Word: gullichsen
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...however, left some tracks--primarily on Tonga, a Pacific island kingdom where Gullichsen washed ashore a few years back after wandering the globe on profits from the sale of his first two companies: the virtual-reality venture Sense8 and the "virtual TV" start-up Warp. Tonga is a tiny place (pop. 100,000), and Gullichsen soon made a powerful friend, the island's Crown Prince Tupouto'a, who appointed him technology adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Defense, responsible for everything from Tonga's air-surveillance network to its e-mail system...
...mail project that got Gullichsen and his longtime business partner, Eric Lyons, thinking. The ever growing Web now has hundreds of millions of sites, most organized into three so-called top-level domains: com net and org The demand for com names has advanced to the point where speculators who snap up the most valuable ones can resell them for thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Three Star Wars sites--EPISODEI.com and its two sequels--were recently sold for $1 million on eBay.) Given that the number of websites is doubling every year, the demand...
...with the Crown Prince's permission, Gullichsen and Lyons started Tonic Corp. and began selling Tonga domain names on a first-come, first-served basis. Bummed that the cool website name you thought of is already taken? Visit www.tonic.to with a valid credit card, and they'll sell you the same name in the .to domain. Price: $100 for the first two years. You can still host your site from your PC in Topeka, Kans.; the name will just be registered by a company based on an island you probably can't find...
...Gullichsen isn't sweating the competition. Instead he's readying his next company, MetaCorp, due for launch this summer. It will allow customers to license their own offshore companies, complete with online banking, all dispensed via another self-run website based, like Tonic, in Gullichsen's Tonga fiefdom...
...with the cash these virtual companies siphon out of the old world order, Gullichsen plans to build a new one. The crown prince has given him the run of a tiny Tongan outrider island, which Gullichsen hopes to turn into a prototype sustainable environment. "I'm setting up an ecologically closed community," he says. "I'll have a wind generator, solar panels, a geodesic dome and hydroponics. I want to live off the grid but still be online--be connected to the global fabric but from a venue that is free from regulation and in harmony with the environment...