Hey, domain names are red-hot again - even in Canada. Yellow Pages Income Fund has spent $2.5-million to acquire Montreal-based Emall.ca Inc., which owns nearly 400 domain names such as autos.ca, debts.ca (an interesting relationship, don't you think?!) and doctors.com. Yellow Pages CEO Christian Paupe told the National Post the deal was a "no-brainer". Now, if Yellow Pages has any interest in markevans.ca, make me an offer.
Update: I wonder what impact this deal will have on Tucows Inc., which run a domain name auction and parked pages businesses? If domain names are a hot commodity again, Tucows could find itself in the right place at the right time.s

Can you imagine not having local phone service? A growing number of Canadians are going without. Instead, 4.8% of Canadian households are wireless-only compared with 2.7% a year-earlier. So, who are these people? They're students who leave home for school; young people who are out and about; new immigrants who have never had home phone service; and, surprisingly, lower-income people, who given the choice, don't mind paying more for the convenience of a mobile phone. Of course, this trend is bad news for carriers who lost more than 500,000 lines last year and saw sales tumble by more $300-million. The cablecos, on the other hand, can only be happy see that people can live without a local phone but aren't willing to give up their cable service. From a bigger picture perspective, you wonder if the cord-cutting trend sends a message to CRTC that it was premature in not taking wireless users into account while making its recent decision to not deregulate the $10-billion local service market.