Doesn’t anyone
out there want
Honolulu.com?
A domain-name auctioneer
By Russ Lynch
finds no takers—at least not
at his $5,000 minimum bid
Star-BulletinNobody seems to want honolulu.com, at least not at the price the South Florida owners of the Internet domain name are asking. With the demand for domain names soaring and only one place in the United States to register them, Beckwith Miller's business, Florida Internet, felt sure there would be bidders above the minimum $5,000 they were asking.
"We're absolutely flabbergasted" that nobody bit when Florida Internet hung out the honolulu.com bait in a widespread e-mail notice.
Just recently, Miller's group sold the name bogota.com to a cable television company in Bogota, Colombia.
In Honolulu's case, maybe the timing wasn't right, Miller said. "We recognize there will always be interest and maybe the markets ebb and flow," he said.
It's still there if anyone wants it, still at the minimum price of $5,000. Internet users can contact Miller's outfit at http://www.cyberincubator.com.
There are already dozens of domain names using the world Hawaii, such as hawaii.net, developed by some webmasters at the University of Hawaii as a gathering place for Hawaii Internet links, and hawaii-products.com, owned by the state Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism.
The right domain name, or Internet address title, makes it easy for Internet surfers to find a particular business, place or individual. Network Solutions Inc. says it has over 1.6 million domain names registered.
As the only U.S. licensing organization, it receives requests, makes sure nobody else is using the particular names and sells the right to use them for $50 a year each.
Big money has been made cornering names before someone else does. A Houston broker grabbed business.com before anyone else and sold it for $150,000, for example.
Is Miller in the business of cornering domain names and then selling them? Not really, he said.
"Late in 1994 we set up the first virtual city for a Chamber of Commerce, naples.com," for Naples in South Florida, he said.
That led Miller, whose background is in banking and finance, and a partner who has been working on the Internet since its fledgling days more than two decades ago, to think they could help others by developing Internet centers for them.
That in turn led them to look for the names of cities that someone might some day want to use.
He really has three main businesses. One is setting up "virtual cities" for communities or business organizations. Another is BotSpot, a World Wide Web center of robotic devices such as highly advanced Internet search systems.
The third is financialcybermarket.com, preparing for a new age of Internet financial trading. With that in mind, Miller has already registered such domain names as commonstocks.com.
