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On a tiny island,
catchy Web name sparks a battle
Page 5 of 6
Mr. Semich's initial plan to market dot-nu to U.S. customers mostly
flopped. Dot-com's big lead over other domain-name suffixes made
dot-com even more appealing for new users. But before long, Mr. Semich
found that some Europeans, in particular Swedes, took a liking to dot-nu.
At the time, Sweden's country-code domain name, dot-se, was
reserved only for companies incorporated in Sweden, steering the
country's burgeoning online population to alternatives, like dot-nu.
Today, more than 80 percent of Mr. Semich's business is in Sweden,
prompting him to open a sales and marketing office in Stockholm. A
Swedish parachutist club has registered the Swedish equivalent of "getupandjump.now,"
and an advertisement site for Vicks Vaporub uses the equivalent of "wakeup.now."
Some Swedes believe the domain name is Swedish. Mr. Semich charges $30
a year for a domain name, with a minimum two-year commitment. There
are about 110,000 domain names using the dot-nu suffix, he says.
Mr. Semich says his private company has annual revenue in the low
single-digit millions. He donates 15 percent to 30 percent of that to
a charitable arm of his operation geared toward developing the
Internet on Niue. The money has gone toward an Internet cafe, tower
construction, a building designed to protect Internet equipment from
cyclones and a $6,000 monthly fee for a telecom link to New Zealand,
among other expenses. Between the charity and the business, Mr. Semich
employs 12.
Mr. Semich says the venture hasn't made him wealthy. He lives in
the same house he did before he started. His visions of turning his
non-Roman alphabet domain-name software into a big business vanished
with the Internet bust, which forced him to lay off about a dozen
full- and part-time employees at the time. Still, managing dot-nu has
proved to be a sustainable business, he says.
By June 2003, the company was able to offer Niueans free wireless
Internet, via a series of towers on the island. For many, it not only
opened them to the outside world but also enabled an inexpensive way
to keep in regular contact with friends and relatives who had left the
island years before. The company also got involved in civic affairs on
the island, sponsoring the rugby team and Niue's contestant in a
regional beauty pageant.
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Page 6
Source: Post-gazette.com
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