Apple Tablet? Not Likely. — iGuide for
Domain records show Apple connection to iGuide.com unlikely.
If you’re one of the many Apple bloggers out there, your holiday season has been filled with speculation regarding Apple’s upcoming tablet. The consensus is that will be called iSlate, since Apple has purchased the iSlate.com domain name.
But another possibility is iGuide. MacRumors points to an Apple trademark application for iGuide. Robin Wauters over at TechCrunch did some investigating and comes to a similar conclusion as MacRumors — if anything, iGuide would likely be some sort of related service, not the name of the actual device.
When I saw the rumors regarding iGuide, I immediately recalled that the domain name iGuide.com had sold recently. Digging through the Reglike archives, I found this story regarding iGuide.com selling for $100,000. The whois record at the time showed Beverly Hills based Baroda Ventures LLC as the buyer. (It’s now protected by whois privacy.) I don’t see any connection to Apple, and the current use of the domain name leads me to believe there is none. It forwards to OVGuide.com, another domain owned by a Beverly Hills firm at the same address as Baroda Ventures.
If Apple bought the domain name through a shell firm, it certainly wouldn’t be forwarding it to an online video guide site.
It’s possible Apple has a product or service planned with the name iGuide, but it doesn’t own iGuide.com.
