In April 2011 Apple Inc. reportedly paid $4.5 Million dollars for the one domain name iCloud.com from a company named Xcerion. Fast forward some 4 years later and now 170 iCloud related domains have transferred ownership from Xcerion to Apple Inc according to whois records.
Some Facts
- 167 of the domain names “start with” the term iCloud
- 2 start with My
- 1 starts with OS (osicloud.com)
- All of the domain names are either .com, .net and .org
- All the domain names were registered at Network Solutions and have now transferred to brand protection service CSC Corporate Domains.
- All of the domain names were owned by Xcerion and are now owned by Apple Inc.
- All domains have a creation date prior to April 2011
Questions
Were these domains included in the reported $4.5 Million purchase of the iCloud.com domain name? If so, why some 4 years later to take ownership according to whois records?
Were these domains acquired recently due to some relating keywords Apple wants to focus on with iCloud?
Further brand protection to the iCloud brand?
What are some of the domain names?
Since there are 170 domains, I’m not going to list them all, but again, they all relate to iCloud with 167 of them starting with the term, so the most common pattern is iCloud + Keyword.TLD
iCloudAds.com |.net|.org
iCloudApps.com
iCloudSocial.com |.net |.org
iCloudMusic.com |.net
iCloudBrowser.com |.net |.org
iCloudRadio.com |.net
iCloudPay.net|.org (the .com appears to still be in transfer mode)
Mail, Watch, Widgets, Touch, Wiki, Vote, Player, Secure: are some of the other keywords after the iCloud term.
As just noted above, it appears that not all domains have transferred yet, so the 170 number will grow at least a little. I have seen the 170 but there are likely only a few that have yet to transfer that relate to iCloud at least.
Xcerion owned a total of about 380 domains prior to this large transfer, with 231 of those domains being created in 2007 with almost all of those being “cloud” related but not all “iCloud”. Many were iCloud though. Another 74 domains were registered in 2008 and a couple in 2009, making up the vast majority of the domains that have now transferred to Apple.
This could be related to the streaming music service launch if you look back in history… wonder why Apple didn’t buy the whole company! btw, they still pay $30 per iPhone to Cisco to license iphone name which is a Cisco tm
http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-gains-control-of-icloud-domain/
How come there were some cased when Apple accused “iphone” related domain name owner about infringing TM? Did they JV on this w/ Cisco too?
perhaps there is some precedence established that said cloud is generic not sure
maybe they knew this xerion company had the clout to weather a court battle
Good point. But then iphone should be as generic as well. Actually Apple has lost a case already trying to claim all i*** instances. It was published by Mike a while ago.
On the other note, didn’t it happen to you when the buyer pays for the domain name, then never comes back to pick it?