Company acquires Listen.in domain name.
Google has made a curious domain acquisition — Listen.in.
Technically it’s an Indian country code domain name, so perhaps we should just ignore the obvious phrase “Listen In”.
But it’s more fun if you don’t ignore it.
What’s Google up to? The company does have a product called Google Listen that’s in Google Labs. Oh, and there were those apparent plans to “listen in” to your computing environment.
Of course there’s the new Google music service as well, and this would be a nifty name for it when it rolls out generally.
Still, I find it hard to believe the company would bank a new product on a local ccTLD like .in. The company hasn’t been big on buying generic or even “cute” domains like this in the past.
Listen.in used to be a social music service based in Canada.
What do you think?
[Update: see comments, Ross says the got this domain when they acquired PushLife. It was still in an individual’s name until it just changed hands.]
They got this back in April when they acquired Pushlife. http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/08/google-buys-mobile-entertainment-platform-pushlife/
Listen.in was a social music network that they’d launched in late 2010 iirc.
Glad to see the .in TLD slowly taking off, IMO it’s a great TLD that could be well branded and used worldwide, just like Outside.in
@Joe: This would be a good one too: http://linked.in/ , but it’s not.
India and China are becoming the biggest economy in the world. So Google wants to tap into India market.
.In will be next big things in near future, ignoring the gTLDs