« I think it’s a pretty safe bet that the Website www.iphone.com is about to get a ton of traffic. After all, look at the spike the site received back on January 9th, the day Apple (AAPL) announced it’s long anticipated phone. (Here’s the Alexa chart below)Iphonetraffic_3 The odd thing is that Apple doesn’t own this site. Iphone.com is a site called The Internet Phone Company, and, at the moment, it mostly contains ads for phones that play music. Click on an ad to buy a phone and you get re-directed to LetsTalk.com, a Venture Capital funded e-commerce site for all things cell phones. Ironically, probably the only phone LetsTalk won’t have for sale when the iPhone launches on Friday is the iPhone itself, since those are only going to be available through Cingular and Apple.
I don’t know the particulars here, but my hunch is the registrant of iPhone.com has a deal to sell the leads to LetsTalk. (Iphone.com, according to domaintools.com, is registered at GoDaddy, and the contact information is private. The phone number on the site took me to a voice mail. LetsTalk also hasn’t returned calls.)
Now, wouldn’t you think that Apple could just buy this domain from the owner, or find a way to have the site shut down? Heck, Apple and Cisco were able to work out a deal over their trademark dispute after Apple brazenly launched the iPhone even though Cisco had the trademark on the name. I guess this one’s small fry, just not on Apple’s radar. Fair enough. Jobs and Co. have other things to worry about. On another note, the chart above does show the power of a domain name – after all, all that traffic is from people typing directly into the browser (ignoring the search box) to look for a site about the iPhone. »
Source TheKey