Misnamer™
What's in a name?
A chance to ruin everything.
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I gave you the news you needed on every photo-sharing app launched from March 2010 til now - from Instagram to Re-Run to MoneyShot to Paparazzeeeee to LensKraftr to KameraKoo to Stalker-Share to NipSlippr to ShutterSlug
Some golden names among the Photo-Sharing App set. I can’t believe Paparazzeeeee is real. If it is, I never want to meet the person who named it.
http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2011/09/19/why-im-stepping-down-from-techcrunch/
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Look, I think Color is as big as turd as the next guy. But that’s a sweet domain name, some of the best IP the company has. But depriving its use in others’ names? Is THAT possible?
Sure, why not, they’ve got $40M.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/22/out-of-the-blue-instacolor-forced-to-change-name-by-the-true-color/
Something of a black comedy involving white hot startup Color and still-green-behind-the-ears Instacolor. Red in the face, the developer behind the latter app, which combines the key functions of Instagram and Color, was forced to change its name to Instalook after the Color folks developed a gray mood about the Instacolor name.
Color’s lawyers earlier this week sent a cease & desist to the developer of Instacolor Instalook, asking him to change the name of the iPhone app pronto.
So when does INSTAGRAM lop off their pound of flesh? -
You cannot fake this kind of thing.
(Entire blog post to be read in Richard Stallman’s voice.)
“Have you ever thought “Gnip”… well that is a strange name for a company, what does it mean? As one of the newest members of the Gnip team I found myself thinking that very same thing. And as I began telling my friends about this amazing new start-up that I was going to be working for in Boulder, Colorado they too began to inquire as to the meaning behind the name.”
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Somewhere during a VC pitch in New York.
VC: So where did you come up with the brand?
PRODUCTEEV: Okay, so Productive.com was obviously taken. Duh. Then we thought, oh snap, let’s do PRODUCTI.VE! But Chavez controls .VE so that’s kind of a nonstarter.
VC: Don’t want your name nationalized out from under you!
PRODUCTEEV: Right. So then we were like let’s do that VWLDRP thing that has all the kids overturning police cars! But we checked and some bastard’s even squatting on PRODUCTV.com!
Enter Plan D.
PRODUCTEEV: Incredibly, Producteev.com was available. So we snapped it up!
VC: How does $15 million on a $50 million pre strike you?As far as misnames go, Producteev isn’t terrible. But why self-marginalize?
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When every other logo seems to be missing at least one vowel, dribbble.com decided to go the opposite direction.
Just as Gillette’s MACH 3 razor forever changed shaving by duping consumers into believing bladecount corresponded to smoothness, so too driBBBle has not-so-subtly asserted that hipness is directly proportional to the number of absolutely unnecessary consonants one aSSSerts.
Get ready people because Dribbble enjoys great influence among designers.
In less than a year some idiot will try for FFFFOUR.
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“Evoluent”
This says many things to me.
- “Can we make this feel kind of like Microsoft?”
- “What about that evolutionary picture of the monkey to man, but with the letter ‘E’ like, evolving?”
- Creative Gas Tank Running on EMPTY in a bigggggg way.
But the coup de grâce unquestionably is the use of the TRADEMARK. This little spangle would lead you to believe that there was a risk of someone else marketing as E-VOH-LOO-ENT.
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Few Web 2.0 mega-Internet plays have a better name than Twitter. But the co-inventor who named the company has been effectively written out of the story.
A good interview… check it out.
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Simon & Schuster announced Sunday that Walter Isaacson’s “iSteve: The Book of Jobs” will be published in early 2012.
So much for my recommended title “I.”
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You’ll Pivot your Business Model so Why Not Your Crap Name?
David Aronchick and Fouad ElNaggar founded a really cool startup together. Their model almost seems too obvious. You know YouTube? Okay, THAT for sound bites. They only needed a killer name (Youtubeforsoundbites.com didn’t clear legal.)
Then “while joking around with (his) buddies” David did something stupid. He named his company. Entertonement. Get it? Like Entertainment but with tone.
Right.
As Geekwire puts it “(Entertonement) never really worked as a name. People struggled to say it, and spell it.”
Happily for his investors, Entertonement did something few possess the stones to do. They renamed themselves. So many people in the startup world talk about The Pivot. You rarely hear people talk about The Rename. Good ideas with bad names are in many ways worse than bad ideas with good names. Why encumber something great with the friction of a terrible name?
So they stepped up and did something awesome.
They bought a cool and memorable domain and rebranded as HARK. Read their story here.
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“SeBreeze 3000”
Really glad this is the 3000 line of industrial air freshener. They finally licked that fart smell of the 2500 series.
(a.k.a. Engineering trumps marketing at Rubbermaid Commercial Products.)
