Wicked domain that generates Cash

Wickedly brilliant!

Cameroon seems to have discovered a path to riches, by capitalizing on the fact that millions of people each day forget to type the ‘O’ in ‘.com’. You see .cm is Cameroon’s internet domain or top level domain (tld), and they have decided to point all those spelling mistakes straight to the bank ($$$). Here are a few good examples:

www.microsoft.cm
www.google.cm
www.bbc.cm

As of this writing, the above links point to a site hosted by ‘agoga.com’ that has Ad driven links targeting travel, shopping, cars etc. The ads are less conspicuous on links with names owned by bigger companies that might take all this to offense.
Domains belonging to those without high profile lawyers (like me for instance), have their sites redirected somewhere else…


Camtel, the company that runs this tld for Cameroon has outsourced the management of this revenue generator to a seemingly clandestine operation that can be traced back to Vancouver. This whole thing really stinks… but I have to hand it to whoever came up with the idea for being wickedly brilliant.

Great article as written by another blogger, called let me check again..

Smuggled Gorillas are not yet returned to Cameroon

Years of dispute over the gorillas' return to Cameroon from Malaysia — lobbied for by, among others, the Born Free Foundation and the Last Great Ape Organisation ended in dissapointment because of red tape. The 'Taiping Four' western lowland gorillas were sent to the Pretoria zoo in South Africa in 2004 at the request of Malaysia, which confiscated them in 2002 after discovering they had been illegally imported to its Taiping zoo from Nigeria. Some groups have argued that the animals will be safer in South Africa than Cameroon, where they will be protected from poachers who might hunt them for meat.

The languages of Cameroon and China - scratch your head

It is quite incredible that on an area not larger than California 247 distinct languages could be spoken, but this is the case in Cameroon 247 indigenous languages, one so-called lingua franca ( def. any language widely used beyond the population of its native speakers is 'Cameroon Pidgin or Contact English' only spoken in West Cameroon) and two administrative languages (English and French) are spoken by 17 million people. This compares with 400 Chinese dialects spken by 1.3 billion Chinese people. Mind blowing.

Definition of Pidgin: A pidgin, or contact language, is the name given to any language created, usually spontaneously, out of a mixture of other languages as a means of communication between speakers of different tongues

The CIA, Oil and Cameroon

According to the CIA fact book Cameroon procudes 82,300 bbl per day (bbl = abbreviation for barrel, one barrel equals 42 US gallons or approximately 159 litres) and consumes 23,000 per day. This means that approximately 59,300 per day goes into reserve. Almost 18 mio bbl per year. Now let's calculate quickly 1bbl of crude oil today is sold at around $62 per barrel. This means that the country could have gotten $1,260,000,000 in April 2006 when the prices climbed to above $70 today for last years reserve. And again according to the CIA, Cameroon has in fact 85 mio bbl deposited, meaning the country could get 5,270,000,000 more than £5 billion dollars today. Hmm, makes me wonder.
CIA fact book on Cameroon:
Cameroon produces 82,300 bbl per day (2005 est.)
Oil - consumption:
23,000 bbl/day (2001 est.)
Oil - exports:
NA bbl/day
Oil - imports:
NA bbl/day
Oil - proved reserves:
85 million bbl (2005 est.)
Pipelines:
oil 1,107 km (2006)
More on the oil interest of the US and China in Cameroon in tomorrows blog

Why the Oil reserves in the Gulf of Guinea are the cause that the political course of the US is changing towards Iraq

Not a lot of people know that Africa's oil/gas resources are concentrated in the area of the Gulf of Guinea. Nor do a lot of people know that the main oil-producing area of this region is in the sea, far removed from the center of political and other conflicts.
This means oil production is relatively safe, in addition the quality of the oil is higher because as it contains less sulfur. The advantages don't end here, the low transport cost compared to the Caspian Sea and the Middle East from this region to the US are considered ideal.
Reports say that 7 billion barrels of the globe's newly proven deposit of 8 billion barrels of crude oil in 2001 are produced in the region of the Gulf of Guinea.
Does anyone know that Exxon, Chervron and other companies have invested US$3.7 billion, the largest US investment in Africa to date, in building an oil pipeline leading from Chad to Cameroon?
The reason why murderers like the president of Equatorial-Guinea Obiang are invited to the White House is because of the oil resources before the coast.
And this is why China, which holds 40% of the oil resources in Sudan, shrug their shoulders when accused by the US to ignore the murdering of black Sudanese by Arab Sudanese.

I should add that the US is the largest oil consumption country in today's world, its average daily oil consumption accounts for almost one-third of the world total consumption. Absolutely crazy, this looks to me like ascramble over resources between China and the US.

Gallup poll of corrupt countries, Cameroon comes in 5th

The Gallup corruption index was based on responses from adults in 101 countries. Over the course of the last year, respondents were asked two questions: Is corruption widespread throughout the government in your country? Is corruption widespread within businesses located in your country?
One should add that people have different definitions of corruption. What is considered corrupt in one country is considered rather normal in another. A recent poll in Russia suggested that 44 per cent of Russians consider some form of bribing acceptable. Poland, which joined the European Union in 2004, was ranked as the second most corrupt country by its own citizens. 89 per cent of Poles said they believed corruption was widespread in the former national government.
Lithuania emerged as the country perceived to be most corrupt, followed by Poland, Lebanon, Thailand, Cameroon, Ukraine and Russia. Nigeria, an African country with rampant corruption, ranked 75 out of 101 countries. Who would have thought that Cameroon ranks before Nigeria : ) ?

Yesterday was World Aids Day

I do hope that this disease will be entirely eradicated pretty soon. 25 years is just too long.