News
Apple secures iPhone.com domain
Apple has completed the purchase of the iPhone.com domain name from Michael Kovatch for more than $1 million, according to a DomainTools report. iPhone.com now redirects to Apple’s iPhone page at http://www.apple.com/iphone/ . Kovatch, who owns several other high-profile domains such as Wine.net and Golf.net, bought the iPhone.com domain in 1995 in hopes to capitalize on internet telephony, even though the technology to support it did not exist at that time. Exact terms of the sale have not been revealed, but if Apple indeed paid more than $1 million for the domain, it would make the domain name sale one of the richest in history.
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1
Lucky Bleep***Bleep.
He was thinking ahead though… I’m gonna go buy the isock.com domain name right now.
Posted by MCW on July 2, 2007 at 3:35 PM (PDT)
2
Yeah, but is his iPhone activated yet?
Posted by solarpos on July 2, 2007 at 5:02 PM (PDT)
3
AT&T (SBC) purchased yellowpages.com for $100 MILLION a couple of years ago. At the time, the purchase price included some employees and a call center located in Las Vegas. The software and web hosting services the previous owners used for their search product were dumped for AT&T’s own. Therefore, it could be said that their purchase was strictly for the yellowpages.com domain. Now THAT’S a lot of money for a URL!!
Posted by skipperwill on July 2, 2007 at 11:33 PM (PDT)
4
Stupid stupid stupid! Apple should have just copped it and done something else. Geez. I thought they were smarter than that. But AT&T was much stupider - 100M for a domain? Pfff.
Posted by Pikemann_Urge on July 3, 2007 at 2:38 AM (PDT)
5
i hope comes out with a toilet because i will sell them iCrapper.com for $1 mil
Posted by hydra-calm on July 3, 2007 at 9:38 AM (PDT)
6
I guess that kind of offsets the profit margin on iPhones, huh?
Posted by Multimoog on July 3, 2007 at 10:43 AM (PDT)
7
I believe the largest ‘domain name only’ transaction was for ‘bussiness.com’ about a decade ago for $7million.
Posted by YouKnowItsTrue on July 3, 2007 at 11:55 AM (PDT)
8
Kudos to him. I don’t support cyber-squatting overall, but this guy just had some good instincts.
Posted by superape on July 3, 2007 at 12:14 PM (PDT)
9
That is one lucky person. $1 million dollars, that’s quite a lot for us average consumers.
Maybe I should look into and purchase a domain name of Apple’s next product. I can only hope that I get it right.
And also, $1 million is just pocket-change to Apple.
Does anyone know if Steve Jobs said that he would pay for the 2-yr contract for the iPhones he gave to the Apple employees? or did he just give them the phone?
And if he did just give them the phone, would they have to get a contract in order to activate the phone, or would they just be the lucky group of iPhone owners who didn’t have to get a contract for their iPhone?
Posted by doompod on July 3, 2007 at 4:03 PM (PDT)
10
the purchase of yellowpages.com seem more like a aquisition (sp?) than a domain purchase. I mean the actually got a physical building out of the deal.
Posted by 3rdEye on July 4, 2007 at 1:52 AM (PDT)