Name Awards

vlingo, vlingo what are you doin o?

Yahoo recently announced they are offering voice search capabilities so that users of Blackberry devices (and similar) can speak their requests and get an email reply via Yahoo’s mobile oneSearch engine. Unlike the competing ChaCha where humans answer the requests, do the search and send the results, everything for Yahoo is handled automatically via technology from a company called vlingo.  That is right.. another bunch of techies trying to be clever and spelling their name without a capital letter. Good luck.. it will drive editors nuts.. and so they will be in foul mood when writing about you. And what are they to do if a sentence starts with the name?

Did your mother give you a name with a lower case? Of course not. Names are proper nouns. They should always start with a capital letter. Make the logo lowercase - if you must - or if you are paying Landor a lot to design your new look. But keep your name in lower case at your own risk. Cisco tried it years ago.. and they perhaps had more justification than others since this name was the back end slice of San Francisco. But then they grew up.

Imagine trying to read an analyst’s report on companies to watch, even later a Wall Street analyst’s, and your name doesn’t get flagged or indexed since it was passed over by man and machine all for the want of an uppercase letter.

Vlingo probably has great technology or Yahoo would not have hooked up with them. Their name potentially is very powerful and appropriate, but only when people know it is a name and not some common word.

Nevada - the snowy state?

One of the fun parts of naming is discovering new roots and meanings every day. I must have been asleep at the wheel to not know that Nevada is from the Spanish word “snowfall”.

There is snow in the mountains and the north, but enough to name the state after it? Wow. Imagine we name some winter ski parkas (that are good in snowy weather) Nevada. People will surely not get it and assume we lost all our naming marbles in the casino.