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The Real Deal 159: Buy and sell domain names

We go through the methods and pitfalls of buying, selling, and registering domain names.

Tom Merritt Former CNET executive editor
Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
Rafe Needleman
3 min read

We go through the methods and pitfalls of buying, selling, and registering domain names.


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Intro: Domains--buying and selling.

Why buy? For future use, defensiveness, and to sellL

Stories: Projects, son’s name, cool words

Selling is not so easy--we’ll get to that.

BUYING
Finding a name
Bustaname.com

Registrar
Private registration
Renewal
Nameservers
Domain forwarding
Buying additional services - protected, certified, etc?
How much to pay? $6.95 a year is a good deal.

SELLING
Wild west
Is your buyer an individual or a frontman for megacorp? (story of web 2.0 sites)
Pool.com, polldaddy auctions
portfolio approach might work, but fees and commissions not generous, and it’s hard to sell a domain for $10k these days.

COMMENTS ON TODO LISTS EPISODE

by pdxgrey April 22, 2009 12:20 AM PDT Toodledo. (www.toodledo.com) I almost skipped over this one because of the awful name. You can set goals, priorities, stars, contexts, folders, due-dates, timers and share lists with colleagues and friends. With Toodledo, you can do GTD or not do GTD. You have lots of control over which features or fields you want to turn on in your lists. There is an awesome iPhone app, an Andriod app, a Firefox plug-in and many others.

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by blkmagwom April 22, 2009 12:49 PM PDT For To Do lists, I was surprised you didn’t cover Backpack or Highrise. I was a devoted “I Want Sandy” user and when they folded in December, I spent 1-2 weeks trying to get a new system in place. I think backpack is really great for to do lists, and I can access them over the web, on my phone, and email items to it.

Highrise is the rock star though. I can email things to it and then I can see them on today’s task list, tomorrow, this week, etc. I don’t think highrise has a mobile component which is a limitation.

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by sheala April 27, 2009 9:41 PM PDT Hey ya’ll-
if i had been feeling better last week I would have thrown my two cents in.
For project management on a Mac I love Yojimbo. You can build and tag folders, projects sets of passwords, software keys, secured things. Plus it has a nice drag and drop feature that will just hang out in the background. I hear Notebook is pretty good too.
For a to do list I really like Action Gear for the Mac. It has Growl integration so it can be set to automagically interface with Mail and iCal and do all sorts of cool things.
Sheala, GA
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There’s a very slick solution for syncing Things between two macs: DropBox.

Simply relocate your Things library to your Dropbox folder (http://hocuspokus.net/2008/11/sync-your-things-database-via-dropbox). Install Things (fresh install with none of its own data) on the other computer and relocate ITS library to the same file. Works pretty well though you have the usual precautions when syncing into the cloud (making sure app on other machine is shut down before opening on current machine, other computer must have gone online recently for its changes to appear to the cloud version, etc).

BTW, this trick also works with OS X’s AddressBook app and, gloriously, 1Password.

Finally, I used OmniFocus for a long time and love many things about it (the location aware contexts on the iphone app were really handy), but it was too rigid.

Cheers gents.

—–
Greg Kramer
“Craemmir” in chatroom
Washington, DC
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Next time: Twitter client software!

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