The Telegraph is out with a couple stories about the .UK extension. Stephen Fry is the first Brit to make the switch to .UK and the second story out this morning is about X.UK and a possible 10 Million GBP sale.
Stephen Fry is the first Brit to switch to a .UK domain
From the article:
Stephen Fry has become the first person to make the switch to a .uk web domain as the service becomes available for the first time.
The presenter is making the change from .com to a .uk address, after having expressed his hatred of the .co.uk domain at great length over the years.
“Fret no more, people of Britain. The day of .uk is upon us. And team stephenfry.com — as with all things — is proud to be ahead of the curve, or at least cresting it,” he said.
“It’s only three harmless key-presses, you may think. A year or so back I wrote that it seemed to me annoying and lax of the British internet authority (if such a body ever existed, which it didn’t and doesn’t) when domain names were being handed that they were so inattentive and their eyes so off the ball.
Read the full article here
Could X.UK fetch 10 million GBP ?
A major expansion of Britain’s online real estate will create one of the shortest and most expensive web addresses in the world, when x.uk goes on sale for the first time on Tuesday.
The four characters are expected by their owner, insurance entrepreneur Simon Burgess, to sell for around £10m, which would be the highest price ever paid for a UK web address.
X.uk is being created by a decision by Nominet, the non-profit company that controls the UK web address system, to expand by allowing addresses without “.co” or other category before the “.uk” suffix. Because Mr Burgess already owned x.co.uk, he had an automatic option to acquire the more valuable x.uk.
Mr Burgess said: “There’s only 36 of these four character addresses: 26 letter and 10 numbers.
“We think x.uk is uniquely valuable. A is for aardvark and Z is for zulu but X can be anything. I’ve already had an offer of more than £5m from a very large organisation, which I turned down.”
Read the full article here
x.uk is a very elegant domain.
I’m sure Stephen Fry was wooed quite deliberately. Few Brits command such a popular following.
Would be interesting to see French Connection using FC.UK hack 😉
Many family names, Ukrainian in particular and with “*yuk” or “*iuk” or “*juk” – they will eventually catch up.