I'm laughing as I'm reading the arbitration decision regarding Google suing an apparently money hungry idiot. The defendent (referred to earlier as the idiot) tried to convince the arbitration panel that when she purchased googlecheckout.com, googlematching.com, and googleoutdoors.com that she fully intended to set up a dating site. "Go ogle checkout" is how it was going to be called. where "where the word 'ogle' commonly means 'to glance amorously.'" .....Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight
First do we need another dating site? I suppose it's America and if you have the desire you can do what you want. I do find it ironic though that with the recent Google hookup that another site would use a similar name in trying to start a supposed dating site.
In the article, this woman, asked Google to pay her 1.2 MILLION, yes MILLION, TWO commas for the domain name. She then got reasonable and lowered her offer to a paltry $375,000. Google balked and too her to court. Here's an excerpt from her reply email to google cease and desist letter:
"Hi there. I have received your email and do not actively have these domain names in use. ... I am the proud owner of these domain names and others. I am wiling to do a transfer of these domain names to the google property rights at a cost of my expenses and time and future loss of business. I would possibly be willing to accept an offer of $ 1,250,000.00 as a package deal for all three domain names."
Pretty ballsy if you ask me. "Stop? me? little old me? ok, for 1.25 million"
Google won. Rightfully so in my opinion.
I wonder how much practice/coaching she had to have so she didn't ruin her case by slipping up somewhere and saying "googlecheckout" rather than "go ogle checkout".
Each Friday we have an in-house training session. Topics vary from how we do things interally to new idea such as NetTiers, CodeSmith or ActiveRecord/NHibernate. Really it's quite cool that our company does this. If nothing else it gets the developers together once a week in a room to learn something together.
Today was my day to teach on the provider model design pattern, something I've been a proponent for internally as we are having scaling issues while also offering customization. I prepared and wrote some code to explain the concepts and printed some flow charts and what not. All of it came together wonderfully!!! In fact afterwards I felt like everyone in the room, even some non-developers (design guys) could understand what was going to be going on in the development camp in the future.
The kicker for me is when I asked for comments/questions, I had just one comment from one of our more stringent attenders. He said, "Great job, I've actually watched a Microsoft presentation on the topic and this was better/made more sense"
I wonder if I'll finally be promoted in rank in the Ze Frank's League of Awesomeness
Tim