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The Associated Press is reporting today that although the 'iPhone.com' domain name was grabbed long before January 9th, when Apple announced its new gadget, speculators have been registering thousands of iPhone-related domain names such as 'iPhoneJewelry.com' and 'TheAppleMaciPhone.com'.

According to Name Intelligence Inc., which analyzes domain name patterns, roughly 450 domain names including the word "iPhone" were registered on Jan. 11 and about 375 on Jan. 12 — just a few days after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at the Macworld conference in San Francisco. Although the registrations dropped to 25 per day for a while, they have picked up rapidly and more than 350 iPhone related domain names were registered in a day last week.

Jay Westerdal, president of Name Intelligence, says in his blog entry that more than 4,000 new iPhone domain names have already been registered and another 4,000 are anticipated by the end of the year.

As of now, the official address for Apple's iPhone is http://www.apple.com/iphone.

Update (Jul 1, 2007): Various sources are reporting that Apple has purchased the 'iPhone.com' domain name and it has recently been transferred.

Read full story: Yahoo! News

Related topics: Cybercrime, Cybersquatting, DNS, Domain Names