A $100 investment in 1992 could turn into a million-dollar profit for a Silicon Valley businessman, as bidding began last week for the Internet domain name “wireless.com.” Bids are starting at $1 million, said SiteJockey.com, the broker for the auction and the domain name.
Mike Cheponis, president of California Wireless Inc., a consulting firm in the Bay Area, reluctantly registered “wireless.com” for his company in December 1992 when he realized the Internet was going to become very important.
“I wanted cwi.com, but it wasn’t available,” Cheponis said.
In addition to wireless.com, he also owns the rights to about a dozen other domain names he said he has for various other interests.
Shortly after SiteJockey.com was established in August, it repeatedly approached Cheponis about selling the wireless.com name. Through market research, SiteJockey.com had determined “wireless.com” was one of the most sought-after domain names on the Web.
“I hadn’t intended on doing that (selling), but SiteJockey kept calling,” Cheponis said. “We had an arrangement that I thought made sense and sounded good.”
Cheponis was further motivated to sell because his consulting business was doing well and “a Web presence wasn’t really needed.”
Cheponis could join several others who have turned a tremendous profit on their visionary investments in the Internet.
In December, Marc Ostrofsky, a Houston-based businessman, sold “business.com” to a company called eCompanies for $7.5 million. This surpassed the previous record established when Compaq Computer Corp. paid $3.3 million for the AltaVista.com search engine domain.
Ostrofsky bought the domain in 1996 from a European Internet service provider for $150,000.
“Wireless.com” could fetch in excess of $15 million, according to Alex Sepehri-Nik, chief executive officer of SiteJockey.com.
“We looked at the marketing budget … we thought we were looking at a certain figure, but interests that have been expressed to us have exceeded that number,” Sepehri-Nik said.
“Just finding an available domain name that accurately reflects or identifies a market or product line is virtually impossible these days,” he said. “Companies are willing to spend a great deal on a domain name that is marketable and that will identify their company as a leader in a specific industry.”
The bidding commenced Jan. 17, and at RCR press time, several companies already had expressed interest.
“We’re getting more bidders than we expected. Right now there are 10 active bidders, but that will probably drastically increase as we get closer to the auction’s closing. I’d say 50 percent are distributed between big-name companies and the other 50 percent are up-and-coming companies,” said Sepehri-Nik.
The auction, which officially closes at 5 p.m., PST, on Jan. 31, also includes the trademark rights to the name, the company said.
SiteJockey.com purchases, resells and auctions domain names not currently used by their rightful owners. The seller grants SiteJockey.com the exclusive right to list and sell their URL in exchange for a small percentage of the selling price-usually 10 percent. In return, SiteJockey.com will actively market their URL, the company said.
“Simply put, the organization that wishes to be identified as the leader in this industry should have their Internet presence located at www.wireless.com,” Sepehri-Nik said.
Coincidentally, immediately following the wireless.com auction, on Feb. 1, SiteJockey.com said it will start taking bids for “telephony.com.”
