PuppyFind is a website that, as the brand name suggests, helps people find puppies. The company just sent an email to its mailing email list announcing an upcoming rebrand. Beginning on March 1, the company will become known as Puppies.com. In addition to the shorter rebrand, the company will also update its website.

From what I can tell using the Whois History tool at DomainTools, it looks like the parent company of PuppyFind has owned Puppies.com for nearly ten years. It appears the company acquired Puppies.com around June of 2012. Prior to that, the domain name was registered under Whois privacy at Internet.bs, and it had Hitfarm name servers. This leads me to believe Puppies.com had been owned by a domain investor prior to the acquisition.

Earlier this year, Home.com was acquired by Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation. The deal terms were not publicly shared, but I am sure it is one of the top domain name sales of the year if not an all time top sale.

Last night, I was toggling back and forth between the football game and the movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I probably watch Ferris Bueller once every few years, and if I catch it on television, I’ll probably watch parts of it. As I was about to turn the channel during a commercial break, a television commercial caught my attention. Fairway is now advertising its Home.com brand on tv.

Much like it was neat to see Olive.com advertising during an NHL playoff game shortly after the domain name was acquired, it was neat to see Home.com in a television commercial:

TechCrunch just published an article about a $75 million fundraising round for a collectible card startup called Alt. The startup had previously raised $31 million in funding:

Collectible card trading platform Alt raises $75M as it eyes other asset categories and preps its mobile launch https://t.co/DvPJDhy4Dd by @grg

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) November 11, 2021

For its website, Alt uses the off-brand OnlyAlt.com domain name. An alternative to a keyword brand .com domain name like this might be a brand-match alternative extension. Ordinarily, this would probably be no big deal, but the usage of the Alt.com domain name could pose a unique challenge to the card trading platform.

A little over a week ago, I read that Facebook was planning to rebrand in a fashion similar to the Google / Alphabet rebrand. The idea behind the rebrand was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to plan to turn the company into a metaverse-focused business. The news, as I understand, was first reported by The Verge.

Soon after the article was published in The Verge, speculation began to mount about what Facebook – or perhaps a parent entity would be called. Because a Mark Zuckerberg related entity owned Meta.com already, it would be pretty easy for Facebook to rebrand as Meta. At the time of publication, Meta.com was forwarding to Meta.org, the website for a project called Meta from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.