What's in a name?

If you think domain names are nothing to get excited about you’d be wrong, it would appear.

From clever marketing tool to lucrative asset, domain names can be big business.

Hundreds of countries have their own domain name – including of course the UK’s .uk domain.

Now Columbia’s .co domain has been released for sale globally, giving way to another furore to get the best web addresses.

Nearly 40,000 .co names were reserved during the pre launch phase, including by companies such as Amazon and Apple.

E.co sold for over £50,000 and Twitter has snapped up the t.co address as its official URL shortener.

See Green uses the .eu domain name in its web and email addresses but has also registered the .co site for the future.

The domain ending can be all important – the .tv domain, from the country of Tuvalu, is used by a whole host of tv shows – including GMTV (gm.tv).

The .me domain from Montenegro is aimed at individuals, and the .pr domain could well be used by nifty public relations firms. Even the Co-operative has got in on the act, using a relatively unknown domain .coop for its co-operative.coop address.

But want one of the most popular domain names and you can expect to pay over £10 million. That was the price for insure.com last year, and back in 2006 sex.com sold for $14 million – around £9 million.

Some companies choose to think a bit more laterally – like DIY store B&Q, which has the diy.com web address.

Other organisations use even trickier means of coming up with memorable web addresses. Clever addresses like del.icio.us, goo.gl and blo.gs have all been created through domain name hacking – a programming trick rather than anything more sinister.

Social bookmarking site Delicious owns delicious.com, but also has the del.icio.us address, which is what it advertises under. Last year Google launched its URL shortener under the domain goo.gl – using Greenland’s country code.

So although the .co domain may not be competing with all those dotcoms out there, it seems that big businesses are still hedging their bets and claiming their names now while they can.