live auction at DomainVermarkter Forum in Germany next month. Users are now invited to express interest for the domains they would like to see participate in the live auction.

I had just wrote about several other new Google tools yesterday! Today Google Insights was brought to my attention! Another sweet, Free tool that is in Beta presented by Google.

Register.com is giving away domain names , 1 per company. There appears to be no-strings-attached to the promotion. This isn’t an affiliate link either . . . probably should be eh ?  Click here to get a free domain name.

Here is something you do NOT want to do if you happen to own a trademarked term domain and you do not own the mark. I can understand this probally happens more often then one would think, as I really do not check most of the domain I go for either. To be safe, it’s best to always check the term using the free USPTO government database. It’s free and only takes a couple seconds.

Since SnapNames.com is back up, I was doing my normal checking on domains and noticed 4 current 3 letter .com auctions going on. Anybody can get into these auctions currently with a min bid. None of these are mine, but I just wanted to point them out.

• ZZE.com with a current min bid of $8,000 and ends 8-8-08
• TYV.com with a current min bid of $7,500 and ends 8-8-08
• KYU.com with a current min bid of $6,000 and ends 8-11-08
• JVR.com with a current min bid of $6,000 and ends 8-12-08