CitizenHawk Inc. has received a patent for its unique blend of online services—finding website fraudsters and recovering proprietary domain names.
There are companies that do one or the other online, but Citizen Hawk offers clients both. The Aliso Viejo-based company has several notable financial backers but has kept a quiet profile, while enforcing online brand protection for some of the world’s largest retailers, including Apple, Staples, Travelocity and Groupon, among others.
The patent “validates that what we’ve been doing and what we’ve been claiming is in fact true,” CitizenHawk Chief Executive David Duckwitz said.
It also should help the company stand out among operators of so-called affiliated marketing networks, which are commissioned by big retailers, financial services firms, and other large companies to drive traffic to their sites.
CitizenHawk’s software scans the Web to identify infringements and redirections. Screenshots of the offending sites are catalogued and brought to the attention of targeted client companies.
CitizenHawk issues warnings, cease-and-desist letters or policy violation notices to search engine providers on behalf of clients. If that doesn’t work, it files what’s called a UDRP—short for Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy—triggering a review by a dispute-arbitration panel.
CitizenHawk has filed almost 400 UDRPs and claims a 99% win rate.
A win means a CitizenHawk customer assumes control of the offending website and redirect future traffic to the proper website. CitizenHawk gets a percentage of sales that might result.
The 500 largest online retailers each have an average of 100 websites infringing on their brand, according to a 2010 Harvard study on typosquatting—the practice of registering misspelled versions of popular website names to capture Web traffic. The study estimated the 250 most-visited websites lose almost 440 million impressions annually, along with $364 million in business.
CitizenHawk sees annual revenue between $5 million and $10 million. It is profitable, and its revenue has been increasing at a 15% annual clip, Duckwitz said. It has 25 employees.
The company has raised $5.1 million in venture capital funding. Its lead investor is Seattle-based Maveron LLC, co-founded by former Starbucks Chief Executive Howard Schultz.
Design Win
Aliso Viejo-based networking-equipment maker QLogic Corp. notched a design win in Dell Inc.’s latest lines of storage servers.
The company’s newly launched 16-gigabit fibre-channel adapters will provide connectivity for the Texas-based computer maker’s lineup of rack, tower and blade servers targeting the corporate, data-center and cloud-storage markets.
The adapters are billed to improve processing performance, capacity and data-transfer speeds more than the current standards.
QLogic is the market leader in fibre-channel adapters, with almost 52% of the market. Sales in that segment topped $78 million in the third quarter, according to figures released by Redwood City-based market tracker Dell’Oro Group Inc.
Costa Mesa-based Emulex Corp. was No. 2 with $67.4 million.
The fibre-channel market has largely hit maturation, as fibre-channel-over-Ethernet and Ethernet connections gain prominence in data centers. The shift to 10-gigabit Ethernet connections and higher, which are seen as an improvement over fibre-channel and 1-gigabit Ethernet products, will play out in the coming years as established players, such as Irvine-based Broadcom Corp., Intel Corp. in Santa Clara and Dell enter the fray.
The move to improve connection devices comes as capacity has surged in data centers with the advent of cloud computing and the proliferation of video and streaming data.
Boost Smart Phone
Irvine-based Boost Mobile LLC has added its second 4G smart phone in time for the holiday shopping season.
Boost, a unit of Overland Park, Kan.-based Sprint Nextel Corp., has released the Samsung Galaxy S II 4G in titanium for about $370 through its retail stores, select independent wireless dealers nationwide and its website. The no-contract, prepaid carrier released the HTC Evo 4G earlier this year amid feverish consumer demand for smart phones.
Samsung’s Galaxy Prevail, released in April 2011, is the company’s top-selling device.
“Since then we’ve launched about 10 smart phones in the lineup,” Boost Mobile Vice President Andre Smith said. “It’s driving more than 56% of new customers.”
Boost has released 11 cell phones this year.
The company battles Dallas-based rival Met-roPCS Communications Inc., among others, in the ultra-competitive no-contract segment.
Sprint doesn’t break down revenue per brand. The company recently reported its prepaid brands—which, in addition to Boost, include Virgin Mobile USA and Assurance Wireless—topped $1.12 billion in revenue in the September quarter, up 28% from a year earlier.
That amounted to about 13% of Sprint’s $8.76 billion in sales in the recently ended quarter.
