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Great Domain Names Are… Boundless

TechCrunch reported on a startup called Boundless that raised a $7.8 million Series A round of funding. Boundless is an “online green card application support services,” and the company uses its brand match .com domain name, Boundless.com.

I did a bit of research on the history of the Boundless.com domain name to see when the startup was able to acquire it. Because the domain name has been registered under Whois privacy for several years at Namecheap, I can’t see when the company acquired the domain name. To try and peg down when the company acquired the domain name, I used Archive.org to see what was on the domain name and when. Here’s what I found:

Jane Domain Change is Fine, But Branding Needs Work

Last week, a NamePros member with the username Maple Dots wrote about how a company called Jane switched urls from JaneApp.com to Jane.App for its website. There was quite a bit of discussion about the domain name change and the company’s branding that followed. In my opinion, the domain name change is totally acceptable and maybe even more memorable; it’s the Jane branding that could use some work.

Poly.com Acquired in Advance of Rebrand

A California company called Plantronics acquired a company called Polycom in a $2 billion deal announced last year. This morning, I saw a Google Alert about the company rebranding as Poly. The acquisition and rebrand was covered by eWeek. Smartly, the company acquired the matching Poly.com domain name in advance of the rebrand news.

Amazon Acquires ProjectZero.com for Counterfeit Initiative

This morning, I saw several “Project Zero” related domain names registered by Amazon. I saw that they company registered domain names like AmazonProject-0.com, AmazonProject0.com, Project-0.net, and quite a few other similar “Project Zero” domain names of various lengths. I searched Twitter to see if I could find anything about Amazon’s Project Zero, and I saw this tweet from The Verge with more information about it:

Did Lebron James Acquire Lebron.com?

If you visit the Lebron.com domain name right now, you can see that it forwards to LebronJames.com, the website for NBA superstar Lebron James. Lebron.com is currently registered under privacy at GoDaddy, so it is unclear if Mr. James acquired the domain name, but it appears that someone associated with James may now control it. This was reported this morning in a tweet from Daryl Lopes:

In early January, Joshua Schoen also reported that the domain name was forwarding to Lebron James’ website:

Mode Acquired Mode.com Before Series C Funding

This morning, TechCrunch reported that “Mode, a five-year-old collaborative analytics platform based in San Francisco, has raised $23 million in Series C funding led by Valor Equity Partners.” In total, the company has raised $50 million in funding. Smartly, Mode acquired the brand match Mode.com domain name prior to the announcement of the most recent round of funding.