My Life Blog

For those who don’t know what the term means, check out the definition at Wikipedia.  But even as you read the definition, realize that the term doesn’t quite describe what’s going on here.

Here’s the story.  When Suzanne and I were in Kauai, we were reminded again that the word "wahine" meant a Polynesian woman or a lady surfer.  Somewhere along the line, I was playing with word combinations and came up with Teeny Wahine.  We thought it was so catchy that we considered using the cool name alone to spin off some form of business.  Young women’s surf apparel came to mind first.

So because I’m forever the dreamer, I did some research on the domain name and found that teenywahine.com was taken.  But the website was not very impressive and in fact the website name does not even match the domain name.  So I researched teeny-wahine.com instead.

I had registered the domain name after looking up the availability of a trademark on the name.  To my surprise, I found that it had been abandoned.  Or so I thought.  Suzanne had a friend research the trademark and we subsequently found out that it was owned by a company called Wahine, Inc. who produce a defunct magazine.  There is no website for the company or the magazine.

Her friend’s research also revealed that the Quicksilver division of the Roxy apparel company was interested in the trademark.  If you go to the website, you’ll surmise that they are into surf wear as well.  So it appears we had the right idea, but were a little too late.

So in the end, all we have is the domain name.  If you’ve already visited it, you’ll see that I’ve utilized Yahoo’s simple web page wizard to put up a for sale sign.  So we are cybersquatting for now, but we had much bigger designs.  So there you go.