eCompanies today said it paid a hefty $7.5 million for the domain name Business.com to launch a business-to-business Internet service.
The announcement underscores two trends: the high value of compelling Net addresses and the rush to create companies focused on business-to-business transactions and services.
"Business.com is the highest-order business-to-business domain name and is
a perfect match with the service we are building in the eCompanies
incubator," eCompanies co-founder Jake Winebaum said in a statement. "We
plan to make Business.com the Internet's preeminent business brand."
The start-up will face intense competition, however. As for the price of the domain name, it appears to be among the highest ever paid. In August 1998, Compaq bought the AltaVista domain name for a reported $3.3 million.
In 1997, the name Business.com was purchased by an unnamed company for $150,000, a record at the time, through a company called idNames.com. eCompanies bought the Business.com domain name from Marc Ostrofsky, a
Houston-based entrepreneur.
Ostrofsky will become an adviser to the
company, and Winebaum will become acting chief executive.
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