Word: tonga
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...Erics decided the best way to beat the com system (and make some easy money in the process) was to circumvent it. There's nothing magical about the letters com they reasoned; why not just use, say, .to for Tonga...
...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...
...time of his death, he was working on compiling dictionaries of the Lakeside Tonga and Tumbuka languages of Northern Malawi...