.CO Domain International Sunrise now Available

We are now accepting orders for .CO Domain International Sunrise claims. (We previously mentioned the rollout of the .CO Top Level Domain here)

This is for holders of registered trademarks, where the registration date is prior to July 31, 2008.

The price for Sunrise claims is $300 USD, which covers the first year registration for successful claims.

If your claim is not successful, we will refund $50 back to you.

(Our cost on this breaks out to $205 non-refundable for the sunrise claim, and $25 for the first year registration).

The International Sunrise phase of the .CO rollout continues through until June 10, 2010. The order of applications does not matter. If there are more than one valid trademark orders for the same domain, that domain will go into an auction process.

As our customers may be aware, we are breaking with our usual policy of ignoring new top-level-domains (as we wrote here and here) and recommending you pursue a .CO domain under the following circumstances:

If you are running a production, webfront, ecommerce, online business that is identfied primarily by your .com web address, then you should attempt to grab the .CO version of your domain. While normally we feel it is safe to ignore most top-level-domains, and that you can safely not defend your names within them, we feel that .CO is an exception because of it’s obvious typo and visual correlation to “.COM”.

The .CO Registry has released this Open Letter to Brand Owners which describes their internal processes and structure but doesn’t really change the fact that if you’re currently branded under .COM and you take your presence seriously, you’re probably going to bite the bullet.

How to Enter Your Sunrise Claim

We are processing these manually for the moment.

1. Open a ticket with support
2. List the domain name(s) you are interested in
3. Provide the trademark details (see below).
4. We will issue you an invoice for $300 USD per domain claim.

How to find your trademark info

For Canadians

Go to http://www.ic.gc.ca/app/opic-cipo/trdmrks/srch/bscSrch.do?lang=eng and enter your trademark (usually without the “.com” extension unless that is specifically part of your trademark).

For US Trademarks

Go to http://www.uspto.gov/ and in the center column click on “Search Marks”.

We will need the following infomation about your trademark:

• Trademark Name
• Trademark Country
• Registration Number
• Date of Registration
• Applicant Capacity (“Trademark assignee”, “Trademark licensee” or “Trademark owner”)

We will submit the sunrise claim when the invoice is remitted.