Getting the right domain name can be quite a pesky problem for the pugnacious new startup. Often the .com of the name of your service has been taken by a third party. Of course, not everyone has this problem, I doubt that Woopra, Wakoopa, and Zazzle had to work hard to get their desired domain names. Dropbox has long had been dealing with the issue, and to avoid paying a large sum to buy Dropbox.com they had been living over at GetDropbox.com. Of course, this has caused some confusion, but it is doubtful that any real damage has been caused.
It turns out that adding “get” to your product and using that .com is quite common. Take a look at GetClicky.com and GetGlue.com. Clicky of course the popular analytics service, which we here at the TheNextWeb use, and Glue the semantic browser plugin for FireFox created by AdaptiveBlue. Take away: both those companies have money, and choose to stay on their current domains.
But, as Dropbox monetizes, and expands into the more consumer side of things, it perhaps makes sense to spare the world any confusion around the domain name. We do not know at this moment what the price was for use of the domain, if Dropbox has purchased or leased it, or if indeed the owner is merely lending it to the company. As an aside, Dropbox is an amazing file transfer service that I use every day and fully recommend.
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