RealNames was a company founded in 1997 by Keith Teare. Its goal...

RealNames was a company founded in 1997 by Keith Teare. Its goal was to create a multilingual keyword-based naming system for the Internet.

In effect, to users of Internet Explorer, RealNames became a domain registry which was capable of registering names that worked without needing to belong to a top-level domain such as ".com" or ".net". RealNames and its backers expected this to be a lucrative source of income, and it raised more than $130 million of funding.

RealNames depended on its partnership with Microsoft, which offered the RealNames service on Internet Explorer. RealNames shut down operations in 2002 following a decision by Microsoft to redirect the 1 billion page views per calendar quarter that RealNames were resolving from the browser address bar into the MSN search engine.

Sounds pretty good to me p87. They managed to raise $130m and had over 1bn page views per qtr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!