Bing

I was tickled to see that Microsoft has announced a new search engine at bing.com.

I purchased bing.com from a midwest property manager several years ago for a startup I was involved with. That domain, in fact, ended up being most of the terminal value of the company.

After considerable effort and a lot of negotiation, I sold the domain to a venture-backed firm for, um, much more than we paid for it. (More important to me than the money was that the VC agreed to a future sit-down for another project I’ve been working on.) Ultimately, however, the firm we sold to went bust and evidently sold bing.com to an Australian company that used it in conjunction with their EasyMail product. They must have received an offer they could not refuse because although the Bing service is still available, Bing.com has hit the big time in Redmond.

– Update!–

While searching for logo images, I found this story in PC World! The author put together a nice little article that goes into more depth than my post here. With regard to his section summary: “Hmm. Guess the introduction of the smaller cell phone with built-in vibrate mode kind of killed that idea.” Hmm. Guess you could avoid publishing inaccurate conclusions if you bothered to do any off-net research.

I’d expect more from a “seasoned journalist“.

–Another Update!–

JR called me out on Twitter for my over-sensitivity: “@TheRightPrice Snarky? Sure. But unsubstantiated? I’d say it was pretty clear in the context that that line was a light-hearted joke.” That’s fair. I apologize for my brash comment. It’s hard to hear someone of note distill years of hard work–incorrectly. I wish I could set the record straight, but doing so would probably be a very bad idea. I’ve got to just suck up my pride and enjoy this small notoriety until my day comes.