The seller was the .Co registry.

The buyer was Dolphin Energy which is a big oil company out of the United Arab Emirates.

Dolphin  put out a press release on January 26th last week (without the price listed) announcing the acquisition:

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, January 26, 2012:

“”Dolphin Energy Limited today announced that it has acquired the Internet domain name ‘dolphin.co’ from .CO Internet S.A.S., the company that manages the .CO root domain.”

“The company will use the domain name ‘dolphin.co’ to enhance its existing online presence with a short, memorable domain that will help the company to engage with its stakeholders locally and across the Middle East region more easily.”

“The company has also taken the opportunity to register the both ‘dolphin’ and ‘dolphinenergy’ names under the Arabic .emirates and .qatar root domains respectively.”

“Dolphin Energy transports natural gas from Qatar to the emirates of the UAE and Oman. The move to acquire the ‘dolphin.co’ domain name comes at a time when there is an increase in the number of companies acquiring .CO domain names.”

More about the company:

“”Dolphin Energy was established in March 1999 as an initiative of the Government of Abu Dhabi.

The founders had always conceived Dolphin Energy as a force for international cooperation – one that would unite the vision and resources of the region with multinational capital and expertise. Total of France was accordingly invited to become a shareholder in Dolphin Energy during 2000. After a further selection process, Occidental Petroleum of the USA became the company’s second international partner in 2002.

The three Dolphin Energy Limited shareholders are Mubadala Development Company with 51 percent, and Total and Occidental Petroleum with 24.5 percent each. Mubadala Development Company is wholly owned by the Government of Abu Dhabi.

Now that the price has been released it another nice .Co sale to a major company.

Congrats to the .Co registry and Dolphin Energy

 …

The domain K.To sold for $40,000.

It looks like according to Domaintools.com the domain was 1st registered just back in 2008.

.To is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of the island kingdom of Tonga.

I have seem many one letter ccTLD’s in non-major jurisdictions sell for as little as $1K, this maybe a record sale for a .TO domain.

As far as who owned or bought the domain name well .TO registry doesn’t provide whois info:

“Tonic does not maintain a whois database that provides registrant information, as many of our customers consider the public display of this information invasive of their privacy”

K.To is currently forwarding to keek.com…

The publicly reportable sales included in the total above came to $692,343 led by moneyandme.com at $20,000 followed by performancegraphics.com at $12,500.

Below is the entire list of publicly reportable sales:

The seller appears to be a a company out of China, Guangzhou You Yang Network Technology Co.,Ltd

The buyer is unclear at this time, but I think this is a highly brandable domain and think it was a good buy at $35K

Congrats to all

 …

Verisign Registry Services ended the quarter (December 31) with approximately 113.8 million active domain names in the adjusted zone for .com and .net, representing an 8% increase year-over-year.

In the fourth quarter, Verisign added 7.9 million new domain name registrations, representing a 4% increase year-over-year.

VeriSign, Inc. reported revenue of $204 million for the fourth quarter of 2011, up 3% from the prior quarter and up 14% from the same quarter in 2010.

Verisign reported net income of $54 million and diluted earnings per share (EPS) of $0.34 for the fourth quarter of 2011.

This compared to a net loss of $(41) million and a loss per share of $(0.23) in the same quarter in 2010.

For the year ended Dec. 31, 2011, Verisign reported revenue of $772 million, up 13% from $681 million in 2010.  Verisign reported net income of $143 million and diluted EPS of $0.86.

Verisign ended the fourth quarter of 2011 with Cash, Cash Equivalents, Marketable Securities and Restricted Cash of $1.35 billion, an increase of $111 million from the prior quarter and a decrease of $714 million from the same quarter in 2010.

 …

If your planning on going you better get a planning as the host venue and most of the nearby hotels to the venue are now sold out.

I know it’s not politically correct to bad mouth a venue or host city so I’ll just say that San Jose is probably not going to be the nicest, cleanest nor safest city you’re going to visit in your life.

If you don’t have a reservation for a hotel yet, you might want to check out some hotels in the “nice area” of San Jose which is Escazu which is about 20 minutes from the venue.  There you will find some nice hotels, restaurants an iMax movie and a mall.  Escazu is where the “rich people live”.

Hopefully you will have sometime or before of after the show to check out the rest of Costa Rica which is quite beautiful and has some incredible wildlife, flowers, and yes crocodiles, frogs, sloths and Iguanas of all sizes, including just short of dinosaurs, and come in a rainbow of colors.

We have been fortunate enough to spend some time in Costa Rica so I thought I would give some tips to those that might be going.

Arenal Volcano

This is an active volcano and there are a lot of nearby hotels, spa, and hot springs.

Its a pretty area and on clear nights you will see smoke coming out of the Volcano.

Peninsula Papagayo/FourSeasons

In the northern part of the country several hours from San Jose, for those who like there view their wildlife in luxury and who are deep of pocket, lies  is the beautiful property of the Four Seasons.

If you love golf,  the course is incredible and don’t be surprised if a monkey steals your ball  (you get to drop).

The resort has several manned beaches where you can get some grub and some frosty beverages to wash it down as well as around 20 unmanned beaches all within the property and some of the rooms even come with their own dipping pool.

There are a ton of wildlife around including the howlers, the monkeys that can you hear from miles away, yes even in the middle of the night sometimes.

Their is a second international airport up in that region in the city of Liberia so if you wind up in north you can fly back to many US cities from that airport without traveling back to San Jose.…

The publicly reportable sales included in the total above came to $528,656 led by mcommerce.com at $50,000 followed by bigbags.com at $11,050.

Below is the entire list of publicly reportable sales:

Included in the recent round is a long time employee (since October 2006) was Account Executive Bari Meyerson.

Many of Bari’s clients frequently referred to her affectionately as the “Moniker Princess”

We noted last week that Moniker.com lost a huge amount of  domains under management in 2011.

According to RegistrarStats.com Moniker fell to the 11th largest domain name registrar in the world, last week when FastHost.com passed them.

They started off 2011 as the 7th largest domain name registrar but lost some 800,000 domains under management throughout the year and still lost almost 80,000 domain names the last 30 days.

In our December Interview with the new Co-President of Oversee.net, Debra Domeyer we asked her about the future of Moniker.com:

Q.  

The is a rumor that Moniker.com and/or Snapnames.com have been or are up for sale.  What can you tell me about the sale of either or both of these companies?

A.

“We don’t comment on rumors or speculation on any of our business units.”…

The publicly reportable sales included in the total above came to $515,789 led by Bizable.com.com at $15,600 followed by CollegeTextbook.com at $15,000.

Below is the entire list of publicly reportable sales: