Archive for the ‘amazon.com’ Category
Company gets key domains but misses some others.
Amazon.com released a slew of new products today: a new basic Kindle, the Kindle Touch, Kindle Touch 3G, Kindle Fire, and Amazon Silk.
The company is known for aggressively registering variations and typos of its brand names. Let’s see how they did for this product launch:
Kindle Fire – as I wrote about yesterday, Amazon bought this domain name. However, it appears someone else may have registered the typo wwwKindleFire.com.
Kindle Touch – Amazon registered KindleTouch.com through brand protection company Mark Monitor. KindleTouch3G.com was registered earlier this month by someone using a whois privacy service. My guess is it’s not Amazon since they would have picked it up through Mark Monitor.
Amazon Silk – Amazon has a new web browser but not the corresponding domain name AmazonSilk.com. It’s owned by a Brazilian company.
As of right now none of the domains here owned by Amazon are resolving.
© DomainNameWire.com 2011.
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- A Kindle Wave? Amazon Registers Domain Name.
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Company registers domain names for apps related to its new MyHabit.com store.
Amazon.com’s new MyHabit store seems to be doing well since its launch a couple months ago based on how quickly some of its limited-time sales sell out.
Now the company appears to be working on MyHabit apps for your iPhone and perhaps Android devices: The company just registered MyHabitApp.com, MyHabitforiPhone.com, and MyHabitMobileApp.com according to whois records.
The company has been on a registration spree picking up defensive registrations for MyHabit.com. I count at least 60 registrations leading up to the site’s launch.
Examples include:
-City domains such as MyHabitNewYork.com, MyHabitParis.com, and MyHabitMumbai.com
-Fashion domain names such as MyHabitRunway.com, MyHabitCouture.com, and MyHabitDulce.com
-Negative connotation names such as iHateMyHabit.com and IgnoreMyHabit.com
-Promotions/sales domain including MyHabitSpecials.com and MyHabitCoupons.com
-Typos including MyHavit.com and wwwlmyhabit.com (it looks like they don’t own wwwmyhabit.com)
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Company gets domain name for its new music service.
When Amazon.com announced its music-anywhere service and corresponding Cloud Player a few months ago, it was missing a key ingredient — the domain name CloudPlayer.com.
It has belatedly fixed that problem.
On July 11 the whois record for CloudPlayer.com transferred to Amazon. It hasn’t yet started forwarding the domain name to its product page, however.
Cloud Player is the application to access your Amazon Cloud Drive, where you store your music on the service.
The domain name was owned by Cheray Unman, who has an outfit called Venture Bank at VentureBank.com. (It’s an odd web site that will leave you confused more than enlightened.)
My guess is this domain name cost Amazon more now than it would have before it launched the product.
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Another category-generic domain name site from Quidsi.
Amazon.com-owned Quidsi, which has a habit of launching category stores on category specific generic domain names, has launched a pet store at Wag.com.
Over the past few days I’ve been trying to figure out what Amazon was up to as it registered dozens of domain names related to pets that included “Wag” in the name. My guess was a new Amazon-branded product line, but I didn’t think to check the whois record for Wag.com.
Among the domains registered: WagBirdShop.com, WagCatShop.com, WagPamperedPet.com, WagReptiles.com, WagCats.com, and WagPetToys.com.
The store is clearly not just for dog items even though the name conjures up an image of a dog wagging its tail.
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Amazon registers domain name flouting recent Consumer Reports rankings.
Earlier this month Consumer Reports released updated eBook reader ratings, declaring “Nook beats Kindle“.
That certainly didn’t go well with Jeff Bezos.
So the company just registered the domain name KindleBeatsNook.com.
When it comes to domain names, perhaps Consumer Reports should give Amazon a higher rating than Barnes & Noble. After all, no one (yet) has registered NookBeatsKindle.com. And no, I don’t think this is a trademark issue on a domain like this.
I’m not a fan of Consumer Reports’ ratings when it comes to newer gadgets, so I’ll stick to my Kindle…which I often times access via my iPad anyway.
KindleBeatsNook.com does not currently resolve.
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Amazon cans its California affiliates. California loses, affiliates lose. It’s time for a bigger discussion.
Yesterday a couple California readers forwarded a message from Amazon.com saying that, should their governor sign in to law a new so-called “affiliate tax”, their participation in the Amazon Associated program would be terminated.
Hours later they received a message saying the bill was signed and they’ve been kicked out of the program.
I’ve written about the affiliate tax many times. Here’s the idea:
1. State wants to raise more money
2. It’s upset about missing out on sales tax from online purchases
3. Creates a law saying that a web site’s affiliate marketers represent a sales force, so the site has a “nexus” in the state.
4. This allows them to force the e-tailer to collect sales tax on purchases.
Except that it doesn’t work. It ends up being a lose-lose. As you see in this case, Amazon has decided to fire its affiliates instead of collect the sales tax. That means not only does California not get the sales tax it wants, but its citizens’ income goes down. With a hefty income tax of nearly 10%, that means California will actually get less revenue now that it has passed this law.
It gets worse. A lot of people are going to lose their jobs. They work for companies that get a lot of their income through affiliate programs. Heck, one of the biggest affiliate program networks, CommissionJunction, is located in California.
California tried to pass a similar law before, but then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill.
This isn’t new. Amazon has fired its Colorado affiliates and North Carolina affiliates. Instead of firing its New York affiliates it is challenging the law there.
We had a related scuffle here in Texas. A newspaper reporter in Dallas noticed wrote about an Amazon.com flag flying outside a distribution center in the area and asked why Amazon wasn’t collecting sales tax on Texas purchases.
The Texas comptroller ended up sending a $269 million bill to Amazon for uncollected sales tax.
Fine, said Amazon: we’ll just close down the distribution center and fire all the employees.
So Governor Rick Perry, not one to like seeing jobs lost, said he disagreed with how the comptroller handled the situation. Then Amazon decided to try making something out of it by saying it would bring thousands of jobs to Texas if it wasn’t forced to collect sales tax.
You see what’s going on here? It’s like the economic incentive packages that cities and states dole out to attract business.
The “affiliate tax” is a bad idea for the reasons I’ve explained above. At the same time, it’s not fair to companies like Best Buy and Barnes & Noble that they have to collect sales taxes, even on online sales, when Amazon.com doesn’t have to.
The guidelines companies work with today were created in a catalog world. We’re in an internet world now.
It’s time for a national discussion on sales tax.
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Related posts:
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- Amazon.com Fires Colorado Affiliates Thanks to Affiliate Tax
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Amazon granted patent for domain name marketplace.
Amazon.com subsidiary Amazon Technologies, Inc. was today granted U.S. patent number 7,805,379 for “Method and system for leasing or purchasing domain names”.
This patent, which was applied for in December 2007, seems to conflict with a number of existing domain name marketplace and domain monetization technologies that were commercially available at the time the patent application was filed.
One conflict in particular is Sendori, which offers a bidded marketplace to “lease” traffic that goes to a particular domain name. The leasing system described in Amazon’s patent would allow someone to go to a marketplace and lease a fraction or all of the traffic to a domain name. The marketplace would then split the traffic accordingly through a redirect. However, Amazon’s method may lease a percentage of traffic for a set period of time rather than on a per-visitor basis.
The marketplace could also offer domain names for sale and may also include some sort of valuation technology. You can read the full patent here (pdf). Abstract:
A method and system are described that enables a domain name owner (i.e., a “lessor”) to grant a third party (i.e., a “lessee”) a lease to any domain name the lessor owns. More specifically, a lessor may use a domain name service to allow a third party (i.e., a “lessee”) to lease a domain name for use or to purchase the domain name outright. More specifically, the lessor may lease a domain name to the lessee so that any user who accesses the leased domain name is redirected to a network resource identified by the lessee. The lessee may also be provided the option to purchase the domain name outright from the lessor, rather than lease it.
© DomainNameWire.com 2010.
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