The William J Clinton Foundation announced yesterday that two former presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush have rolled out a site for its Haiti relief efforts.

The Official Site is ClintonBushHaitiFund.org.

Fortunately the foundation was smart enough not only to register the reverse domain name,  BushClintonHaitiFund.org but they also registered ClintonBushHaitiFund.com and BushClintonHaitiFund.com just to keep some idiot from registering it.

Speaking of idiots although the Foundation secured BushClintonHaitiFund.net, some idiot beat them to their own .net, ClintonBushHaitiFund.net which was registered by some 3 days before the foundation registered their domains and the .US verision which some other idiot grabbed today.

Needless to say that no one who reads this blog should even think about registering any domain related to this tragedy and certainly not a typo or other variation of a charity.

On the other hand the 90999 text message program we wrote about last week, has last I heard, generated $8 Million and that was before the weekend.

Out of the CES show this week the hottest tech items seems to be a tablet computer which is generally being referred to not only by the media but by the manufactures as “Slates”, in anticipation of Apple’s expected introduction of the iSlate latter this month.

cnet.com is reporting that “Slate Mania grips PC Makers” at the CES show.

So which high tech company owns the potential category killer domain slates.com?

Well it turns out if owned by a very low tech company, Levi Strauss the jeans maker.

It look like they are really not even using the domain, as it just advertises their “easy order” product at Levi.com.

You would think that one of those computer makers might buy this domain from Levi.

Stay Tuned

Again from ThisWeekInStartups.com, the Jason Calacanis ustream.tv show. It’s a great show, and the experience of watching it live has turned out to be a little bit addictive. Check out #TWIST on Twitter. Jason is simply Twitter.com/Jason.

In this audio clip from ‘Jason’s Shark Tank’, Jason tells caller/developer Kevin, of pikk.com what he likes about what Kevin’s created so far.

Signals of Quality

Jason Calacanis: Everyone should follow you on Twitter obviously, Pikk. You have that up and running, and you have a four letter domain name. These are, again, signals of quality for me. You have a decent domain name decent web design. I’m  not crazy about your web design, to be totally honest with you I think it’s a 7 or 8 out of 10 but, listen, Mahalo was a 6 out of 10 at one point, now it’s a 10 out of 10, so, it’s progress you know, and I can appreciate that. Smart enough to pick a four letter domain, great – how did you get the domain was that available or you bought it.
Kevin: I bought it.
Jason: Yeah, how much did that cost you?
Kevin: Ah, I’ve been told I got the bargain of the century, this cost me about twenty-five hundred dollars.
Jason: That’s a great deal.
Kamran Pourzanjani: Yeah.
Jason: For a four letter domain…

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s another Jason Calacanis audio clip from This Week In Startups, episode 29.

Jason on ‘Dot Com’

The context is a domain/brand a caller mentioned in a previous ‘Ask Jason’ segment.

Jason Calacanis: Isn’t it amazing though Tyler? The people with the naming.
Tyler Crowley: I just found out… I think lean.ly is available. With the dot L-Y which seems to be the hot new…
Jim Lanzone: Hmm!
Jason: Oh…
Tyler: Don’t get you started with that?
Jason: gov.ly? (refers to earlier in the conversation)
Tyler: gov.ly?
Jason: gov.ly
Tyler: lov.ly gov.ly
Jason: lov.ly gov.ly… I hate that nonsense.
Tyler: Yeah.. L-Y’s catchin’ on, so is dot F-M
Jason: (Sighs)
Tyler: But it gives people more of an option to come up with names… You use Bit.ly all day long!
Jason: You know what, De.licio.us did this as well, and then when they were successful they wound up buying Delicious dot com.
You’re going to wind up with a dot com anyway, You might as well make the effort and spend the money to get it early. So you don’t have to re-brand it!

I wasn’t the only one scratching his head when I read the TechCrunch story announcing Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s new, very cool, credit card reading startup. It’s called ‘Square’. But the domain is squareup.com. Here’s Elliot Silver’s take (links to full post)

TechCrunch reported today that Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, has launched a mobile payment service called Square. While the actual product/service looks pretty cool, I am surprised that someone with the capital resources such as Dorsey would launch a new brand on a domain name that is different from the actual brand.The big problem for Square is that they are using the domain name SquareUp.com for their website. This really defies logic to me for a couple of big reasons…

Exactly! Can’t afford it? Not worth it? It’s just a domain name? But it is difficult to supply the facts that support our side of the argument. The best evidence I’ve come across that supports, with data, the efficacy of a great (generic) domain name comes from Edwin Hayward at MemorableDomains.co.uk with a report entitled visit site to read more]

Dev Hub just shared with me the results of a three month test of 50 domains chosen by the client a domain name portfolio holder.  As you can see from the chart’s below, over the three month test the domains that were previously just parked, went from making $63 a month to over $140 a month.

The 50 domains went from having no search traffic when they were parked to getting almost 3,000 visitors from search in the third month on Dev Hub platform.

So while some of the improvement in revenue can be attributed to additional traffic generated from search, Dev Hub was able to generate 58% of the revenue from sources other than parking.

Pretty impressive, especially when you consider the fact that only 1/2 of the domains in the test were .com’s.

This report comes at a time when the industry is looking for new and better ways to monetize domains.

It was just a little over a month ago that I was sitting on the TRAFFIC test track panel when Mark Michael one of the co-founders of Evo Media Group, the company behind the development platform,, Dev Hub appeared before us looking for an additional $1.5 Million of investment capital.  Although I was quite impressed with Dev Hub system and Mr. Michael’s presentation, I couldn’t commit to that type of funding in the 15 minutes we had.

Looks like I made a bad decision.

Dev Hub did in fact secure the investment they were seeking after the show.

Here is the charts and relevant data for the case study: