All eBay Bids for Y2K Domains Phony

The Internet domain Year2000.com is still for sale, now
that its owners have determined that only pranksters participated
in an auction that ran the price of the address up to $10 million.

Cliff Kurtzman, president and chief executive officer of Tenagra
Corp., the Houston-based Internet marketing company that owns the
domain along with Canadian Y2K guru Peter de Jager, said today that
he will now focus on attracting private offers for the Year-2000-
friendly Internet moniker.

Bidding for the domain - currently home to Tenagra's and de Jager's
Year 2000 Information Center - ended on the auction site of eBay
Inc. [NASDAQ:EBAY] at midnight Jan. 1 with two offers of $10-
million. Kurtzman and eBay had learned by late Tuesday afternoon
that the pair of $10-million bids were not valid, and had begun the
task of contacting the next-highest bidders to determine which of
the remaining 11 bids might be from serious contenders.

All the bids were "not sincere," Tenagra Corp. reported today.

"Naturally, we are disappointed that the bidding process on eBay
was flawed for items of such large value, but we still believe that
the domain name holds exceptional value for the right party,"
Kurtzman said. "Rather than repeat a lengthy bidding process, we
have decided to entertain direct private offers for Year2000.com by
any parties interested in purchasing it."

Kevin Pursglove, an eBay spokesman, told Newsbytes earlier that,
while bogus bids do occur on the auction site, most transactions
take place without a hitch.

"The way eBay is arranged, you're asking everybody who comes to the
site and either lists an item or is bidding on an item to
essentially honor their word," Pursglove said. "There is a great
deal of operating on trust."

Kurtzman says the partners figure the domain could hold value for
the right buyer, if only because there are already some 25,000
links on Web sites around the Internet pointing to the address.

Billing the address as the "Web domain name of the year" for the
rest of the Year 2000, Kurtzman said that Jeremy Padawer, host of
the Domainappraiser.com Web site, has valued Year2000.com at $4.5
million.

The current record for the price known to be paid for a domain name
is $7.5 million, offered by Santa Monica, Calif.-based eCompanies
LLC for the Internet address Business.com.

Kurtzman said the partners are still offering a reward of $10,000
to the first person to suggest the eventual buyer of Year2000.com,
a contest he said has so far received more than 600 entries.
Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates and real estate developer
Donald Trump have been the most often suggested potential buyers of
the domain.

The Year 2000 Information Center and more information on the
domain-name sale can be found at: http://www.year2000.com .

Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com

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