SUNDAY BUSINESS – What’s in a name?

What’s in a name? Jason Drummond, founder of VirtualInternet, is working to protect firms and their brand names on the internet

WHAT’S in a name? Quite a lot if you’re a company that needs to set up a website and do business on the internet. If you’re a newspaper called the Sun you might find that www.sun.co.uk has already been taken by a Californian computer manufacturer called Sun Microsystems. If you’re really unlucky, the name you want may already have been registered by domain name speculators who will charge you a small fortune for something you thought was already yours by right. Burger King and Ladbroke had to go to court last year to win back the right to use their names in web addresses after a company called One in a Million had registered them in the hope of cashing them in for a profit. But making an honest living out of helping companies avoid problems like these is VirtualInternet, one of seven companies in the stock market’s internet sub-sector. VirtualInternet’s core business is registering domain names, turning Company Name Ltd into www.companyname.co.uk on the web and giving it the chance to register regional variations for countries such as France (.fr) or Germany (.de). But it also hosts corporate websites and provides e-mail and e-commerce facilities to help clients such as Burger King and Clerical Medical do business on the net. With more than 7,000 domain names registered and 3,000 web- sites taking space on VI computers in the UK, US, France and South Africa, 29-year-old founder and chief executive Jason Drummond describes the company’s business model as “selling lots of things for reasonable amounts of money and getting a strong cash flow and lots of repeat business.” Drummond’s career began at 15, when he started distributing software through newsagents in south west London. At 18 he set up IDL Communications to sell fax machines and cellphones and in his mid-20s he was working for GE Information Systems as mar- ket development manager for electronic commerce. VirtualInternet was born in 1996 and achieved its stock mar- ket status this January after a £15m reversal into Charriol, an Aim-listed investment shell set up by internet entrepeneur Chris Akers. On its first day of trading, the shares jumped 190% to 311p in what was a volatile time for UK internet stocks. After settling back over the following month, the shares took off again last week, jumping 60% to 235p on news that VirtualInternet had been chosen as one of just 34 firms accredited to register the important “.com” domain name on the net. The job had previously been done by Network Solutions, whose five- year government-awarded monopoly ends tonight. Now, with a company worth £47m, on City expectations of £5m in sales this year, Drummond has set his mind on broadening the company’s product range and geographical reach. Last Monday, he announced the £250,000 acquisition of Net Searchers Ltd, a London company which specialises in monitoring and policing how company names are used on the internet. “People don’t realise how important it is to protect their name on the net, it’s more than just your brand name, it’s how people find you,” he says. “There is a feeling that the net cannot be policed, but over the last three years, Net Searchers has been working with major brand owners and corporate clients to help protect their brands and key intellectual properties.” What Net Searchers does is very simple : it checks websites and news groups to see if company names or brand names or trademarks are being misused, then reports back to the client every month. The service also includes checking variations of company web addresses to see that nobody else is exploiting the average surfer’s ability to make simple typing errors. Last week, Citibank was in court alleging the misuse of its trademark on a site whose address omitted the dot between “www” and “citibank”. The site in contention, wwwcitibank.com led unsuspecting surfers to a pornographic website instead of the American bank. The man who registered the rogue Citibank site has also pulled a similar stunt with Coke, Boeing and the New York Times. “We tell clients to think of all the different ways their name can be misspelt and advise them to register those as well,” Drummond says of the potentially embarrassing consequences of innocent surfers getting the name of a legitimate company wrong. The acquisition of Net Searchers will give VirtualInternet an advantage when it comes to offering registration services to clients in Europe and the US, according to Drummond. “The big push will be with professional services, where we have products and services that no one else has,” he says. “Net Searchers is part of our plan to offer those services to major brand owners in the US. It’s a very big market and the retainers are substantial.”