After meeting as high school students in 2002, Alex Benzer and Charlotte Genevier, co-founders of Webligo developed and launched Social Engine in 2007. The product is described as a social-network-in-a-box, a white label social networking application that is growing and now earns nearly $1MM/year according to the Webligo home page.
With dorm room offices and virtually zero operating costs, Webligo’s savings grew quickly. In 2006, Alex and Charlotte began developing a new product – SocialEngine – seeded with their sales and the recent acquisitions of two earlier projects (BlogHoster and IMS Pro). SocialEngine, 100% bootstrapped without any outside investment, was launched in 2007 with great reception. With SocialEngine now earning nearly $1M/year, Alex and Char have built a team of seven developers and designers to grow SocialEngine and explore other opportunities.
The only problem is, Webligo’s founders launched the product using the .net (socialengine.net), instead of the .com.
Now Webligo wants the .com, so the company has filed a WIPO complaint over the domain name SocialEngine.com.
While it’s not known whether Webligo made a previous offer on the .com domain, the company recently filed for a trademark on “Social Engine” in Sept. 2010, three years after launching their product, and nearly 11 years after the domain name socialengine.com was first registered.
The current registrant according to GoDaddy Whois is listed as “Domains for Sale” out of Columbus, OH, with an email address of DomainsForSale -at- Gmail.com.
Here’s a little more information about Social Engine, in a video pitch posted on TechCrunch back in 2008.