Stadia.com Acquired Before Google Announcement (Updated)

I saw a tweet from Techmeme with news about Google’s new game stream service called Stadia, which made me wonder if Google had acquired the brand match Stadia.com domain name in advance of the news:

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.

Domain Name Financing Options Are Underutilized

Earlier today I wrote about the Gem rebrand and Gem.com deal. I think domain name financing options are underutilized. Perhaps it is because they are lesser known than other types of financing, but I think prospective buyers and sellers need to consider and/or offer financing options for domain names to get deals done.

Listed below are four types of deals that buyers or sellers might propose when a buyer can not or will not pay the full asking price up front:

Marksmen Acquires Poosh.com on Behalf of Kourtney Kardashian

In mid-February, I noticed that Marksmen, a brand protection and intellectual property acquisition company, had acquired the Poosh.com domain name. A couple of weeks later on March 2nd, Poosh.com transferred to a third party. I noticed these two Whois changes  when the domain name showed up in two of my DomainTools morning alert emails.

I did not really think much about Poosh.com until I saw a new brand called Poosh was mentioned in the news. I was reading an article in the New York Post this morning, and it looks like Marksmen acquired the Poosh.com domain name on behalf of Kourtney Kardashian. Here’s an excerpt about Poosh from the NY Post article:

Apple Registers PrivacyIsImportant.com

Everyone knows that privacy is important. Maintaining privacy in this day and age is nearly impossible, though. Privacy breaches have become a common occurrence at companies of all sizes over the last several years, including a major iCloud incident at Apple. In addition to the accidental privacy breaches, large companies seem eager to monetize the private details of its customers – and pretty much everyone it can!

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: