-Caveat Lector- from: http://dailypress.com/archives/1/a1/stories/88949sy0.htm <A HREF="http://dailypress.com/archives/1/a1/stories/88949sy0.htm"> dailypress.com</A> ----- Questions or comments? Sunday, Feb. 14, 1999 Williamsburg woman is ruler -- for now -- of hundreds of Web sites By Peter Dujardin Daily Press WILLIAMSBURG - Ask Gilinda Rogers why she has amassed 667 Web addresses -- and counting -- and she gives any number of reasons: She bought CoxCable.com and CoxCommunications.com hoping to save her tiny cable news show. She bought Eve.com and Gwen.com to teach her young daughters a thing or two about the Internet. She bought TheSuperstation-.com to meet Ted Turner. As she goes grocery shopping, shuttles Eve and Gwen to school and visits with friends, Rogers keeps a pen and pad handy: A new "domain name," or Internet address, might pop into her head. "I'll see something and I'll say, 'Hey, that's a really good idea.' And I'll write a little note to myself." When Rogers gets some free time -- usually early in the morning or late at night -- she logs onto her living room computer and goes to her favorite site: the Internet Network Information Center, or InterNIC, the official domain name registration center. If the names are available, Rogers buys them -- at $70 a pop -- just as she did last week when she bought her latest, "greedylaw-yer.com." She may use it, she says, to post ads and information from personal injury lawyers with a sense of humor. "I already had greedylawyers.com, but somehow I missed greedylawyer.com," she says. "I think that's a really good one, too." Fun, but no hobby. It's a 60 hour-a-week job that Rogers hopes will pay off as her company, U-Surf.com, develops the names into Web sites and sells advertising on them. She believes the 300 or so "best of" and "best in" sites -- such as "bestofNYC.com," "bestofAtlanta.com" and "bestof-Richmond.com" -- have the most promise. Judging by her meeting last month with some venture capitalists in Denver, she may be right. "My husband used to say I should get a real job," she says. "He doesn't think that anymore." She's been through numerous negotiations in the past year. Some have been amicable, as with a California beauty supply company that paid a pretty penny for Eve.com. Others have been heated, as with Cox Communications, which brought five Atlanta lawyers (at least she thinks they were all lawyers) to her Williams-burg house last summer. The latest brouhaha erupted last month, with Denbigh Toyota. Butch Capps, the dealership's general manager, said the company had been posting "generic" pages on regional Toyota sites over the past few years. But he wanted a stronger Web presence, a place to post information and feature the latest car and service deals. So he picked the simplest name he could think of: "denbightoyota.com." "If someone's passing by, and goes home to look it up, that's what they're going to type in," Capps says. Too late. Rogers already owned it. She had bought it a month earlier after thinking back to how tough it was, in her days as a radio saleswoman, to sell to the dealership. "Thanks, but we have all the ads we need," she recalled Denbigh Toyota saying. Now, she thought, she has some leverage. "It's like buying land where you know they're going to build a factory," she explains. "Of course you're going to want to help them build it." Capps wants the name back, but Rogers says she'll give it up only if Denbigh Toyota agrees to a three-year deal, either to advertise on one of her other Web sites or pay her company to develop it. (Capps said she wanted to charge $30,000 for three years, though Rogers says she'd be willing to part with the name after three years of Web development at the basic rate of $550 a year.) "I'm more than willing to do business with them," she says. "But this is first-come, first-served." Capps won't pay, whatever the cost. On principle, he says, he'd rather take her to court for violating his "common law" trademark. He'll even use a different name before paying her, he says. "This is coercion," Capps says. "This is something that should, by all reason and by all logic, be available to us, and it's been secured by someone outside, someone with no ties to Toyota or Denbigh, solely for their own benefit. It's wrong." Some lawyers say Capps would have a strong legal case. In the meantime, all Rogers has to do is keep renewing it once every two years. Rogers, 39, is a longtime entrepreneur. Her father, former Williamsburg mayor and current Councilman Gil Granger, owned two radio stations. From him, she "learned how to figure out mortgage payments before I learned my multiplication tables." She's been the queen of some off-beat jobs. In 1981, at 21, she bought land on Pocahontas Trail with what she says was her own money and built the Wiener-In restaurant. She sold it shortly thereafter and bought a Williamsburg camera store, and sold it. Then, in 1988, she became a souvenir seller -- soon to be promoted to general manager -- for her father's minor league baseball team, the Peninsula Pilots, in Hampton. Some people accused her of running the team into the ground, and even she admits she didn't know the first thing about baseball. After some news stories criticized her management, she learned, in a statement from her father, that she had "resigned." Then it was off to Europe, where she spent time "seagulling," hopping port to port to meet Navy boyfriend Steve Rogers, now her husband. When they returned to the States, she became a saleswoman at her father's radio station, WMBG. And in 1994 -- upset with how the local press covered a Williamsburg child molestation -- she founded her own TV show, "First News," to cover Williamsburg, James City and York County. Then, "from money I earned working hard," she says, she bought one of her father's stations, WPTG. Rogers says she "didn't know anything about the Internet" until two years ago. She had an account with America Online, but that was about it. While flipping through the paper, she came across an ad for "wmbg.com," a Web site devoted to Williamsburg and wondered whether the site's owner was trying to cash in on the radio station's good name. He told her she could have it -- for $70,000. She was mad at first, but then realized: "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Still, her goal, she says, has never been to sell the names, but to "help companies with their marketing." In March 1997, she bought her first domain name, "localnews.-org" and by last fall had 200-some names. She has hired five Web developers -- including a former cameraman from her old TV station -- and developed 74 of the names into Web sites. She taps into the large pool of people who mistakenly wander into her sites looking for something else. "TheThrillPark.com," for example, attracts lots of ads from Kentucky companies making their pitch to the 2,000 visitors trying to reach "ThrillPark.com," the official site of a Kentucky amusement park. Similarly, she expects "TheSu-perstation.com" to capitalize on people looking for "super-station.com," Turner Broadcasting System's site. (She insists, however, that her initial motive was simply to trade the name for a chance to meet Ted Turner.) Last fall, in what may very well have been her smartest move, she bought about 300 "best of" city and state sites, where she hosts online contests about the best pizza joints and jazz bars in town. She has begun developing those sites, and the talks with the venture capitalists may push it even faster. However the negotiations go, she hopes they will go better than her dealings with Cox. Hearing in early 1997 that Cox was coming to the market, Rogers says she bought CoxCable.com and CoxCommunications.com to show she was "part of the team." She planned to give them up, she says, in return for Cox keeping her TV show in their lineup. Instead, Cox dropped her show, Rogers says, and she soon began posting "complaint forms" on her Cox sites. Visitors -- some 6,000 people since last summer -- haved filled them out, checking off items that described their conversations with Cox officials. "Cursed at me," "hung up on me," "didn't have a clue," were among the options. Asked why she would do such a thing, Rogers insists it wasn't for spite. "Don't you think people should get good service*" she asks. Once she had the names of thousands of complaining customers, though, she admits she didn't really know what to do with them. Cox finally got wind of what was happening early last year and began sending her letters. It argued the company, as holder of the Cox trademark, rightfully owned the domain names. The company wanted the names so it could automatically re-route visitors to www.cox.com, the official Cox site. "This has confused our customers," says Cox lawyer Leslie Spasser. Last summer, Spasser's colleagues in Atlanta paid a visit. They talked to her for hours, Rogers says, and offered $40,000 for the names. (Cox won't confirm that figure). Rogers says she declined the offer, however, thinking it might be a setup: They could later sue her for trying to "hold them hostage." "The whole thing's been keeping me awake at night," Rogers says. What she wanted, Rogers maintains, was not unreasonable: She wanted them to do business with her --either by advertising or using her for Web development. But Spasser says Rogers made "unreasonable demands" and that she wanted a "bounty" for the names. Later, the strongly worded letters continued: "Please consider this your last opportunity -- after many months of stonewalling -- to resolve the matter," Spasser wrote on Jan. 26. "If this matter is not resolved expeditiously and equitably, Cox will have no choice but to exercise its rights in court." Now, Rogers says, she has nearly resigned to dropping all conditions and selling the names to Cox for $220 -- the price she paid for buying and developing them. She has already done away with the complaint form and transparently passes visitors to the official site. If only all her deals could be like the one with Calla Beauty, a California company. It wanted "Eve.com" --the name Rogers registered for her daughter. Since Eve is too common a name to trademark, there were no legal issues. Instead, the company used charm. Less than a week after the company's first call, Rogers and her daughters were on a plane to the West Coast for an all-expenses paid, whirlwind tour of Southern California, including a couple of days at Disneyland. Then they hashed out a deal. Rogers gave up the name in return for three things: a promise that her daughter could keep using the "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" e-mail address; a promise that the name wouldn't be resold to a porn site; and a hefty interest-bearing college fund for her daughter. "It was less than $50,000," Rogers says. "But I have no doubt that Eve will be going to college." Now, when friends, family or even newspaper reporters ask the 8-year-old how she made out, she has a ready response her mother taught her: "I made a killin' on the Inter-net." Peter Dujardin can be reached at 247-4749 or by e-mail at [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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