stevanl

LaunchBar (ctrl+space): http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

Most likely that they bought it (in 2007?) from someone that registered it before 29 Oct 2001.

From http://net.educause.edu/edudomain/eligibility.asp :

"Why do some institutions that do not meet the eligibility criteria have .edu domain names?

According to the Cooperative Agreement between EDUCAUSE and the U.S. Department of Commerce, all .edu names in existence as of October 29, 2001, are "grandfathered." This means that everyone who already had a .edu name by that date (October 29, 2001), regardless of current or past eligibility requirements, is allowed to keep those .edu names."

Whois info:

  Domain record activated:    10-May-1999
  Domain record last updated: 03-Sep-2007
  Domain expires:             31-Jul-2011

Considering most of those thick mobile applications would rely on the internet for one reason or another, it's not wrong to assume that web-apps could take the reign in the future. After all, HTML offers more capability now than it did back when the iPhone was released.

They also had the element of scarcity, not only did you require an invite, but those invites themselves were very hard to come by. USB's were traded for them, and sites dedicated to getting them, gmailswap.com anyone?

I'd recommend to the book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath here, despite it being more geared towards marketers, than website launches. Derek Sivers has a nice set of notes on it over at http://sivers.org/book/MadeToStick

I should be there!