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CEO Aaron Levie got lucky: The company that owned the dot-com of his company name wanted a lot, but not as much as they could have held him up for.

Just Box.

I just had a nice talk with Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box.net. I mean, Box. I had to ask him how much it cost for the company to drop the ".net" and become a ".com," a change that happened in December of 2011. I expected that the three-letter common-word domain of an already-successful, well-funded company would go for a lot, several million dollars possibly.

"How many zeros?" I asked.

"Six," Levie said.

How big an integer in front of those zeros? I asked.

"The lowest. And actually, it was five zeros with the highest integer."

Levie said he bought the domain nine months ago from Digimedia. "We got to know the guys who owned it over a couple of years," he said.

"You've been working them for a while, eh?" I asked.

No, Levie said, it wasn't like that. He said the Digimedia guys were really cool.

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How Box.net became Box.com for just shy of a million bucks

Twelve years ago, a total of $5 trillion in market value was lost when the "Dot-com" bubble burst. Many investors lost their life savings, their kid's college funds, or their retirements as a result.

Flash-forward to today, and I'm convinced many investors are running the risk of making the same mistake that caused those trillions of dollars in losses a decade ago.

Let me explain...

You've undoubtedly heard about the new multi-billion dollar "Web 2.0" companies like Groupon, Zynga, LinkedIn and Facebook. The mainstream financial press can't get enough of them...

For the past several months, investors have been blindly throwing money at these companies.

Take Zynga for example. Zynga is up 25% since it started trading back in December... but the company doesn't even turn a profit .

In fact, Zynga has lost $400 million during the past year. The firm's net loss came out to $1.40 per share... or more than 10% of its current share price.

LinkedIn (Nasdaq: LNKD ) , a social-networking site for professionals, is up slightly since going public . But it's been a wild ride. The stock trades at a P/E over 800.

G roupon (Nasdaq: GRPN ) doesn't even have a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio... because it has no earnings . In the past year, the company has lost $350 million or $0.97 per share.

Facebook -- considered to be the "hottest" of all these companies -- hasn't gone public yet. At this point, we can only guess what sort of enormous valuation it might see. Estimates are calling for a valuation of $100 billion. With net income of $1 billion in 2011, that means the stock could sell for 100 times earnings.

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Forget Facebook... Buy This Instead

When Anton Marinovich turned 18, his grandmother gave him $1,000 with strict instructions to invest in the stock market. He chose Apple Inc.

Seventeen years later, his investment is worth more than $240,000 and will bring him over $1,000 a quarter through the company's new dividend plan.

"It's pretty bananas," Marinovich said. "I always hear about all these people here in Silicon Valley falling into huge luck, but I never thought it would happen to me," said Marinovich, who is the director of sales at Equilar, a Redwood City, California-based executive compensation consultant.

Watching Apple shares soar more than 77 percent over the past 12 months has been a wild ride for people like Marinovich, who are firmly planted in the cult of Apple. Between him and his fiancee they own two iPhones, two MacBooks an iPad and 400 shares of Apple.

Many loyalists bought stock years ago when shares languished at double-digit prices. They held on to it out of a love for the company and its products. Now, they are being richly rewarded by a share price of around $600 and a rich dividend payout from Apple's cash pile of nearly $100 billion.

Nearly two dozen individual Apple shareholders interviewed by Reuters say they are not going on crazy spending sprees or vacations to Fiji, despite the huge windfall they could get by cashing out. Practically none of them said they plan to sell, a loyalty that gives some of their financial planners heartburn.

That's not to say they aren't treating themselves - or breathing a little easier.

Marinovich said the comfort of his Apple investment cushion means more freedom in his spending habits. He recently bought himself a $2,000 Omega watch and is shopping for a new Audi to replace his Volkswagen Jetta.

Retiree Pat Harshbarger, 79, has seen her $13,800 investment in Apple rise to $46,000. That paper wealth has made the former nurse comfortable enough to consider taking a few more trips to Maine to visit family and one to Las Vegas, where she and her husband want to try their hand at the slot machines, she said.

Seventy-one years old Stan Merkin, a retired Dell and IBM programmer whose portfolio has gained about $100,000 just by buying Apple since late last year, said he will buy another 50 shares if the stock hits $650.

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Apple's Shareholders Get Rich, and Hang On

In the age of endless sharing, super cookies, social search results, and that ever-present social graph, its comforting to know that there are some who are still prioritizing privacy. (And a few of them are former Googlers no less!) In October 2010, Google engineer Brian Kennish created Facebook Disconnect, a Chrome extension that disables all traffic from third-party sites to Facebook servers but still allows you to access Facebook itself. The extension was an immediate hit, racking up 50K active users in two weeks (it now has 200K+), prompting Kennish to leave his job at Google to focus full-time on helping the average web user take back control of their data.

Shortly thereafter the former Google engineer launched Disconnect, applying the same method behind Facebook Disconnect to other major third-party sites, like Digg, Google, Twitter, and Yahoo, enabling you to disable data tracking while you browse.

Now collectively attracting over 400K weekly active users, Kennish tells us his privacy-protection tools ended up being much more popular than he ever expected. As a result, he decided to turn the side project into a real company, co-founding Disconnect.me with another ex-Google engineer, Austin Chau and consumer rights advocate Casey Oppenheim.

The company, which officially launched late last year, is founded on a simple premise: Personal data should belong to people, not corporations. So, the team is building Disconnect.me into a full-fledged platform that allows users to control who does what with their data online, Kennish says. The first step is to help users stop the free flow of personal information to third-parties, he says, while step two will be giving users customized controls that allow them to share personal info when and how they deem fit. (To give you a sense of how big he thinks this problem is, watch this video here.)

To help them in their crusade, the team has raised $600K in seed funding, led by Highland Capital Partners with participation from Charles River Ventures, and angels investors like David Cancel, Mark Jacobstein, Ramesh Haridas, Vikas Taneja, Chris Hobbs, and Andy Toebben.

Both to celebrate their new raise and to provide users with a response to Google consolidating its privacy policy (which, in fact, rolled 70 different policies into one, allowing the company to combine all data it has on you into a single profile), the team is launching Google Disconnect and Twitter Disconnect for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

These extensions are similar to Facebook Disconnect and follow the recent addition of Facebook Disconnect to Firefox and Safari. And, of course, some may also be familiar with Kennish from Frictionless, which he built with Nik Cubrilovic to take having to download a Facebook app out of the process of reading news on the social network. (Read Johns coverage here.)

The app was an awesome solution to a grievance many have experienced when reading social news, and Kennish says he expected the extension to get some traction, but it only had about 3K active users at its peak, and with Facebook iterating on its UI, Kennish said they had trouble keeping up, and decided to put the app in hibernation. Although, with some pressure, we may be able to convince the guys to bring it back.

In the meantime, Disconnect.me is going to be focusing on protecting you from the thousands of companies that track, analyze, and auction off your browsing and search histories without so much as a peep to you or the millions of other web surfers out there. And, by the way, Disconnect.me doesnt collect your IP address or any personal info, unless you want to give them your email address, of course.

This also especially relevant given this post from Gizmodo today about nuking your search history and the case against Google.

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Disconnect: Ex-Googlers Raise Funding To Stop Google, Facebook & More From Tracking Your Data

By Jessica Toonkel

NEW YORK (Reuters) - When Anton Marinovich turned 18, his grandmother gave him $1,000 with strict instructions to invest in the stock market. He chose Apple Inc (AAPL.O).

Seventeen years later, his investment is worth more than $240,000 and will bring him over $1,000 a quarter through the company's new dividend plan.

"It's pretty bananas," Marinovich said. "I always hear about all these people here in Silicon Valley falling into huge luck, but I never thought it would happen to me," said Marinovich, who is the director of sales at Equilar, a Redwood City, California-based executive compensation consultant.

Watching Apple shares soar more than 77 percent over the past 12 months has been a wild ride for people like Marinovich, who are firmly planted in the cult of Apple. Between him and his fiancee they own two iPhones, two MacBooks an iPad and 400 shares of Apple.

Many loyalists bought stock years ago when shares languished at double-digit prices. The held on to it out of a love for the company and its products. Now, they are being richly rewarded by a share price of around $600 and a rich dividend payout from Apple's cash pile of nearly $100 billion.

Nearly two dozen individual Apple shareholders interviewed by Reuters say they are not going on crazy spending sprees or vacations to Fiji, de spite the huge windfall they could get by cashing out. Practically none of them said they plan to sell, a loyalty that gives some of their financial planners heartburn.

That's not to say they aren't treating themselves - or breathing a little easier.

Marinovich said the comfort of his Apple investment cushion means more freedom in his spending habits. He recently bought himself a $2,000 Omega watch and is shopping for a new Audi to replace his Volkswagen Jetta.

Retiree Pat Harshbarger, 79, has seen her $13,800 investment in Apple rise to $46,000. That paper wealth has made the former nurse comfortable enough to consider taking a few more trips to Maine to visit family and one to Las Vegas, where she and her husband want to try their hand at the slot machines, she said.

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Apple's devoted shareholders get rich, and hang on