Brad Stone from the NY Times “Bits” blog reports that Business 2.0 will be shut down:

We’re sad to report that employees of Business 2.0 magazine were told today that the monthly publication will close next week, after they finish the October issue.

As we wrote in July, executives at Time Inc. were weighing whether to shutter the seven-year old business/technology publication as the magazine’s ad pages precipitously dropped this year.

Business 2.0 is the magazine which published the first domain-related article that caused a stir among the folks at Wall Street and Madison Avenue. The article, which was titled ”Masters of their Domains” and published in the magazine’s December 2005 issue, featured the TRAFFIC domain conference in Delray Beach, Florida in 2005 and described how a handful of visionary people recognized the value of generic domains early and made millions from their domain portfolios in the end. “Masters of their Domains” also gave a little insight into the success of domain investors Rick Schwartz, Michael Bahlitzanakis, Frank Schilling and Yun Ye.

In 2006, Business 2.0 editor-at-large Paul Sloan wrote another important article about the domain industry, namely “The man who owns the Internet“. This article portrayed Kevin Ham from Reinvent Technology, and it caused a big wave of investors entering the domain business, too.

After all, it’s really sad that the magazine has to close now, as it has been a very important publication for the domain industry. Hopefully Time Inc. will find a new place for its Business 2.0 employees, including Paul Sloan who has done a fantastic job writing about technology, media and the domain name industry.

DomainTools.com (Name Intelligence) is offering a new domain insurance service. This service is for domainers who register their domains through DomainTools.com’s in-house ICANN registrar and DomainTools will require the domain owner’s mobile phone number and a personal call back to verify any changes on a domain. This high level of personal contact and security should make it extremely difficult to hijack any domain.

I’ve always wondered how long it would take for the first company to come up with a domain insurance service. DomainTools is the first company to offer such a service, which costs between $100 and $10,000 per year, and per domain stolen DomainTools will pay ten times the yearly fee per day until the domain is recovered or until the claim is exhausted:

Domain Insurance Per Domain
Cost per Year	Coverage	Per day Lost
$100	$100,000	$1,000
$500	$500,000	$5,000
$1,000	$1,000,000	$10,000
$5,000	$5,000,000	$50,000
$10,000	$20,000,000	$200,000

Domain investor Frank Schilling is back to blogging after five weeks vacation. In his first new post he reflects on some of the thoughts he had had while being away. For example, he says that less domains will be sold for more money and direct navigation domains are still underpriced:

I met a lot of deal makers on the road and did some reading about the financial markets. Those folks taught me that domain portfolios of today will get sliced, diced, levered and sold for much more money in future. They will get financed by the same bankers, covered by the same analysts, rated by the same agencies. Only the dollars and quantities will change. More money for fewer names is the future I envision.

(…)

Now, in 2007, as “good looking” names without traffic have begun to get inflated and feel bubblish, the names that generate free-cashflow through type-in traffic are unfairly underpriced. It just doesn’t add-up that names which “look cool” but make “no money” get equal or lesser step-ups in relative valuation as those on which they carry the freight and pay the renewals in a portfolio.

I also believe that domains will continue to go up in value for a long time to come. Although the Internet might get overhauled or a new Internet architecture might be invented at some point in the future, I don’t believe domain names will ever be replaced, because you will always need a unique address you can navigate to when surfing on the Internet. Mark Cuban recently said the Internet was dead and boring, and he certainly has a point: The speed at which innovations come up for the Internet has decreased, because the Internet has evolved already. Today it is more like a reliable tool that everybody can use to make his or her life easier instead of being this geeky new thing that only a handful of people were using. So what Mark Cuban might have wanted to say, is that the Internet’s technological progress has slowed down and that it is no longer seen as a hip device, but it has become a powerful tool used in everyday life and business. This is the reason why the Internet and domain names just become more important (and more valuable) as time goes by, in my opinion. More and more people will be using the Internet and the business world will be much more dependent on it in the years to come. After all, these are developments which play into the hands of domain owners and result in the value of domains reaching new heights.