What's in a brand name?

In the 21st century, Shakespeare might ask, "What's in a brand name"? To the numerous branded companies, the answer is a "plenty of value and money"! Look around the marketing landscape,you would figure out that a rose by any other name would not smell as sweet!!

Here is an article (from mashable.com)about the acquisition of Fb.com by Facebook!

It has been revealed that Facebook has acquired the Fb.com domain. This news comes just days before its special event, where it is set to reveal an overhauled version of Messages that works like e-mail. Facebook paid a cool $8.5 million, more than 42 times the amount the company originally paid for facebook.com.

In September, the American Farm Bureau sold the Fb.com domain to an undisclosed buyer. Looking up the domain’s whois reveals that MarkMonitor, a brand protection and domain management company, is the Fb.com’s registrar. However, Domain Name Wire has revealed that the domain’s whois has been updated to reflect that Facebook is the domain’s administrator.

A recent report from All Facebook claims that Facebook is using Fb.com internally, but doesn’t quite know what Facebook intends to do with it. At the same time, The New York Times and TechCrunch claim that the company’s impending Messages overhaul will utilize the Facebook.com domain for user e-mail accounts.

What does that mean for Fb.com? Most likely, Fb.com will become the e-mail domain of the company’s 1,400+ employees. Yahoo does something similar; its staff uses @yahoo-inc.com e-mail addresses instead @Yahoo.com in order to avoid confusion between its employees and the hundreds of millions of users of its e-mail service.