Chicago.com investment, end user sales notes, and more

What’s going on with a major geo website and AWOL end user notes.

[Update: the sale has been confirmed.]

I spent the prior week vacationing in Seattle and central Washington. There was a lot of news the prior week and I did my best to stay on top of it (despite complaints from my wife).

One potentially big piece of news the prior week that I didn’t cover was a development at Chicago.com. Dan Pulcrano of Boulevards Fresh Media, Inc. had a well researched story regarding the Sun-Times Owners buying Chicago.com.

Did the Sun-Times’ investors actually buy the site?

At a minimum, we know that Wrapports invested in Chicago.com. That’s on the firm’s website. What we don’t know for sure, since no one involved is talking regarding it, is if they bought Chicago.com.

It’s true that the registered owner of Chicago.com has changed in whois. But I ran a search with the Illinois Secretary of State and determined that the fresh registrant – THINGS TO DO CHICAGO, INC. – is merely an assumed name of CHICAGO.COM, INC. The listing with the Secretary of State shows that Josh Metnick is still the registered agent and president of the firm.

It’s possible Wrapports bought the whole thing and Metnick is still on board, but it’s also possible it was just an investment. Given Wrapports’ complementary investments such as Chicago Sun-Times (which had a partnership with Chicago.com), it seems like a good fit.

Whether it was an outright sale or investment, congrats to Metnick.

Now, an update on my weekly end-user sales notes.

Each week I uncover which firms bought domain names at Sedo and Afternic. It takes a lot of time but readers tell me it’s valuable.

I’ve run into a hitch as GoDaddy has changed how it’s serving whois results, a key ingredient to creating these notes. Until I get it resolved with GoDaddy I won’t be able to provide fresh notes. Hopefully it will be resolved by next week. I promise to catch up on those as soon as I can.