Tag Archives: bbc

That Pizza will be 2.6 million …

That Pizza being pizza.com! Some lad bought the domain name in 1994 at the “dawn” of the internet age, and has owned it ever since. After seeing how much vodka.com sold for (about 3 million dollars) he put Pizza.com up for auction and got 2.6 Million US dollars!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7331042.stm

In January, Mr Clark decided to sell it after hearing that another domain – Vodka.com – was sold for $3m in 2006 …
“If someone’s willing to pay that much for Vodka.com, maybe there’s more interest in pizza.com.”

The online auction was launched on 27 March. The first bid was $100, jumping to $2.6m a week later.

Having accepted the latter offer, Mr Clark hopes to get his windfall in a few days’ time when the transaction is completed.

He said he now regretted not buying more domain names in the 1990s.

I remember when I started at college at UMass Boston, I was a student lab operator in the Unix lab (support staff) and me and a workmate (and friend) Josh started joking around looking to see what Domain names we could register. This was in 1999 or 2000 and any word in the English language we could think of was already registered as a domain name. Wish I’d gotten on this internet lark in the early 1990’s and purchased a few domain names too!

Waving frog waves for the last time

Sad:

The Panamanian golden frog communicates with other frogs by semaphore in the form of gentle hand waves.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7219803.stm

What’s is amazing is that they took video of them in the wild before the last wild populations were destroyed by a fungi:

… after filming for the BBC One series Life In Cold Blood, the frogs had to be rescued from the wild, due to the threat of chytrid fungus.

More details on chytrid fungus and a possible cure:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7067613.stm

The blow that chytrid has dealt to the frog population is already immense.

The disease has probably accounted for one-third of all the losses in amphibian species to date, says Professor Rick Speare, an expert in amphibian diseases who works with the University of Otago’s frog research group.

Update:
Just found this video on YouTube that from the BBC documentary mentioned above: