A sale of Chinese Internet domain names netted more than $160,000 (85,000 pounds) on Friday in what organisers said was the biggest such auction yet in the computer-crazy country.

A pair of sites named for ultra-mobile personal computing (umpc.cn and umpc.com.cn), one of the hottest technologies around, fetched an eye-popping 390,000 yuan (26,000 pounds).

Generic domain names including art.com.cn and book.com.cn sold well above their reserve prices, while caipiao.com — “caipiao” means lottery ticket in Chinese — fetched 37,000 yuan.

“I think today was a definite step forward in this market,” said Ranger Wang, who organised the auction in a Beijing hotel and was the seller of the “umpc” names.

The prices fetched were far from the giddy sums that change hands in the West. Five of the 12 names up for auction failed to attract a bid. But Wang said the sale total of 1.3 million yuan was, as far as he knew, a record for China.

Posted: 08|19|06 at 1:18 pm. Filed under: Auction News.