At ICANN I had a chance to get a personal tour of MindsandMachines.com new domain registrar site.
Mindsandmachines.com which is part of Top Level Domain Holdings (TLDH), a publicly traded company on the London Stock Exchange, applied for 100 or so new gTLD’s and recently launched its own domain name registrar site.
Not only can you register domain names on five new gTLD’s extensions; Casa, .CEO, .Best, .Cooking and .Horse, but also .com .net and .org registrations.
Since MindsandMachines.com is also the registry and/or the backend provider of the new gTLD’s .Casa, .CEO, .Best, .Cooking and .Horse they are offering real domain registrations not reservations or expression of Interest.
Here is what MindsandMachines.com says about these domain name registrations which are live on their site:
“Not an “Expression of Interest” but a real reservation.”
“The master list of reservations is kept by the registry, the authoritative source.”
“A registrar can only hold your place in “their” line — and they have to compete with other registrars to see who will get the name.”
“But any registrar connected to our Priority Reservation system — for instance, Minds + Machines — is connecting straight to the master list. ”
“If you get a Priority Reservation your name is automatically marked as “taken” and won’t be available to anyone who doesn’t own an exact-match trademark on the name.”
Under the ICANN rules no new gTLD domain name can be allocated until the end of the Sunrise period, the time which trademark holders who have registered with the Trademark Clearing House had have a chance to apply for their trademarked terms.
So like any good domainer presented with a new site and opportunity the firs thing I did was start to look around and Based on my Domaining 6.0 post that the future of domains is in brandable domains, here are my three first new gTLD registrations:
BuyA.horse
RideA.Horse
Stallions.Horse
The three domains cost us €29.95 each for the 1st year registration.
We already own Stallions.com and therefore thought that since .horse is meant for the Horse industry it was a good domain to register.
MindsandMachines.com is one of the registries we chatted about yesterday, that is charging premium annual pricing (renewal fees) like the old .TV pricing model.
For example a very popular type of Horse, PasoFino.horse is priced at €5,999.95 priority reservation & 1st year registration.
Keep in mind that the company is located in Europe and therefore all of its prices are stated in Euro’s not dollars and at the current rate of exchange €1 will cost you $1.35
Each of the 5 different new gTLD’s have different general annual pricing and different premium domain name pricing.…
