Archive for the ‘Oversee.net’ Category
Oversee.net hires GM from online travel industry to run its travel network.
Oversee.net has hired Raj Beri as General Manager of its travel vertical, the company announced today. Beri was previously Director and COO of IgoUgo, a travel site owned by Travelocity.
The travel vertical is part of Oversee.net’s “vertical markets” business that includes fully developed web sites. Oversee.net is best known to domainers for its DomainSponsor domain parking service.
Oversee.net’s travel properties include LowFares.com, FareSpotter.net, AboutAirportParking.com and AirportParking.com. These are big sites; LowFares.com has a US Quantcast rank of 1,492 and FareSpotter.net is ranked 2,973.
So just how big is Oversee.net’s travel vertical? According to Beri’s LinkedIn profile, it’s a $40MM+ business.
Other vertical markets at Oversee.net include consumer finance (CreditCards.org, IdentityTheft.com) and shopping (ShopWiki.com).
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Related posts:
- Oversee.net Trademark Attempt Rejected
- Oversee.net Acquires ShopWiki
- Oversee.net Launches CreditCards.org Web Site
Judge tosses two claims, allows fraud claim to move forward.
The judge overseeing Monte Cahn vs. Oversee.net has handed down a mixed bag to both parties in his latest ruling.
The Honorable Stephen V. Wilson dismissed two of Monte Cahn’s claims against his former employer while denying a motion to dismiss a fraud claim and strike a prayer for punitive damages.
Oversee.net argued that Cahn’s fifth claim for fraud by Oversee.net was merely a restatement of an earlier insufficient claim that was dismissed. But the judge ruled that Cahn added enough specificity to the claim to make it a valid claim.
The judge also denied Oversee.net’s motion to strike the Prayer for Punitive Damages based on the fraud claim.
However, Wilson dismissed two claims for conversion with prejudice. The judge had previously dismissed such claims but allowed Cahn to plead them again. These are now off the table.
The judge’s refusal to dismiss the fraud claim and strike punitive damages is a victory for Cahn, and the claim for fraud seemed to be a bigger issue than the conversion claims.
A judge trial for Cahn’s first claim for breach of contract is scheduled for January 17.
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Related posts:
- Judge Dismisses Many of Monte Cahn’s Claims Against Oversee.net
- Court Grants Oversee.net Motion to Dismiss in Monte Cahn Lawsuit
- Oversee.net Blasts Monte Cahn’s Amended Lawsuit
Judge again to decide on motion to dismiss some of Cahn’s claims against his former employer.
Monte Cahn has responded (pdf) to Oversee.net’s Motion to Dismiss certain claims in his case against his former employer.
Cahn’s lawyers write:
“As this is Oversee’s second Motion to Dismiss, Oversee has defaulted to boilerplate, insubstantial objections to Cahn’s claims.”
The judge struck many of Cahn’s claims in Oversee.net’s previous motion to dismiss. Oversee.net says the case is simply a breach of contract case.
There’s not much new in Cahn’s response, as it mostly reiterates what he alleged in the latest amended complaint against Oversee. In addition to breach of contract, Cahn claims that Oversee.net committed fraud when it convinced him to join the company when it acquired Moniker. He also alleges conversion of some of his personal domain names.
For the fraud claim, the lawyers state:
“…he is suing Oversee because Defendants’ fraudulent representation caused Cahn to lose millions of dollars in lost opportunities, including alternative employment and investment opportunities with third parties.”
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Related posts:
- Judge Dismisses Many of Monte Cahn’s Claims Against Oversee.net
- Oversee.net Blasts Monte Cahn’s Amended Lawsuit
- Oversee.net Asks Court to Dismiss Monte Cahn’s Claims
Oversee.net continues to say lawsuit with Monte Cahn is merely about contract claims.
Oversee.net has filed a motion to dismiss (pdf) numerous claims in Monte Cahn’s second amended lawsuit.
The motion to dismiss starts out with this telling line:
“Apparently, the third time is not the charm.”
The second amended lawsuit was the third complaint brought by Cahn.
Oversee.net claims Cahn’s latest complaint is “fundamentally flawed”. It asks the court to dismiss claims of fraud or conversion and let the case proceed “as a matter rooted in contract law”.
The motion to dismiss states:
“Although Cahn has now abandoned some of his theories, he still seeks to turn a breach of contract claim into a claim for fraud, and he still seeks to plead conversion claims that fail as a matter of law”.
The company claims that Cahn has tried to revive two of the claims that the court dismissed previously.
“In an effort to conceal the lack of change, Cahn reformats some of his allegations and repeatedly adds to his factual allegations speculative contentions about the defendants’ states of mind…”
Oversee.net also claims that Cahn has added “several rhetorical flourishes about the supposed importance to Oversee of retaining Chan post-merger”.
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Related posts:
- Oversee.net Asks Court to Dismiss Monte Cahn’s Claims
- Judge Dismisses Many of Monte Cahn’s Claims Against Oversee.net
- Monte Cahn Updates Lawsuit Against Oversee.net with New Details
Company co-president explains Oversee.net’s business shift.
News of Oversee.net’s layoffs didn’t come as a huge surprise last week. This sort of shuffling the deck is common when there’s turnover at the top.
I caught up with Scott Morrow, co-President of Oversee.net, to find out what’s going on at the company.
Morrow told me that Oversee.net now has three strategic focus areas.
First, it will leverage its core assets of DomainSponsor and DOMAINfest Global. It will expand these further outside the limited domainer crowd.
“The domain industry is evolving and many of our clients are moving from parked pages to building out sites, taking advantage of affiliate opportunities and lead generation,” explained Morrow.
The company will still be involved with monetization but it won’t just be parked pages.
Second, it will build out its marketing services platform “to better value or add value to the traffic that we support.”
This involves projects like categorizing and profiling traffic to better understand it. The company is also investing heavily in email and mobile.
Third, Oversee.net will continue to build out its own properties, particularly in the travel, consumer finance, and retail sectors.
Despite the layoffs, Oversee.net is still hiring. The company is looking for engineers, developers, and sales people.
Morrow says the company is still going strong into Europe as well.
As one of the largest companies in the domain name space, Oversee.net is seen as somewhat of a bellwether. It will be interesting to see if there are similar shifts are other companies in the space.
© DomainNameWire.com 2011.
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Related posts:
- Pinky Brand Discusses the Past, Present, and Future of .Mobi
- Moniker Discusses the Future of Domain Auctions
- Jeff Kupietzky To Leave Oversee.net Next Month
Company lays off staff after executive transitions
Los Angeles, CA domain name company Oversee.net has fired 13% of its workforce. The company just announced the layoffs with the following statement:
As part of its plan to address new growth opportunities, Oversee.net has realigned its work force resulting in a staff reduction of 13 percent. These moves, along with pending new hires, will allow the company to leverage core assets to innovate more effectively, improve competitive positioning and achieve growth.
This move comes just weeks after CEO Jeff Kupietzky left the company. Three other executives left in June.
Oversee.net fired 18% of its staff in early 2009, but has been hiring since.
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Cahn claims company deliberately shifted Moniker‘s revenue to other Oversee.net entities.
Monte Cahn has filed an amended complaint (pdf) against Oversee.net after a judge tossed out many of his original claims against his former employer.
The amended complaint includes new details regarding how Oversee.net allegedly affected Moniker’s revenues after the acquisition.
First, Cahn explains that the acquisition violated Oversee.net’s advertising agreement with Google because of Moniker’s TrafficClub service. This forced Oversee.net to shut down TrafficClub upon the acquisition.
Second, Cahn claims that Moniker was Oversee.net subsidiary SnapName’s second best performing registrar at the time or the acquisition. Moniker received 70% or 80% of revenue Snapnames made selling domains from Moniker, or about $700,000 annually, according to the complaint.
But when Network Solutions ended its agreement with SnapNames, Cahn says Oversee.net used the Moniker revenue share payments to obscure the revenue impact:
In order to disguise and prevent the Oversee Board and others from recognizing the disastrous effect of the departure of Network Solutions, after the merger, Oversee improperly diverted Moniker’s registrar revenue to SnapNames, thereby artificially deflating Moniker’s EBITDA.
Cahn still claims Fraud in addition to breach of contract claims.
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Related posts:
- Monte Cahn: Acquisition of Moniker Violated Google Contract
- Monte Cahn Adds Allegations to Complaint Against Oversee.net
- Oversee.net Asks Court to Dismiss Monte Cahn’s Claims
Judge sides with Oversee.net’s Motion to Dismiss.
Oversee.net got a big win today in a lawsuit filed by former employee Monte Cahn.
The judge granted Oversee.net’s Motion to Dismiss (pdf) five claims ranging from Intentional and Negligent Misrepresentation to Unfair Competition.
Oversee.net has argued that the case is merely a breach of contract case. When it filed the motion to dismiss, its lawyers wrote that the case “is nothing more than an alleged breach of contract case” but that “Unfortunately, in a veritable ‘kitchen sink’ pleading, the Complaint contains a hodgepodge of claims against Oversee and two of its officers…”.
The judge seems to agree, at least with how Cahn plead his case. In his decision he wrote “The essence of Plaintiff’s claims at issue is an attempt to plead a breach of contract claim in tort.”
However, the judge dismissed the claims without prejudice, noting that Cahn can “refile his claim
for intentional misrepresentation/fraudulent inducement, that claim must be pled with particularity
pursuant to Rule 9(b).”
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Related posts:
- Oversee.net Asks Court to Dismiss Monte Cahn’s Claims
- Monte Cahn Adds Allegations to Complaint Against Oversee.net
- Monte Cahn Sues Oversee.net Over $13 Million Incentive Plan [Updated]
Former Oversee.net employee finds new home at Rook Media.
Longtime Domain Sponsor account manager Joe Higgins may have left his employer of the last 6 1/2 years recently, but he didn’t leave the domain name industry.
Higgins has joined new domain name parking company Rook Media.
Rook Media was formed by former Name Drive senior managers who left after the latter was sold. It was in a private beta with large domainers since February and opened up to the masses in June.
The company handles all types of domain names but its founders have a lot of experience in multi-lingual domain name monetization.
Higgins will help expand Rook’s monetization offerings while also helping domainers with brokerage and alt-
monetization needs. He will maintain an office in Los Angeles.
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Court denies temporary restraining order for Monte Cahn’s laptop.
The latest legal battle in Monte Cahn v. Oversee.net et al is over a laptop.
Lawyers for the defendants want to get their hands on the Moniker founder’s laptop, which they say is Oversee.net company property. They claim the laptop may include confidential emails and other information about both this case and other legal matters.
The defendants filed for a temporary restraining order to get the laptop. But U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson denied the order, saying the defendants failed to explain how the laptop is an “emergency” justifying emergency relief nearly seven months after Cahn left the company and more than a month after the lawsuit began.
Lawyers for the defendants have proposed having a third party escrow the laptop for potential use in the future if there’s a court order. They claim that Cahn’s lawyer “is currently in the process of obtaining the Oversee Laptop from Mr. Cahn so that he can provide it to his hand-selected forensic consultant Intelligent Discovery Solutions (“IDS”) for purposes of creating an image of the hard drive.”
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Related posts:
- Oversee.net Asks Court to Dismiss Monte Cahn’s Claims
- Monte Cahn Adds Allegations to Complaint Against Oversee.net
- NBC Universal and DONE! Fight Over What to Do With Women.com
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