After a couple weeks of domain name auctions, Bido - the company that auctions 1 name per day - has decided to no longer offer a guaranteed sales price to sellers.

“Looking at domain submissions we learned that if you state that you are willing to give a guarantee if certain guidelines followed, domain owners will submit anything and everything for your consideration,” said Bido cofounder Sahar Sarid on his blog, “mostly outside the boundaries stated.”

From now on, all Bido domain auctions will start at $1 and have no reserve price.

[via Domain Name Wire]

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Associated Cities has announced the finalists for the GeoDomain Awards and voting is now open. Finalists can be seen on the Associated Cities site.  Winners of the awards will be announced during the awards dinner at the GeoDomain Expo in Chicago on July 12th.

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Andrew at DomainNameWire.com is reporting that Pizza.com has finally sold to National A-1, a company that owns an extensive portfolio of high caliber domain names. No official information about the sale price was reported. The domain name was previously sold at auction on Sedo.com for $2.6 million. However the winning bidder later backed out of the deal.

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Frank and I both forgot Domain Name News turned 1 year old on June 12th . It’s been a busy June and time flies.  It seems like 1 year of real time is like a decade on the internet. I think that we’ve both been so busy in the domain name business for so long that it just seems like we’ve been doing this forever and time slips by.

In that 1 year, we’ve redesigned a couple times, we were slashdotted, and we published about 650 articles and thousands of your comments. We’d like to thank you all, especially our friends who helped us launch, our advertisers and everyone who reads, comments and tips us off. We couldn’t do any of this without you !

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Associated Cities has opened up nominations for their Geo Awards.  Nominations are open to the public  until July 1st and final voting will be conducted on July 2nd with the final voting to close on July 8th. Awards will be presented at the 2008 GeoDomain Expo in Chicago.

To nominate someone Click here

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The GoDaddy Group Inc., which includes GoDaddy.com, Wild West Domains (its resale brand) and Blue Razor (its bulk domain brand) has reached a new milestone, registering its 30 millionth domain, RulesOfSaving.com.

GoDaddy is either registering, renewing or transferring about one domain every second of every day, making it the most popular domain registrar around. Although GoDaddy has registered far more than 30 million domains since it began, the tally only includes active domains - making the feat even more impressive.

[via GoDaddy Press Release]

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As reported by Andrew at DomainNameWire.com, reports have surfaced that Godaddy VP Adam Dicker has been bidding on domain auctions at TDNAM.com, the domain name after-market site he is charged with running. Network Solutions and Enom also allow employees to bid on domain names in auctions at Namejet.com. The practice of allowing employees to bid obviously creates a conflict of interest and raises ethical questions.  At the same time it is unclear how a company could possibly police this or prevent employees from bidding.

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As hinted earlier, Yahoo! announced today that they have reached a non-exclusive deal with Google around Search & Advertising. For more information read the Google Blog Post, Google Press Release and Yahoo! Press Release.

The TechCrunch Summary:

The deal is non-exclusive. Yahoo will be able to run Google ads alongside Yahoo ads or other ad providers.

The deal is expected to add $800 million a year in revenues and $250 million to $450 million in operating cash flow.

The deal only applies to paid search and contextual ads, not to algorithmic search.

[via TechCrunch]

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Tucows has chosen Afternic as their exclusive partner for auctioning their daily inventory of expiring domains.

When Tucows decided to end their in-house drop auction, there were questions regarding where they would send their domains. After some investigative work by DotWeekly and an official announcement on the Afternic frontpage, the answer is now clear.

[via Domain Name Wire]

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According to a TechCrunch post, Google and Yahoo will be announcing a partnership arrangement today (1:30 PST). Stay tuned for breaking news as it happens [more here]

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