Page 17 - OmniSite Anniversary Book

OUR HISTORY
2019
2020
For ve or six years, Ward would contact him each year to ask if
he ever planned to use it and, if not, would he sell it. Each year the professor said: No, and no deal.
Until nally in 2006, the professor sold the “Omnisite” URL to Ward for a whopping $6,900.
“I’m a technical guy, and I like weird and goofy things, OK?” Ward says. “I wanted that domain name, because it is important to me. It’s a throwback to the early days when the Internet started.” And so became the name of this company. But let’s back up just
a bit. This business actually began on Jan. 3, 1999 as “Logical Concepts, Inc.”
Logical Concepts, Inc. took shape in the less-than-cushy corporate suite otherwise known as the attached garage of Ward’s personal residence in Greenwood, Indiana.
“My three kids were just little at the time, and they’d always come into
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new “Information Superhighway,” as it was called in the 1990s. Today it’s better known as “the Internet.”
In those early days of the Internet, “Omnisite” was a computer science term used to describe a lofty concept. Omnisite was predicted
to be a website where Internet users could
go to nd everything they ever wanted to know — an all-knowing, or omniscient site to provide in nite information. That far-fetched idea turned out to be Google.
Then – just before Google launched — there was a prophetic
Indiana University professor who owned the domain name: Omnisite.com. Though he never developed a website,
he owned its URL.
Omnisite
\ äm-'ni-site \ noun 1. Lofty concept or idea
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