Gossip

Portable owns up: and reveals dark past!

Our Sniffer recently revealed a change of name at Portable Addons, with a snide suggestion; that Portable had been too thrifty to buy the Portableaddons.com domain. Rather than be suspected of such meanness, the company prefers to reveal its secret origins ...

Dear 'Sniffer',

I've read with interest your comments on the name change from Portable Add-ons to Portable Plc in your article and am pleased to be able to offer you the 'official explanation' of the 'parking' of the www.portable-addons.co.uk and www.portable-addons.com domain names.

I am sure you would have of course conducted a whois search ...

Whois lookup results for: portable-addons.com

Domain Name ... ... ... . portable-addons.com <1/> Creation Date ... ... .. 2000-11-07 <1/> Registration Date ... . 2000-11-07 <1/> Expiry Date ... ... ... . 2002-11-07 <1/> Organisation Name ... . Liberty Communications plc <1/> Organisation Address. Norwood House, 9 Dyke Road <1/> Organisation Address.<1/> Organisation Address. Brighton<1/> Organisation Address. bn1 3fe<1/> Organisation Address. East Sussex<1/> Organisation Address. GREAT BRITAIN (UK)<1/>

Whois lookup results for: portable-addons.co.uk

Domain Name: PORTABLE-ADDONS.CO.UK <1/> Registered For: Liberty Communications plc<1/> Domain Registered By: WEBCONSULTANCY <1/> Registered on 07-Nov-2000. <1/> Domain servers listed in order: <1/> DNS0.EASILY.CO.UK 213.161.76.87 <1/> DNS1.EASILY.CO.UK 213.219.14.245 <1/> WHOIS database last updated at 01:23:21 13-May-2002

A quick search of the database at Companies House will reveal that Liberty Communications was a previous trading name of Portable Add-ons, and was the company used to 'extricate' Portable Add-ons from the receivers of Datrontech plc, which went into receivership on November 6th, 2000 (spookily, a day before the above domain name registrations!)

Thank you for repeating and reconfirming the reasons for changing the name as stated in the press release. Regards, Mike Cherry, Technical Director.