Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Can You Guess the Super-Short Domain Name HP Just Registered for Gram?

Yesterday we learned about the creation of Gram, the new brand name for the Hewlett-Packard subsidiary formerly known as Palm. The plan is to build a brand and a business around the open source operating system that is evolving from Palm’s old webOS operating system.

There’s not much to know about it beyond the name and that HP is keeping it stealthy for now, but AllThingsD just learned an interesting detail: HP has registered the Internet domain name gr.am.

See my screen shot of the domain registration information. We also have another small detail: The company paid $18,000 for the domain. According to this post on the message board for Namepros, the person who had it before, who goes by the name XMAN, makes the claim.

As domain names go it fits perfectly with the super-short type of domains that are popular precisely because they fit easily into Tweets.

And it’s probably not the last domain that HP will register for the purpose of doing business under the Gram name. It turns out you can make practically any word into a top-level domain name, so there will probably be a .gram when the time comes, along with probably a gram.hp, too.

Thanks to Jay Mahal for pointing me to the post on namepros.

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