Infinibeam isn’t just crazy, it’s a misinformation machine — .ooo owner

Firm is spreading a lot of incorrect information regarding domain names.

I was rather amused when Infibeam, the Indian ecommerce firm behind .ooo, disclosed its bold ambitions for the domain name last month. I figured it was just a publicity stunt.

Kevin Murphy called the firm’s sales targets counting millions of first year registrations “batshit crazy”.

I filed Infinbeam in the “PR stunt” file, or perhaps the “delusional” file.

Then yesterday I read a The Economic Times article that states Infibeam’s CEO told it “all 34,000 global brands registered with the Trademark Clearing House from over 100 countries have purchased the dotooo domain name from Infibeam”.

This is simply not true. For the record, I count just 222 domain names in .ooo’s zone file.

Perhaps Infibeam was misunderstood by the reporter? Perhaps. It happens all the time.

But then I went to Infibeam’s twitter feed today to learn more regarding the firm. It seems they assigned someone to go look up domain name facts, and hasn’t fact-checked a single one of them.

Among today’s misinformation on twitter:

• First, it states “fund.com priced at over $9 million.”, then it states Fund.com sold for £10m. Even if you believe it sold for $10 million, that’s not £10m.
• “Highest priced domain name is http://sex.com which was of 14 Million Dollars”. It was $13 million, but then the twitter feed later states that other domains sold for more.
• It states privatejet.com sold for $30.2 million. Yes, that was noted via a press release, but it was a mostly equity transaction that no one believes.
• It states icloud.com sold for $35 M. Based on other tweets, I think they meant to say this was in Hong Kong Currency.

Infibeam also apparently can’t check dates on numbers that are constantly changing. Here’s one tweet from today:

Umm, that was so last June.

Another tweet:

Yikes! Verisign shareholders will be surprised to see this number so low. Perhaps Infibeam ought to check the 2009 date on the article they read ahead of spreading misinformation. Infibeam also noted 2009 numbers for .org, .info, .biz and .us.

So now I’ve changed my opinion on Infibeam. I don’t they just have delusional aspirations. I now think they’re clueless, incompetent and, by spreading incorrect information, dangerous.