The Times: Tech column - Domain speculation/Nanotech/Video-enabled phones
By David Rowan
HERE, finally, is the secret to making easy money on the Internet: set up as a domain-name registrar. Even as dot.com values tumble, domain names are proving ever more popular - with 36,278,755 .com, .net and .org names now registered. At a typical cost of £45 for two years, there is an endless stream of speculators keen to invest.
Take Steve Rumney, a graphic designer from South London, who has spent "a five-figure sum" on around 400 names, from shoppingtelevision.com to TVandBroadband.com. He waits, like thousands of others, for the e-mail that heralds a purchase inquiry and a decent windfall.
Lately, though, a new form of inflation has swept through the domain-trading world. With the .com market nearing saturation, companies began hard-selling alternative must-haves, from .tv to .cc - forcing businesses to move quickly to protect trademarks, and enticing speculators to spend ever more aggressively. Earlier this month a new .biz suffix launched with 160,000 preregistered domains; and within the next few months we can expect .name (for personal names), .aero, .museum, .coop (as in co-operative) and .pro (the latter for professionals, not the vice trade).
But the most controversial of the new domain suffixes has been .info, marketed by a company called Afilias as an alternative to .com, and overloaded with applications when orders opened in July. Steve Rumney spent £100 on each of around 60 .info names - and he certainly appears to have acquired some gems: business.info, finance.info, loans.info, health.info, even gems.info. "I was just lucky," he says. "They must potentially be worth £1 million - someone who wanted them badly would pay a lot."
Except that Rumney looks unlikely to reap those financial rewards - and to lose his initial stake. Afilias accepted his registrations during a period when only trademark owners could stake their claims. To register his generic terms, Rumney - like many other speculators - simply supplied a fictional trademark number, and Afilias accepted it without checking. Now - amid claims that 25 per cent of the first 11,000 registrations were fraudulent - the World Intellectual Property Organisation is being called in to determine whether each one should be forfeited.
Meanwhile, Afilias - which has now sold some 600,000 addresses - stands accused of a "shambles". "We don't actually hold the trademarks," says Rumney, "but I didn't think every single generic name would be challenged. The registrars were actively encouraging people to register generic names."
Now Rumney's other domains are starting to expire, and he lacks funds to renew them. So far he has managed to sell only one of his 400 names, onnet.tv, which went for £2,000 to a man in San Francisco.
Yet he remains on the lookout for opportunities. Twelve days ago he noticed that the American owner of intelligentfinance.com was about to let it lapse, and "watched it round the clock" to snap it up, on behalf of a Canadian bank. The Halifax should have known better than to let him. For in the domain-name jungle, predators lie everywhere.
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Get used to nanotechnology - the "billionth-part" branch of research that is causing an extraordinary buzz in the learned journals. Last week Israeli scientists announced details of a "nanoscale" computer made of DNA molecules that could process billions of calculations at once. A few days earlier American cancer researchers published details of a "molecular nanogenerator" - a tiny weapon that traps a single radioactive atom in a molecular cage to target individual cancer cells. In recent days we have also had transistors so small that 10 million will fit on a pin-head, silicon "nanowire" chips based on single-molecule switches, and predictions that future military uniforms will be built from molecules that react to their surroundings. Suddenly, small is looking very beautiful, not least to investors - and, thankfully, British universities are waking up to the big opportunities of the very little.
++++
THINGS to do with a 3G mobile phone, continued. Here is a creative, if worrying, innovation being pioneered by a London-based tech firm, Remote-i (www.remote-i.com). Want to see who's hanging around Soho right now, or examine a holiday location before committing? Subscribers connect to a network of others with video-enabled phones and ask them to supply the required images at an agreed fee. They can therefore "see anywhere via the remote 'eyes'," just as Napster lets them hear any piece of music. That's fine if you want to check how busy the M25 is - but what if someone in St Andrews offers to tail Prince William for whoever will pay £10 a minute? Professional media (even Earls of Wessex) face some restrictions - but what will happen to personal privacy when all of us are potentially paparazzi-for-hire?
(The Times, November 26 2001)
HERE, finally, is the secret to making easy money on the Internet: set up as a domain-name registrar. Even as dot.com values tumble, domain names are proving ever more popular - with 36,278,755 .com, .net and .org names now registered. At a typical cost of £45 for two years, there is an endless stream of speculators keen to invest.
Take Steve Rumney, a graphic designer from South London, who has spent "a five-figure sum" on around 400 names, from shoppingtelevision.com to TVandBroadband.com. He waits, like thousands of others, for the e-mail that heralds a purchase inquiry and a decent windfall.
Lately, though, a new form of inflation has swept through the domain-trading world. With the .com market nearing saturation, companies began hard-selling alternative must-haves, from .tv to .cc - forcing businesses to move quickly to protect trademarks, and enticing speculators to spend ever more aggressively. Earlier this month a new .biz suffix launched with 160,000 preregistered domains; and within the next few months we can expect .name (for personal names), .aero, .museum, .coop (as in co-operative) and .pro (the latter for professionals, not the vice trade).
But the most controversial of the new domain suffixes has been .info, marketed by a company called Afilias as an alternative to .com, and overloaded with applications when orders opened in July. Steve Rumney spent £100 on each of around 60 .info names - and he certainly appears to have acquired some gems: business.info, finance.info, loans.info, health.info, even gems.info. "I was just lucky," he says. "They must potentially be worth £1 million - someone who wanted them badly would pay a lot."
Except that Rumney looks unlikely to reap those financial rewards - and to lose his initial stake. Afilias accepted his registrations during a period when only trademark owners could stake their claims. To register his generic terms, Rumney - like many other speculators - simply supplied a fictional trademark number, and Afilias accepted it without checking. Now - amid claims that 25 per cent of the first 11,000 registrations were fraudulent - the World Intellectual Property Organisation is being called in to determine whether each one should be forfeited.
Meanwhile, Afilias - which has now sold some 600,000 addresses - stands accused of a "shambles". "We don't actually hold the trademarks," says Rumney, "but I didn't think every single generic name would be challenged. The registrars were actively encouraging people to register generic names."
Now Rumney's other domains are starting to expire, and he lacks funds to renew them. So far he has managed to sell only one of his 400 names, onnet.tv, which went for £2,000 to a man in San Francisco.
Yet he remains on the lookout for opportunities. Twelve days ago he noticed that the American owner of intelligentfinance.com was about to let it lapse, and "watched it round the clock" to snap it up, on behalf of a Canadian bank. The Halifax should have known better than to let him. For in the domain-name jungle, predators lie everywhere.
++++
Get used to nanotechnology - the "billionth-part" branch of research that is causing an extraordinary buzz in the learned journals. Last week Israeli scientists announced details of a "nanoscale" computer made of DNA molecules that could process billions of calculations at once. A few days earlier American cancer researchers published details of a "molecular nanogenerator" - a tiny weapon that traps a single radioactive atom in a molecular cage to target individual cancer cells. In recent days we have also had transistors so small that 10 million will fit on a pin-head, silicon "nanowire" chips based on single-molecule switches, and predictions that future military uniforms will be built from molecules that react to their surroundings. Suddenly, small is looking very beautiful, not least to investors - and, thankfully, British universities are waking up to the big opportunities of the very little.
++++
THINGS to do with a 3G mobile phone, continued. Here is a creative, if worrying, innovation being pioneered by a London-based tech firm, Remote-i (www.remote-i.com). Want to see who's hanging around Soho right now, or examine a holiday location before committing? Subscribers connect to a network of others with video-enabled phones and ask them to supply the required images at an agreed fee. They can therefore "see anywhere via the remote 'eyes'," just as Napster lets them hear any piece of music. That's fine if you want to check how busy the M25 is - but what if someone in St Andrews offers to tail Prince William for whoever will pay £10 a minute? Professional media (even Earls of Wessex) face some restrictions - but what will happen to personal privacy when all of us are potentially paparazzi-for-hire?
(The Times, November 26 2001)
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