The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign owns Tech.com
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign registered the ultra-generic Tech.com in September of 1992 – two full years before launching their successful Internet Relay Chat server (IRC) that some of us spent hundreds of hours on.
Tech.com was intended to be the online home of the University-sponsored Research Park; however, several different sites were hosted on Tech.com since then.
Currently, information about research done at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been utilized commercially by external companies and is presented at Tech.com in the form of a technology blog or gazette.
With all the big brains that have passed through the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one would expect that they’d realize the high value of the domain name, Tech.com and would have utilized it in a better way.
Apparently, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was recently contacted by a third party interested in the domain name Tech.com. Even at this point, the Office of Technology Management (OTM) has no clue how to value the domain.
Valuate.com calculates the value of Tech.com to $773,000
We’ll have to wait and see whether the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is actually willing to place one of its most precious assets, Tech.com onto the chopping block; apparently there are more than 700 domains under its command, according to DomainTools.
State Universities are not taught to make money in the real world.
They are taught to spent OPM-Others’ people money.
If they want money, all they have to do is raise tuition and taxes.
Yikes, raise tuition again? Why not sell Tech.com for a big chunk of money instead ?
I see no problem in the uni selling some of its assets, why not? I would think it’s worth at least 1/2 million dollars.
James – I agree, the value of tech.com is definitely at least $500k – perhaps as much as $2 million if they sell it to a technology corporation. E.g. Intel
It’s worth what someone is willing to shell out right now. The rest is speculation and guessing. Illinois is smart to take the cash because they need it and because someone is willing to buy it. I can’t say any more except the parties involved are all handsome fellows and that u of I needs to put it in the hands of people that are going to develop it and in return they can get much needed cash
Shane 😀 I forgot you’re right there where it all happens! It seems that they need a broker so what better chance to make national news than to help them out with a multi-million sale 😀