Do I detect rats leaving sinking ships? Anyone who knows anything about the Internet will know that an important part of success online is a good product or service and similarly that what’s as important is the domain name you use. Vanchau Nguyen knew that, which is why when he was creating an easy to use message board system, he knew the domain name ezboard.com would be part of its success. Fast forward seven years and ezboard, Inc.’s CEO Robert Labatt announces the next generation of ezboard will be Yuku. Not exactly a great name to start off with and they settle on an aboriginal word for ‘tree’ as the supposed genesis of the name. Over the coming year, Labatt announced that all ezboards would eventually move to the new Yuku platform and that instead of pnnn.ezboard.com/bboardname they would become boardname.yuku.com. So when you make such a fundamental change, one of the key elements of your business has to be protection of your domain name, especially when you’re running your business largely on venture capital. Indeed, your VC backers would probably want to see up to date risk assessments for the business and a key element of that assessment would be the domain names. I wonder what they would make, then, of the recent change of registrant for the domain name Yuku.com. If you lose control of the domain name, the new registrant could use it for their own ends or point requests for the domain to ‘dodgy’ content or to link farms, for instance. So the recent changes to the registration of Yuku.com are very strange indeed and one wonders what ezboard’s backers would make of them:

yuku.com - 2007-05-18 13:46

Registrant: ezboard Inc 564 Market Street 705 San Francisco, CA 94104 US 415 773 0400×255 Domain Name: YUKU.COM Administrative Contact: Labatt, Robert  564 Market Street 705 San Francisco, CA 94104 US 415 773 0400×255 Technical Contact: Gakovic, Ceco  564 Market Street 705 San Francisco, CA 94104 US 415 773 0400×214 yuku.com - 2007-08-05 23:29 Registrant: Expert In The House, LLC 650 Delancey Street 102 San Francisco, CA 94197 US 415 205 7465 Domain Name: YUKU.COM Administrative Contact: Labatt, Robert  650 Delancey Street 102 San Francisco, CA 94197 US 415 205 7465 Technical Contact: Gakovic, Ceco  564 Market Street 705 San Francisco, CA 94104 US 415 773 0400×214

So who is “Expert in the House, LLC”? Well coincidentally, Robert Labatt used to sell networking DVDs through their web site http://www.expertinthehouse.com/about.html. Maybe Labatt has plans for the domain name if things go wrong (or worse…) at ezboard, Inc.? Or maybe it’s Just Another Ezboard Cock-Up…