According to a press release tonight, a public company, Zoom Telephonics, Inc. (ZMTP) , announced that it has sold the domain name Zoom.com to another public company Zoom Technologies, Inc. (ZOOM).
Also included in the sale are “certain trademark rights”.
The Seller gets 80,000 shares of Zoom Technologies common stock which closed at $4.27 a share yesterday, making the selling price of Zoom.com $344,800.
However the stock received for the domain will be restricted as detailed below, making the final selling price a number that is yet to be determined.
Under the agreement the domain name will not transfer until the end of a 4 month transition period.
During the transition period both companies will share the zoom.com home page, and a single click will transfer someone to the home page of either Zoom Telephonics or Zoom Technologies.
The companies have agreed to cooperate in order to affect a smooth transition of email addresses.
Zoom Telephonics retains the rights to the domain names zoomtel.com and zoom.net, and anticipates using zoomtel.com as its primary domain name.
As for the 80,000 shares none may be sold for the first 6 months after the effective date of October 18, 2010.
After these 6 months have elapsed, Zoom Telephonics will have the right to sell up to 20,000 of these shares, after 9 months Zoom Telephonics will have the right to sell up to 40,000 of these shares, after 12 months Zoom Telephonics will have the right to sell up to 60,000 of these shares, and after 15 months from signing Zoom Telephonics will have the right to sell all 80,000 of these shares.
Zoom Telephonics may elect to retain ownership in some or all of these shares as long it sees fit.
The current share price of the buyer is fairly close to the 52 week low of $3.34 and well below the 52 week high of over $11 a share.
Of course if the shares of the buyer go back to their 52 week high levels before any shares can be or are sold by the seller of the domain, the price could be more like $880K than the current value of $345K
ZIP
ZOOM
ZERO
These short corporate names are fetching some great prices lately.
Personally, ZOOM is by far my favorite — such a cool corporate name.
– Aron
Great domain.
If you read between the lines it seems as maybe these companies had a dispute on Zoom.com, and/or on the trademark and maybe this was the settlement they came too.
Very brand-able name:
a car
a gadget
any hip corp
I would have hold it for $1mil + but looks like that company was broke
finance.yahoo*com/q?s=zmtp.ob
very good for a site selling products for photo
An absolute mountain of a brandable name.
The “Big Z’s” we’ve seen sell recently- Zoom, Zip and Zero- are in that class of marketing-gold brand platforms that will always be in intense demand. ‘Real Words’ that are yet unconstrained by narrow keywords… The sky’s the limit on these.
If I’m bullish on the future of any kind of .com names, its ones just like this. Short, snappy brand platforms that mean something, yet can be anything.
Really short -particularly 3/4/5 letter – really cool sounding words like Zip, Zoom, Zero have been really undervalued since domainers are so locked into keywords/ppc mentality.
On Techcrunch every week there are now articles about startups rebranding from ugly reg-fee names to much better names. The thinking is changing that you need a cool easy-to-remember name to market yourself online.
There are only 20-30 LLL.com quality of Zip that can be acquired. And there are only a couple of hundred at most of LLLL.com quality of Zoom. And there are tens of thousands of companies with ugly domains that can easily afford $500k-$1 million, particularly if paid over 5-10 years.
Johnny
Especially when you can buy it without any cash
VERY COOL ARTICLE!! I’m glad I cam across this one – its a highly marketable name with endless possibilities! Short, 4 letters, .com – it all works!
I also read that zoom.co sold for $10K at the latona auction.
“maybe these companies had a dispute”
===
Not even close.
ZOOM://ZOOM